TO BLUR, WITH LOVE
Those golden days of blurring Jews
Because they’re girls are gone.
But we’ll take power soon
And then the blurring will still go on and on.
But why do we blur the girls
In a modern liberal democratic state?
Why do we treat them like Iran?
Israel covers and blurs
Because God said women are profane.
The fleshly filthiness of girls
Makes pious haredim insane.
Your wigs and baths and heavy robes
Will please the lord above
And so your newest government says
To blur! with love.
… 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.
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.’
Well, they’re on the warpath. No Pasarán!! they cry; the enemy shall not pass through our sacred gates! So-called Jews who make a PEEP about our way of life (we’re looking at you, Jonathan Tobin) are traitors and will be dealt with as such (remember Jacob Kornbluh!)
A haredi prof at a Brooklyn law school really gets it said:
When asked whether he was concerned about the lack of secular education in many Hasidic schools, [Aaron] Twerski replied, “We make the trade-offs, not the state.”
Haredim to New York:
DROP DEAD
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Nu, so what next?
Nothing. Some violent all-male demonstrations in NYC and upstate. They’ll never be pushed to the wall, so if they were smart they’d shut their traps and do nothing. But who ever said they were smart? They’ve been yeshiva-retarded. They will scream and smash and let out their sexual frustration all over town, and then, on the absurdly slim chance they are, in ten years or so, called to account, they will settle down to cheating on the standardized exam.
You thought Varsity Blues was something. You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
OTOH we know nothing will happen as a result of the regents finally saying officially that zillions of schools in NYC and upstate NY – with zillions of students, their numbers growing insanely quickly, and most of them run by schoolboards rife with retarders – must be subject to serious investigation/review, and schools who keep retarding will be shut down/lose accreditation/lose subsidies… We shall do such things!
Look at Israel, babe. Look at England. England’s been failing forever to do something about schools that treat female students like slaves and teach islamofascism. Israel’s situation is hilarious. A corrupt ex-prime minister, desperate to stay out of jail, has just offered the following deal to the retarders in his country: Be part of my coalition and I promise never to interfere in any way with your child-retardation process. Full, fulsome government funding will be maintained for all of your efforts. Puts Andrew Yang to shame.
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Because everyone knows nothing will happen, and because almost no one – from their parents to NY State officials – cares about what goes on in Jewish retardation locations, talk is cheap. Suddenly you’ve got the ex-editor of Commentary, of all people, sweating rhetorical bullets over the dire social implications if America’s big, visible, Jewish community — which is soon to be demographically dominated by the retarders — starts looking like a bunch of skid row bums. Not a good look. Nothing to do to avert it, but lemme get myself on the record saying it’s not a good look.
Jonathan Tobin begins with paragraph after paragraph of boilerplate:
Evil secular rags like the NYT hate Jews and we are right to regard anything they write with extreme skepticism.
NY public schools are shitty too.
‘[P]oliticians and news outlets unfairly scapegoated the ultra-Orthodox for spreading COVID-19.’ Hey Tobin short memory: Google Orthodox Spreader Events, lad. (‘[M]ost [haredim] continue to live in constant poverty and go to the doctor without being able to understand their own diagnosis. The price they pay, as we have seen during COVID-19, as well as the recent polio upsurge and anti-vax sentiments … is high and will remain so unless major changes come.’)
After many we’re the victims! paragraphs, Tobin finally, gingerly, timorously, delicately, reticently, dips a toe in.
You don’t have to share the contempt for religious Jews that may be widespread in the Times newsroom to be alarmed by the fact that test scores in these subjects at ultra-Orthodox schools for boys (girls, who are expected to get jobs rather than merely study sacred texts, get slightly more instruction and do marginally better) appear to be the lowest in the state.
