To paraphrase Dylan.

Mayor Bill de Blasio lashed out at Hasidic residents of the Williamsburg section in Brooklyn late Tuesday night after personally overseeing the dispersal of a crowd of hundreds of mourners who had gathered for the funeral of a rabbi who died of the coronavirus.

Hey, maybe now that the mayor has been willing to lash out, he could turn to Hasidic noncompliance with childhood vaccinations… Or, hey! How ’bout them education standards!

For decades, the communities have largely been allowed to evade government oversight, thanks to politicians who have enjoyed their support as one of the state’s most powerful voting blocs. The price of that support has been largely paid by Orthodox children.

As in, they get measles and coronavirus and as a special bonus are unemployably ignorant. What will it take, observers have wondered for years, for city and state government to lash out? And now we have our answer.

America eats shit in some obvious ways (see the post below this one), but is also an amazing place. When idjits on the school board in Palmer Alaska banned some of the twentieth century’s greatest novels (details here), people there rose up and blew them a big ol’ collective raspberry.

Ever since an Alaska school board voted to remove five books from elective high school classes, the titles of the works have come alive throughout the community. One city council member reads excerpts from her favorite book on Facebook every night. An attorney began a movement to reward students who read them. Hundreds have joined a Facebook group to voice their opposition to the removal. And a local bookstore owner says donations have been pouring in since the vote from community members who want her shop to give teenagers those books for free. “There’s been a huge response from the community,” says Mary Ann Cockle, owner of Fireside Books in Palmer. “The outpouring of support and concern about banning and censorship has been quite a surprise — but in a good way.”

Nice one.

Only Vinod Khosla and his beach (scroll down) can hold a candle to the story of this house in LA.

America!

Yes, we know you do.

The question is why any rational human being, let alone a government tasked with protecting citizens, listens to a word you say.

Israel has, post-coronavirus, so much to answer for.

When a member of New York’s Hasidic sect “filed a complaint with New York City’s social distancing complaint hotline” after he found forty people gathered in a synagogue that was supposed to be locked, he became Hasidic Enemy Number One, his photograph posted all over town with words identifying him as a snitch.

So far, this is absolutely typical cult behavior, including the suggestion that he be killed. (Same stuff in Israel right now in similar cults: “On April 14, in the Kirya Haredit … police had to rescue a man from a mob angry that he informed authorities about a ritual bath that had remained open in violation of government regulations.”)

Oh but then the JTA found a Yeshiva University professor to explain it all!

“The origin of this situation is that in much of Jewish history, Jews weren’t treated fairly before the law,” said Moshe Krakowski, a professor at Yeshiva University who studies haredi Orthodox society.

“Ultra-Orthodox culture is a very learned culture, so everybody’s got exposure to the same texts. So you’ll have people who will accuse others of all sorts of things, including mesirah, on the basis of their understanding, but not necessarily sanctioned by any rabbinic authority.”

Moshe, Moshe, Moshe. Do you really want to go on record telling us that we have to understand that because Jews have been treated badly they flout public safety laws and talk about killing law-abiding fellow Jews who report them to the police? Does that make sense, Moshe?

And why are you telling people who know better that ultraorthodoxy is learned? Let’s go back to your second statement and see if we can make sense of it.

Point One: UItraorthodoxy is learned. Memorizing prose passages, reciting them aloud repeatedly, handing your children appallingly substandard educations, and blindly following the opinion of your rabbi ain’t learned, my man. The same text exposure, absolutely, which is of course the primary sign that they don’t know much – people of one book and all that. So let’s not have any learned bullshit, please. Even their rabbis, if we can judge by some of the most prominent in the US and Israel, are dangerous idiots.

Point Two: So you say ‘so.’ So – because they are all learned and all read the same texts, they’ll accuse others of all sorts of execution-worthy offenses because… uh… huh? Oh, because for instance in their learnedness they learn that Judaism sanctions death for people who call the cops on Jews who break the law. Others may disagree! But you have to admire the intellectual ferment here…

The Matanuska-Susitna school board bans The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man, Catch-22, The Things They Carried and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings cuz they so naughty, but sees nothing wrong with flaunting one of the world’s largest quims in front of Wasilla High.

Democratic Sen. Chris Murphy

Says College Football System is ‘Immoral’

One other issue shaking up the Haredi community relates to promises made by its rabbis. During the campaign leading up to the March 2 election, United Torah Judaism released a video in which Rabbi Kanievsky’s grandson says to him: “There is this disease that is spreading in the world that they call corona. Many people in the world have died from it, and thousands of people are sick from it. And many people have great fear that it will reach them. So, people are asking: will voting for United Torah Judaism in the election be a protection for them that they won’t become sick from this disease?”

