KIIILLLLLLLLLLLL the murderers!
Separate women-only hours, sheeting on the pool windows… And here’s another reason these are great ideas!
“I’m sure it’s not only Muslims, I think there’ll be a lot of female students that would benefit from it because not everyone is comfortable with all genders swimming (together),” [another student] said.
Hey now that you mention it a lot — a TON!! — of American women are uncomfortable swimming – hell, being in the same room – with men! Now we see what hijabs and long black coats are about. I think we’ll wear them too!
*****************
UD thanks Stephen.
Well, except for West Virginia, which beat Louisiana by a whisker in their race to the very very bottom…
It’s stupid degrading shit like this.
Reminds you of those poor Huntington WV students similarly force-marched into the presence of Jesus freaks.
Our saddest and next to saddest states. They ain’t heard of the separation of church and state round them parts – their teachers and superintendents ain’t heard of it – and ifn you tried to explain it to them, wouldn’t get through one bit. Hell I’d be sad too ifn I had to send my kids to them schools.
Our Christian Nationalists, Cathophate-Planners, and assorted hierocrats need to start thinking about how hard they’re willing to crack down – once they take over the country – on what’s emerging as a more and more secular American population.
Harvard’s Adrian Vermeule and his Xian Morality Brigade fully expect that, when we spiritually parched people taste the blessings of the strict – but loving – Xian state, we will be blissed out, flooded with gratitude, and utterly obedient:
Subjects will come to thank the ruler whose legal strictures, possibly experienced at first as coercive, encourage subjects to form more authentic desires for the individual and common goods, better habits, and beliefs that better track and promote communal well-being.
I’m thinking their Mullah-Doubles over in Iran must have felt just as confident when they decreed deadly divine dicta for everyone (but specially for breasty hairy femmes); yet a glance at the current situation in that glorious theocracy tells you you got trouble right here in Isfahan City.
See, when a small group of woman-reviling fanatics who think they have a pipeline to God take over a government and start imposing their twisted morality on everybody, things might not turn out all that well. Iran’s on fire, sparked by the Morality Police’s inevitable murder of a young woman whose body swaddling was insufficiently tight to excite the squad. Bad girl and now we will beat you and kill you wow did that feel good.
Not sure how much longer the fun can last. The orgasmic release of harlot-homicide may be less and less available to the pious men of Iran as the country’s population torches the cities.
Nesrine Malik’s description of many Middle Eastern countries applies as well to America’s haredi enclaves, where a fiercely cultivated mental and civic retardation has reduced ultraorthodoxy to an increasingly peculiar, increasingly belligerent, cult.
Because, by definition, many ultraorthodox people don’t know how to argue, UD will charitably refrain from linking to their efforts to defend themselves against the now-notorious New York Times article; she will say, however, that the origins of this group’s virtually one hundred percent full-throated support of that noted polemicist Donald Trump now become clearer to her. As do the origins of their outsize presence at the January 6 rally and even at the insurrection. No one should be surprised that violence is the last refuge of the illiterate. It’s the only voice they have, I guess.
… when Antwerp’s haredi community, faced with the same educational mandate New York’s haredim are facing, did something altogether amazing — something NY’s haredim might want to take a look at.
[The Belgian haredi community] asked the court to fine the government $6,780 per child for every day the [mandates] are in place.
Good golly Miss Molly! THE STATE HAS TO PAY US, PER DAY, THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS, PER CHILD, AS LONG AS IT INSISTS ON OUR EDUCATING OUR CHILDREN.
The suit was ” strongly denied … by the court,” for some reason… But maybe the strategy could work here! Maybe demand more of a per child per diem? 10,000’s a nice round number. Something to start bargaining with.
Systematic. Intended. Wowza.
‘Hasidic girls’ schools sometimes refuse to release transcripts to their graduates who need them for secular colleges.’
*****************
To find a precedent for this grotesque behavior, you have to go back to ancient China, where women’s feet were deformed through binding, so that they would be more easily exploitable in work settings, or competitive in marriage.
In general, though, the phenomenon of a community intentionally disabling its own young people in order to force them to stay within the tight bounds – if you will – of the community is so perverted that it’s very hard to find any precedent at all.
“It’s important to understand how young these parents are when they enroll their first child in school,” [a member of the ultraorthodox community] said.
Typically, hassidic couples have an arranged marriage around age 18, [Rayne] Lunger explained. “Then the expectation is to have kids right away. So at age 21, the expectation is that they’ll send the kids to the school that’s part of the hassidic group they belong to. … You have no connections outside of your own community, and no support,” Lunger continued… Lunger was born and raised in New Square, an all-hassidic, or ultra-Orthodox, village in Rockland County, New York, ranked as the state’s poorest municipality.
The Nothing Song first captures, in Yiddish, the Nothing Modern/Nothing Permitted character of ultraorthodox life:
Montik, gornisht
Dinstik, gornisht
Midvokh un Donershtik gornisht
Fraytik, far a noveneh
Gornisht pikveleh
Shabes nach a mool gornisht
It then, in English, moves on to the yeshiva curriculum:
Reading, nothing
Writing, nothing
Even arithmetic, nothing
Geography, philosophy, history, nothing
Social anthropology, a lot of nothing
On one level it’s more hysterical overreach in the face of people who merely argue that American children should learn basic literacy; but the sentence has a value-added something. “The pleasure of illiberal dependency” sounds not quite right as the opposite principle to “the pleasure of liberal autonomy.” What more easily rolls off the tongue is something like the rigors of illiberal dependency; for an ignorant, isolated, impoverished life of lockstep obedience to rabbis cannot – the writer would I guess say should not – be easy. (Hatam Sofer declared, “Everything new is forbidden by the Torah.”) You’re after a life which – with its strict rituals and rules and repressions – represents a daily rebuke of modernity’s shapeless hedonism.