I like that “may.” It may be widespread. Ya think? I don’t think. I think a long-term reading of the NYT reveals just the opposite – an effort to write about religious Jews
(And hey Tobin doesn’t really mean religious Jews, does he? Reform Judaism, in which I was raised, is religious, but of course ultraorthodox Jews think Reform Judaism is an utterly profane obscene joke. In Israel, ultras spit at/shout GOYISH WHORE at eight year old Orthodox girls whose skirts are shorter than they should, ultra-istically, be. I think Tobin needs to specify what he has in mind by the phrase religious Jews. Me, I think a baseline definition of a religious Jew is a person who takes the ethical as well as spiritual tradition of Judaism seriously, which would, religiously, put the endemically corrupt ultraorthodox movement somewhere quite far below the Reform and Conservative movements.)
with the same neutrality/objectivity the paper’s journalists write about everything else. But what the hell is objectivity if you’re a yeshiva-educated ultra? The schools have surgically removed, as a cancer, anything that comes out of the empirical, enlightenment, traditions. This is what makes ultras such perfect Trumpians – it’s all conspiracies, rage, our side’s righteous lies, our side’s unique possession of the transcendent truth. (Bonus point here: One of the many reasons nothing’s going to happen to the ultra-orthodox retardation locations is that politicians are literally frightened of this group, whose … parlous… emotional/intellectual state combined with unquestioning mass obedience/action means … riots. Politicians don’t like riots, and believe me there will be riots if anything seriously disruptive is done to ultra life. Remember the mass attack on Jacob Kornbluh. That’s just the beginning. America’s ultras are way behind Israel’s, who riot pretty much continually; but mess with them and they’ll be torching cars.)
And then a little more delicacy cuz we don’t want to hurt any feelings here: APPEAR TO BE the lowest in the state. Another conspiracy? Have the Jew-haters in the NY State testing bureaucracy fucked with the results? Good to be skeptical about things like this.
Tobin sympathetically explains the ultra POV:
They believe that the issue here isn’t so much poor education as the refusal of the secular state … to accept the desire of the ultra-Orthodox community to opt out of society.
Two points here:
Here, Tobin. Feast your eyes.
Tobin eventually says the right, obvious, sane things about ultraorthodox yeshivas, but it’s so hedged about with paranoia and knee-jerk anti-leftism (As many commenters on the NYT article note, it’s nuts to make this a left/right thing. Ultras don’t know shit about politics OUT THERE, in That Distant Evil Society. They go where the ultra-friendliest winds blow.) that it’s worthless.
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UD in front of the Israeli Embassy,
Washington DC, 2013. Photo: Jewish
Daily Forward.
… whose failed mayoral candidacy did everything but suck the dicks of each of the major ultra rebbes. As a NYT commenter writes:
One day after the story broke and I don’t see any of the major recipients of ultra-Orthodox campaign donation rushing to their defense. Contrary to what some of the commenters have written here, the ultra-Orthodox (or haredim as they are known in Israel) are neither Democrats or Republicans. They vote as they are told by the community big shots who decide based on promises made to them by the politicians. If they were in the pocket of one party, their unholy efforts would be far less effective. The fact is that the community votes as a bloc and those votes are always up for grabs.
The commenter goes on to wonder why Andrew Yang in particular isn’t tweeting that if New Yorkers had voted for him none of this religious persecution would be taking place, and the beautiful diversity that is beating kids and keeping them ignorant would continue to assume its secure, state-funded role in our great city. Not long ago, he went very public with his love of ultraorthodox ways:
The key for Mr. Yang was his early declaration that he intended to take a laissez-faire attitude toward Hasidic yeshivas…
[Yang] criticized the city for allowing investigators “to check for infractions of various kinds” in yeshivas.
… Mr. Yang has sought to appeal to Hasidic voters on issues besides education, including support for the right of parents to choose a circumcision ritual, metzitzah b’peh, which is used by a minority of Hasidic mohels and has transmitted herpes to babies…
Yeah! And what’s even better, Andrew, is that, as you know, all the babies that get blown by infected mohels die! What a way to go, huh? Helluva cultural practice — one you were happy to support.
So here, in their hour of need, with the NYT finally telling everyone what’s going on in the schools and creating a firestorm, where are you? Where’s the great champion not only of shameful schools, but clerical herpetic cocksuckers?
A New York Times writer begins by speaking the harsh truth (see above), and then suddenly davens over backwards to absolve New York’s ultraorthodox community of decades of public health irresponsibility.
Quoting only one person as an authority on the subject of vaccine hesitancy – a member of the ultraorthodox community – she would have us believe that this particular group of Jews is justified, by its tragic history, in its appalling indifference to any state authority (this approach also lets them off the hook for endemic welfare cheating and refusal to educate their children to a state standard). The writer does not ask why groups of Jews around the world with similar tragic histories seem able to discriminate between a Nazi state and a democratic state. She does not consider that the crucial problem may be that this group obeys only its authoritarian rabbis and has contempt for profane entities outside of its sacred realm.