Rabbi Kanievsky nods his head in approval, and this video became part of the UTJ campaign. Many people who voted for the ultra-Orthodox party have died from corona, and hundreds if not thousands have contracted the virus. This has led to large-scale questioning of the guarantees made by the rabbis, who continue to promise that if people donate to specific charities then they will be protected from corona. The community is now challenging the validity of these blessings, to the point where Rabbi Kanievsky’s son had to go on the defensive in an interview with the ultra-Orthodox website Kikar Shabbat. Rabbi Kanievsky’s son explained the mechanism how this blessing works, saying that once the rabbi has issued this promise, then those whom God decrees will receive the virus will be prevented by God from donating to these charities.

When the interviewer pressed him further, pointing out that people who have donated to this charity are sick with corona, the son then gave a long and difficult to follow response that explained how one can lose the merit and protection because of their sins.

Only he forgot a couple of things.

1. He gambled away $1.8 billion of Harvard’s money.
2. He made five million dollars working for a hedge fund while still Harvard’s president.

A Hasidic writer is incensed that the popular series Unorthodox depicts ultraorthodox sex as “aberrant… [and solely] devoted to producing babies … [a] procreation … done without any sensitivity, tenderness, or human emotion.” The show even features couples keeping their clothes on while procreating. Nonsense! It’s a “hateful libel… a voyeuristic libel.”

There are problems here. Nowhere does Eli Spitzer tell us the truth about Hasidic humpery… I mean, I gather he’s hinting it’s actually a stripped down hootenany, but, as Gwendolyn points out to Jack, yes, but you don’t say it.

I mean, I wonder what it is in ultraorthodox life, its attitude toward women, modesty, and – whisper the word – sex, that inclines audiences to grant credence to a very very twisted portrayal of men and women in bed, a portrayal characterized by such extreme depths of repression, ignorance, desperation, and shame as to beggar belief? Religious fundamentalists who erase the Chancellor of Germany’s image from their publications because she’s a woman… Who instruct their sons that women are to be erased, made invisible, because they are impure, or, as an ultraorthodox woman explains:

It’s very, very, very, very, very hard for a nonreligious person to understand the purity of eyes… By us, men don’t look at women’s photos, period. As long as you don’t know that, then it sounds ridiculous, or changing history or events. But we’re not here to get the events the way they are. We are here to keep the eyes.

I wonder why people assume the plausibility of sick sex among people who consider looking at images of women – or God forbid – sitting next to one on a plane – to be an act of impurity.

No. UD is sorry, but Eli is going to have to do more than shout libel in The Forward. We of the impure world have every reason to assume that women have as bad a time in bed as they do in most other ultraorthodox venues. Prove us wrong, Eli…. or hey! Maybe consider the possibility that a woman would be a more credible source on this particular subject – since you’re basically attacking as a malicious lie a formerly ultraorthodox woman’s account of her sex life with her husband. Does it seem odd to anyone else that a man considers himself the right person to defend female sexual pleasure? So let’s hear from the girls! C’mon, girls!

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

Or maybe we could hear from the boys? Here’s one:

Aron had tried to leave the Hasidic community, but he struggled to assimilate into the secular world. Many of the yeshivas in Brooklyn teach in Yiddish and provide less than two hours of secular education a day. Aron had a heavy Yiddish accent, a rudimentary grasp of written English, and no diploma. In a video filmed by a friend, Aron complained about his limited education and social skills. He said that he didn’t know how to interact with women—he had been forbidden to mingle with them or look them in the eye—and no one had taught him “what your body is about.” He had struggled to process what was happening when [a sex criminal, Baruch] ]Lebovits, a pious man, put his mouth on Aron’s penis. “My head, like, exploded,” he said. “Call it an epiphany, I guess.”

Gently, gently, gently, observers begin to reckon with the unhinged haredim of the world, whose – okay, put it gently – measure of detachment from reality has unhinged so much coronavirus that haredi cities in Israel are now known as Corona Capitals, testaments to what one haredi dissident calls his community’s “terrible disregard for the immediacy of … danger to human life.”

But let’s unpack these sentences – the sentences in my headline – from an essay by a sympathetic insider. Let’s look at their elements and ponder them.