Of course, the writer also intends sardonic irony, for we all know that the seeming pleasure of free — read deracinated — societies quickly turns to ashes as secular modernity’s inescapable meaninglessness and loneliness drives all of us outside of yeshivas to suicide. Indeed we are incessantly assured of the rich communal meaningful happy lives within fortress u-o; and yet Shaul Magid notes that these assurances, like a recent one by Liel Leibowitz in Tablet, are “purely speculative. [Leibowitz] has never lived in [an ultraorthodox community] (I have) and his judgment is a purely romantic, or more likely opportunistic, view of one gazing in from the outside.” Sounds as though Magid didn’t think his community was very happy.
Would you be happy if you were kept from learning anything about the world you share with all of us outside fortress u-o? To read the writer’s account of modern university education, for instance, is to try to wrap your head around a world where schools like Yeshiva, Touro, Brandeis, Baylor, Liberty, Ave Maria, Hillsdale College, and many other religiously serious institutions do not exist. ALL colleges corrupt, which is why your high schools need to aim for total illiteracy – the inability to sign your name on your SAT test:
[P]reventing college is the point. Ḥasidic parents are absolutely opposed to their eighteen-year-old sons or daughters attending college for the entirely rational reason that college consists of a complete immersion in a culture antithetical to Ḥasidism…
Come, come. The other reason – you fail to note it – is that the community makes sure eighteen year old girls are already arranged-married and knocked up, with no future to look forward to but more kids. How entirely rational.
Aint dat nice. A spiritual protection racket. We fallen-away Jews have so much to learn from the real Jews.
Liberal NYC is supposed to be a melting pot, it’s supposed to have a generous safety net and it’s supposed to be tolerant. But underpinning that are unspoken premises that, although there’s criminals in every social group, no social group makes flouting laws a virtue and that, although there are disadvantaged members of every group, no social group will actively work to make poverty inevitable. How are the rest of us supposed to feel when a group breaks those social contracts?
***********************
I did my graduate work in Utah and the same thing happened with the FLDS there. Warren Jeffs’ whole goal was to keep families in thrall to him, thus children were illiterate, girls married extremely young, and boys who showed the slightest hint of “mouthiness” were cast out to try and make it in a world they didn’t understand–not realizing that the entire point of the system was to raise them up in a world they couldn’t understand so they either had to comply, or end up homeless, suicidal, and completely unskilled.
In 2018, former officials of the [Central United Talmudical Academy, famous for its one hundred percent failure rate on a very simple standardized exam,] pleaded guilty to defrauding the federal government’s Child & Adults Care Program of over $3m in reimbursements for school meals that the school had never served... This is classic American graft… [T]ax evasion and welfare fraud are an open secret... When Jews break [the law] so blatantly, it reflects badly on all of us.
*****************
The classic example is Lakewood, NJ; but it’s pretty much everywhere, cuz when you deny the legitimacy – nay, the very existence! – of any entity outside yourself, whatever IS out there exists only to be exploited. Laws? The ‘laws’ are their bogus godless laws. We’re the only godly location in the universe; we answer only to God, who speaks to us and us alone through our rabbis; and if our ‘crimes’ are hurting the heathens, so much the better.
******************
What almost none of the critics of the [NYT] article I have read mention is that this story is really about corruption: the corruption of city and state political figures and yeshiva deans who have duplicitously taken money from state coffers without abiding by state regulations. And the politicians who have looked the other way and ignored non-compliance, assumingly to cultivate Haredi favor in the voting booth. As much as this a Hasidic story, this is also a New York story of political corruption.
… R. Aaron Teitelbaum, one of the two Satmar rebbes today, is quoted in the article as saying “The truth is, we either had very little secular studies or none at all. We will not comply, and we will not follow the state education commissioner under any circumstances.” And yet his schools readily accept state funding. It is this corruption that merits a featured essay in the Times.
It is also not necessarily to Israel’s advantage that an American Jewish community that is able to exercise considerable political influence is in the process of disappearing and being replaced by an isolated, impoverished population that will not be in a position to influence anything outside of the states and localities in which they are concentrated.
Well, yes. Israel has its own socially/economically destructive ultraorthodox community with which to reckon; it now correctly and anxiously views an earlier stage of this community taking shape in the US.
Our immigrant grandparents coped with poverty by working, not by stretching out a begging basket. Time to harden our hearts.
I’ve always been amazed by the way the truly hardened hearts – those of the hostile and exploitative haredim – are reliably sentimentalized as warm and shtetl-hamish by the non-ultraorthodox. This commenter is right – we’re the nostalgic pushovers, the easy marks (given what the ultraorthodox have accomplished in schools that we subsidize, ‘easy marks’ is putting it politely) who regard the perverse, self-punishing practices of this totally rejectionist community as somehow true Judaism. ‘What Haredi communities are really after is autonomy from the state, not advancing a principled religious liberty.’
… proceeds, and will proceed, no matter how many front page New York Times articles try to shut them down. Yeshivas dedicated to debraining generations of ultraorthodox Jewish children- entire high schools score ZERO on basic literacy exams – are straight out of Alfred Jarry’s absurdist Ubu the King, the 1896 play where debraining machines first appeared.
UD Says: Enjoy the ruckus about Jews who debrain their children. It’s going to get very noisy as it begins to dawn on taxpayers what they’ve been paying for at the ultraorthodox yeshivas. Some good writing will come out of it. Some high-level thinking about the limits of toleration in a liberal state will appear. You’ll learn something. Nothing will change.