“Vaccine hesitancy is not rooted in Orthodox religion,” [Nesha] Abramson says. “It’s fueled by people who come from outside the community to spread lies and sow fear.” Indeed Israel’s ultraorthodox also seem captive to the same outside forces, since, as Samuel Heilman points out, their community is as just as “perfect… an incubator for epidemics” as New York’s.
Trace the problem back, in both cases, to a refusal to educate their children in basics like the germ theory of disease; but don’t forget primitive powerful rabbis, in some cases, who tell their followers not to bother vaccinating. The notorious tendency of some ultraorthodox communities to incubate epidemic is rooted in the form religion takes among them – in particular, blind obedience to a rabbi, and a shocking lack of basic cultural literacy that makes people credulous in regard to conspiracy theories, and easily manipulated, by outsiders as well as insiders.
[The Freedom from Religion Foundation contacted] Cabell County Schools administrators in 2017 and 2019 regarding religious activities taking place in schools. … “Despite FFRF’s prior warnings, … adults have continued to promote religion to Cabell County students during the school day, including through religious assemblies,” the lawsuit states.
Three strikes you’re sued, I guess. And it’s about time. No fan of promiscuous litigation, UD nonetheless has long argued on these pages that hopeless recidivists – and fanatics just can’t help it – can only be controlled, in many cases, via the legal system.
Horny haredim, for instance, are always going to stand up on airplanes and demand seating that does not torment them through the proximity of female flesh; and the only way to control this behavior has been to throw them off the airplane when they do their thing.
I mean, the only way for an airline to avoid endless $500,000 a pop successful lawsuits brought by harlots publicly forced to change their seats is to throw the haredim off the plane. Or threaten to do so. Which now routinely happens.
Similarly, it’s quite clear from the incorrigible behavior of Huntington High School’s principal that he perceives his teenage charges as lambs of Christ whether they like it or not, and no heathen “foundation” is going to stand in the way of his herding and revivaling them. Only the principled removal of the principal, plus painful financial penalties against the school district, will begin to perform the miracle of making the blind see in West Virginia.
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‘Course ol’ UD is also waiting for the part where it turns out the principal’s receiving kickbacks from Nik, the mentally challenged revivalist in question, per teenage hellion butts the principal puts in seats. Or whatever. There’s got to be some form of money corruption at play here; it wouldn’t be Jim Bakker-style revivalism without it. Let’s wait and see.
… as I summarized this writer’s argument about the refusal of ultraorthodox schools all over the world to comply with required state education standards – that is, to teach basic computer, verbal, and mathematical literacy, much less, for instance, empirical method, or the institutions, practices, and history of the country in which their students live.
The writer offers a welcome acknowledgement, from within the haredi world (he heads a hasidic boys’ school), of the bullshit nature of the arguments haredim make about the high quality, by any standard, of their children’s education. He notes that in reality
many hours are spent singing songs, listening to stories, and repeating material that has already been learned. In high school, meanwhile, most of the day is devoted to unstructured learning. This, for many students, consists primarily of socializing while absorbing a tiny amount of material...
[M]ost ḥasidic schools offer something like 90 minutes a day of secular studies to students ages six to twelve, the quality of which varies widely, but is mostly well below average; and these pupils then go on to high schools that provide no secular studies at all. I can tell you, as someone who attended mainstream ḥasidic schools, that by the age of fifteen I had forgotten almost entirely the smatterings of English and mathematics I had learned in elementary school and had to start again from scratch.
As I say, such honesty about – well, about what we already know, but about which haredim lie – is welcome. Yet instead of proceeding to offer suggestions about how the closed, hostile world of the haredim might be induced – more sensitively and successfully – by state education representatives to open up enough to educate their children in even minimally non-haredi ways, the writer suddenly goes on a tear about evil liberal conspiracies to “dismantle” haredi life entirely.
[The question is] whether the liberal state is willing to let a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order grow up in its midst. From the perspective of the state, and those loyal to it, there are reasonable grounds to prevent that. What is not reasonable, however, is the sort of liberal triumphalism that imagines that, under the pretext of implementing minor or neutral reforms, Ḥasidim will simply be intimidated into dismantling their own social order...
