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“[I]t’s like putting us in a ghetto.”

The situation with Israel’s corona-plagued haredim has sped so far beyond plain ironic that it’s gone supersonic ironic… After decades of hostile self-ghettoization against the modern Israeli state, that country’s scientifically ignorant and belligerently anti-social sects have infected themselves with a disease that threatens them and their non-haredi neighbors existentially. Understandably, the neighbors are constructing physical barriers against these foolish scofflaw communities whose noncompliance with safety measures has brought catastrophe.

[T]he municipality of Ramat Gan put up barricades along its border with the ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak, which has recorded a sharp rise in COVID-19 infections in the last few days and was placed under a government lockdown.

So, respond the haredim: How dare you ghettoize us!

Just because the “silence [of haredi authorities] betrayed and imperiled their community,” that’s no reason enlightened and responsible Israelis have to climb on board a doomed ship of fools and sink with them. They don’t think their raison d’être is to submit to criminally stupid rabbis; they believe in the germ theory of disease and act accordingly. Their misfortune is to have set up shop alongside a wretched medieval outpost that their state, which should above all be about protecting its citizens, has chosen, over decades, to ignore or, worse, to encourage. Now there’s really no way out.

************

Lest New Yorkers miss out on the fun.

Margaret Soltan, April 6, 2020 3:41PM
Posted in: forms of religious experience

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UD REVIEWED

Dr. Bernard Carroll, known as the "conscience of psychiatry," contributed to various blogs, including Margaret Soltan's University Diaries, for which he sometimes wrote limericks under the name Adam.
New York Times

George Washington University English professor Margaret Soltan writes a blog called University Diaries, in which she decries the Twilight Zone-ish state our holy land’s institutes of higher ed find themselves in these days.
The Electron Pencil

It’s [UD's] intellectual honesty that makes her blog required reading.
Professor Mondo

There's always something delightful and thought intriguing to be found at Margaret Soltan's no-holds-barred, firebrand tinged blog about university life.
AcademicPub

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truffula, commenting at Historiann

Margaret Soltan at University Diaries blogs superbly and tirelessly about [university sports] corruption.
Dagblog

University Diaries. Hosted by Margaret Soltan, professor of English at George Washington University. Boy is she pissed — mostly about athletics and funding, the usual scandals — but also about distance learning and diploma mills. She likes poems too. And she sings.
Dissent: The Blog

[UD belittles] Mrs. Palin's degree in communications from the University of Idaho...
The Wall Street Journal

Professor Margaret Soltan, blogging at University Diaries... provide[s] an important voice that challenges the status quo.
Lee Skallerup Bessette, Inside Higher Education

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Sean Dorrance Kelly, Harvard University

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Roland Greene, Stanford University

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Carlat Psychiatry Blog

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Perplexed with Narrow Passages

Margaret Soltan is no fan of college sports and her diatribes on the subject can be condescending and annoying. But she makes a good point here...
Outside the Beltway

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Money Law

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Ducks and Drakes

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The Bitch Girls

Many of us bloggers worry that we don’t post enough to keep people’s interest: Margaret Soltan posts every day, and I more or less thought she was the gold standard.
Tenured Radical

University Diaries by Margaret Soltan is one of the best windows onto US university life that I know.
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[University Diaries offers] a broad sense of what's going on in education today, framed by a passionate and knowledgeable reporter.
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If deity were an elected office, I would quit my job to get her on the ballot.
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