Cultural isolation as the best antidote to the ills of Western culture? What precisely is meant here? Isn’t it your sense – your gut instinct – that hostile, virtually total, isolationism is unlikely to be even a so-so antidote to anything? As with any other cult, haredi isolation accomplishes two things: It separates these people from a world they consider threatening and polluted; and it makes them increasingly insular and weird. It makes their relationship with the world outside themselves increasingly unworkable. (This dynamic is as true of individuals who radically withdraw from a world they hate as it is of cults. “Withdrawal” is, for instance, always prominently cited in lists of possibly suicidal behaviors.) Isolation from education, to take one notorious instance, poses, one haredi insider writes, an existential threat: “Economists, and anyone with common sense, recognize the looming collapse of a community in which too many children do not receive a basic general studies education. Yet, anyone who dares raise the issue publicly is decried in the Charedi press as an enemy of Charedi Jewry.”

No collective can truly sustain a completely autonomous life. It has to live somewhere; it has to reckon with a dominant culture. The actuality of haredi isolationism in Israel involves a steady, belligerent refusal to educate their children according to mandatory national standards; a refusal to serve in the armed forces; forced gender separation and the derogation/invisibility of women that always goes along with it; regular street demonstrations/riots opposing a vast range of actions of the Israeli state that do not accord with rabbinical edicts (gender-integrated public buses, for instance, where women aren’t forced to sit in the back), and much else along basic lines of profound civil disregard. “[W]here some level of government enforcement [of our illegal public activities under the pandemic] was expected, the celebrations were taken ‘underground’ with defiant, partisan spirit… [A]ttendees were urged to keep [large] event[s] secret,” notes another haredi insider, who continues:

As a minority, we must indeed occasionally fight for our observance and Torah values; yet there is a world out there of which we a part, whether we like it or not. Human lives are the price we ultimately pay when we deny the existence of a world beyond.

Of course, if you believe (perhaps the writer from whom I’ve drawn my headline believes) that “Western culture” is “ill,” then withdrawing from it into sanitary non-Western (really non-modern) enclaves makes sense, I guess… though everything depends on the nature of the illness. For their part, the haredim have made it clear that Western culture is ill with democracy and its institutions; with equality among peoples; and with Enlightenment principles of reason. A writer who left the community remarks: “[A]s an anti-rationalist community, they are suspicious of scientific authority. It’s only to be expected that the response to coronavirus would be deficient.” An insider writes: “[T]he Charedi public’s irresponsible conduct in the face of the COVID-19 crisis reflects our community’s ultimate failure to properly contend with modernity itself.“

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

Coronavirus is an ill; Western culture is not an ill. If you are a collective that believes much of your existence needs to be devoted to resisting a culture you consider disgusting, the honest thing to do is live somewhere else. (UD has long felt that the best place for haredim to live is Salt Lake City, where the Mormons are likely to tolerate them reasonably well.)

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

Next the writer refers to the haredi “detachment from reality” problem. In fact, he uses that phrase twice in three sentences. What does he mean?

I suppose on the simplest level he means that the haredim – in particular, the religious leadership most blindly follow – were fatally detached from the reality of a pandemic, fatally ignorant of the empirical reality of germ-borne disease. That is obviously true, but it’s the least interesting aspect of their lemming-like behavior. (Our gentle writer calls this a “strong collective spirit,” the word spirit patting the haredim on the back for what manifests in practice as mulish automatism. The haredim are the very opposite of a spirit squad.)

What’s more interesting is the relationship of the haredim to the unreality of their religious beliefs.

This is sensitive territory, because all religious people believe things that look bizarre to the non-religious, or to people of different faiths. The religious believe, after all, in another realm – of miracles, of transcendent visitations and ascensions … So why is it that the ecstatic Christianity of Francis Collins in no way undermines our reliance on him as arguably the nation’s most important scientist? This is a man whose faith was confirmed when “during [a hiking] trip he turned a corner and saw a frozen waterfall, perfectly formed into three separate parts. He took it as a revelation of Trinitarian truth, [and] he vowed to devote his life to the Christian faith.” It’s also a man in whose stewardship of our empirical world of health and disease we place very strong confidence.

And that’s because Collins manages to maintain at the same time both a private revelatory faith and a public rationality, a sane and steady commitment to shared, verifiable phenomena. He does not have a detachment from reality problem, because he is able to live at once in spirit and in matter. The haredim, on the other hand, believe there is no reality aside from their specific, peculiar, fundamentalist one; and this is where what the writer refers to as their pervasive “sense of moral superiority” comes in. They are not content to believe what they believe and practice what they practice for themselves; they must impose it on the country. The country is sick with modernity, and they must cure it.

I mean, think of another pretty withdrawn religious group here in the States – the Amish. They definitely go their own pre-modern way too. But they impose on the rest of the country not at all; and in fact they contribute generously to its well-being: The Amish pay arguably more than their share in taxes, while the haredim, for a variety of reasons, pay far lower taxes than virtually all other Israelis, and get abundant state subsidies. Their “exaggerated self-confidence, ” as the writer terms it, derives from their conviction that they alone lead holy, exemplary lives.

They deserve immense state handouts, for these are merely tributes to the greatness of the haredi way of life. They deserve military exemption because their davening is already protecting Israel from missile attacks. And from “an extraordinarily efficient virus in transmitting from one person to another.”

Indeed, the civilizational results are often (to use the writer’s word) dire when heedless, resentful, proud cults are not only ignored by the state, but encouraged. To unpack these sentences is to reveal the truly disastrous dimensions of Israeli state policy toward the haredim.

See Engels here. Compare the haredim of Israel, in the age of Covid 19.

I’m the eldest of 11 children, and it’s not even an especially large family. In my parents’ building in Beit Shemesh, there are around 200 children and lots of elderly folk. The option of assisted living or retirement homes barely exists… These are families with 10 to 15 children. Some households have children who are already married with their own kids, so there can be 20 to 30 people living in one home. The average size of a Haredi apartment is 60 to 70 square meters [700 square feet]. It’s like a small ghetto. On a normal day, everyone is out studying, but these days everyone is together 24/7 with nothing to do. There is no internet, no smartphones, no T.V., no leisure books, nothing. You can’t leave the house…

How did a modern democratic state let this happen?

When, in a few decades, half of Israeli children come from homes like these, Israel can give up any pretense of being a modern democratic state.

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

Fun detail from this interview:

[A haredi website] called “Mevaser” … last week published a whole page of photos of [virus victims] from Borough Park, Williamsburg, and other places – with the women blotted out in black.

Dead in life; dead in death.

A charity run by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, a leader in the world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism whose group is based in B’nei Brak, also known as the Israel’s “Corona Capital” because of all the infected people there, is running a scam that’s perhaps the worst one we’ve seen during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The group says that anyone who donates NIS 3,000 (roughly $836) will be granted complete protection from COVID-19 by way of an amulet and blessings.

When the plague’s wrath subsides, and the rest of Israel returns to its routine far from ultra-Orthodoxy’s ghettos, some within the ghettos will ask themselves two questions.

The first question will be how come ultra-Orthodoxy’s highest living authority, Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky, overruled the government’s order that all educational institutions be shut, and ordered instead all ultra-Orthodox schools and yeshivot to remain open.

… Then they will ask the second question: who maneuvered the ultra-Orthodox community into the cramped ghettos where most of its families live? Why does Bnei Brak, with 23,700 people per square kilometer – almost twice Gaza’s 13,000 – have to be among the world’s 10 most crowded cities?

… Yes, many of his followers, probably most, will not be fazed by their leader’s misjudgment and aloofness, but a critical mass will ask not only how he erred so colossally, but how he made his reckless decision, consulting no one, possessing no relevant knowledge, and overruling a battery of experts.

Once they ask this basic question, ultra-Orthodox Israelis will conclude that their sage was not equipped to make the ruling that 10 days later he was compelled to reverse.

And those who undergo this epiphany will then question everything else they have been made to do, like deprive their children of the general education and military service that threaten their rabbis’ rule of the ghetto they built; the ghetto where, the day corona invaded, ultra-Orthodox Israelis learned they are religiously blinded, socially chained and medically trapped.

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

That last part – about change – is wishful thinking. A kind of generational mental retardation has been accomplished among these groups; coupled with an embrace of authoritarianism and masochism, it represents one hell of a potent, toxic brew.

But props to this writer for going there – for the language of maneuvering Jews into ghettos. Yikes.

As one of Washington DC’s highest-profile orthodox rabbis is released early from a six-year prison term (coronavirus), here’s a quick revisit of Rabbi Freundel’s 52 counts of sexual perversion against orthodox women in the ritual bath (scroll down). And here’s a look at the larger place of the ritual bath in female orthodox Jewish life, and in our current pandemic.

[B]eginning on the days when she anticipates her period, a husband and wife are forbidden from having any sexual relations until seven days following the end of her period. Considering orthodox law states that a period’s duration is a minimum of five days, this typically spans about two weeks or longer, depending on whether her post-menstrual discharge cooperates. In short, this means that for about half of every month, all aspects of an orthodox woman’s life, relationship, sexuality, and emotional health, are dictated by her vaginal discharge…

While the woman is required to count seven clean days before she may immerse herself in a ritual bath (mikvah) prior to reuniting with her husband, it’s not only a matter of days or time waiting. The woman must take an active role to ensure she is “clean” by wearing only white underwear and conducting self-examinations of her vaginal canal with special white cloths twice a day, every day, before sundown. The white cloth is inserted into the vagina so that any fluid or discharge is absorbed. The first examination of the seven days requires the cloth to be left in for about an hour, even if the woman is out of the house, and it is usually quite painful…

If during the seven days any of the examination cloths contain even a tiny spot darker than tan, or a spot on her underwear bigger than a penny and darker than tan, she must take the underwear or cloth to a special rabbi for further evaluation. This Rabbi will then examine the color to determine if it is light enough for her to keep counting, or if it’s too dark or too red tinted such that she must begin counting the seven clean days over, even if it is day 7.

Okay then! Now – what about the bath and the epidemic?

Well, even with all that rabbi-sniffing, the orthodox woman still can’t do the deed until she goes to the ritual bath: “[W]omen must visit the mikvah.” That’s must, babe.

(Does it get even kinkier than this? Don’t ask.)

But things like common baths are notoriously germy (the subject is an excellent vector through which to clarify the meaning of irony), and you desperately want to stay away from them at a time like this. “[W]omen are understandably petrified of going to mikvah: In order for the immersion to count as valid, you must immerse your entire naked body, so that the water touches you completely. One of the main ways of transmission of coronavirus is by touching surfaces that have the disease – and some people may have coronavirus and be asymptomatic, in which case they might show up to mikvah.” But… you MUST use them!

“There are a lot of fixtures of Jewish life that Jews can actually live without,” Rivkah Slonim, a Hasidic woman who has written and lectured extensively about mikvah use, told me. “We can be without synagogues. We can be without a Torah scroll. We cannot, in Jewish law, move forward as a community … without a mikvah.” Immersion is a commandment that comes directly from the Torah, and the punishment for violating it—being cut off from God—is severe...

Although people outside of the Orthodox community might say that these women should just stay home, going to the mikvah is not optional in the way that praying together in synagogue or attending family gatherings is, according to Ruth Balinsky Friedman, a clergywoman at Ohev Shalom, an Orthodox synagogue in Washington, D.C. “I very much understand the impulse to see religion as more symbolic—something that we do when we’re able to, but in a time of crisis, we put aside,” she told me. But “you can’t cancel” the commandments governing sex, she said. “That’s the word of God.”

So you go, girl! Get in there, get infected, pass it on to the old folks and the young. None of this symbolic shit when it comes to the sexual filth of women. That’s the word of God.

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

Useful background on the ultraorthodox mind:

[They] follow literally the biblical model in which God controls and does everything in history. They firmly believe that as long as humans please God by doing mitzvot, God will defeat their enemies and grant them victory… [Many of their leaders] dismissed medical considerations because God controls every detail of history… 

In the coronavirus case, this policy – which totally fails in reality − was applied to the community. The consequences are devastating… [T]he virus [, some of their leaders told them,] is a punishment for lashon hara (harmful gossip speech); people should stop and repent, and the plague would stop…

Some Haredim allowed themselves to be exposed to the coronavirus because God would protect them. Many Evangelicals around the world have done the same. Given the natural laws and medical evidence of a pandemic, this behavior is nothing but magical thinking. Magic claims that through certain words or actions − in this case, religious faith/behaviors − God is “compelled” to do what the practitioner wants.

… The sad outcome of a lack of secular education is that people more easily slip into pre-modern, magical thinking. The Haredi penalty for grasping at magic is greater contagion…  [T]he average Haredi Jew lacks understanding of the serious threat of the coronavirus and the urgency of taking preventive actions.

Unfortunately, the Gedolim − the Torah greats − who make the rulings that guide [haredi] behavior are just as uninformed as their followers. This explains their delayed and initially counterproductive responses to the threat. The community has paid a terrible price for its leadership’s ignorance of science and secular knowledge.. . [D]eprived of essential knowledge, mired in poverty [the haredim are now uniquely] vulnerable to disease.