Liberal order here means everything – everything – that is totally “antithetical,” the writer rightly points out, to the haredi way of life. Totally. Personal choice, autonomy, the use of reason to make decisions which are right for oneself and not necessarily the group (haredim, for instance, notoriously vote as an almost solid bloc; in the last election, almost 83 percent of them, as instructed by their rabbis, voted for Trump, the highest percentage of any voting group). The haredim represent a totally solid rejection of everything modern liberal democracies stand for. Full stop.
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Eli Spitzer even goes on to acknowledge that for haredi parents “preventing college is the point,” so bravo to their schools for doing a bang-up job of making successful entry to college impossible… ? Aren’t we getting a little… weird here? Has Spitzer heard of Yeshiva University? Of quite a number of other seriously religious universities in America? But even those schools won’t take you if you don’t know what a computer is and get 250 on your verbal and nonverbal SATs… tests you can’t even take, come to think of it, without basic computer skills…
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So what do we conclude from what is clearly a radical, all-encompassing, isolation and stupidization of a growing number of young people in the United States?
A country by the way which is itself quite religious?
America is the most religious wealthy country in the world, according to a recent survey. A Pew survey found that Americans said they prayed more than any other wealthy nation surveyed. Fifty-five percent of Americans report praying at least once daily, 6 percentage points higher than the international average.
Again, in line with it being a religious outlier in the advanced world, the US has an extensive network of religious – and often very culturally conservative – universities. As its current political battles suggest, America’s conservative religious culture and legal institutions arguably dominate – they certainly hold their own – in the institutions (had a look at the Supreme Court lately?) and practices of this country. Anyone looking for a liberal triumphalism set on dismantling religious, conservative life will find herself seriously challenged in this god-fearing, abortion under virtually all circumstances outlawing, country.
Because of course the point here is that ultraorthodoxy does not represent merely (in Spitzer’s words) “a countercultural social movement that bends the rules of the liberal order.” I mean, whoa, Nellie! Ultraorthodoxy is itself an outlier in the religious life of this religious country, where massive numbers of seriously committed religious communities educate their children to a more than acceptable standard for a productive, contributing life in the modern world. We are talking here not about counterculture, but cult – a withdrawn, broadly non-compliant cult whose members often display a positive contempt for the laws of a country many of whose claims upon them they simply reject (this contempt for the civic realm is in all respects far worse in Israel). Far from the triumphant dismantler Spitzer perceives, the reality of the extremely liberal city of New York, for instance, is that the very voting bloc ultraorthodoxy represents stays the hand of one politician after another who might for a moment think of changing that sect’s appalling status quo.
Does it not seem strange to Spitzer that a city so obnoxiously liberal as to remove Jefferson’s statue from its city council building trembles before the power of its ultraorthodox community?
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In countries like Spitzer’s – England – the ultraorthodox help make possible the just as appalling educational wreckage many Muslim schools represent. Shouldn’t Muslim schools enjoy the same freedom from an evil liberal state that, for instance, wants to stop them from treating girls like dirt, assigning anti-semitic textbooks, and refusing to teach science?
As structured now, the daycare subsidies enable Haredi fathers to spend their days studying in a beit midrash at the taxpayers’ expense rather than finding gainful employment. Without the subsidies, Haredi mothers, most of whom do have jobs, will have to work longer hours. Or even worse, the men may have to find even a part-time job. The entire edifice of ultra-Orthodox society could come crashing down.
[Israeli] Finance Minister and Yisrael Beytenu leader Avigdor Liberman revoked on Wednesday the eligibility of fathers studying full time in yeshiva for childcare subsidies, enraging ultra-Orthodox political leaders.
In order to be eligible for such subsidies, fathers will need to work or study in a non-religious educational institute for at least 24 hours a week, something which would preclude full-time yeshiva study.
Many commentators have noted that the Haredim could find an ally in the Islamist party in the coalition, which is equally conservative when it comes to issues such as gay rights.
Imperiled by the possibility that Israel may soon get a democratic government, the ultraorthodox are – should be – looking for friends. They will find no closer soulmates than the Islamists.
Soldiers of the Israel Defense Force’s Home Front Command were physically and verbally attacked by ultra-Orthodox Jews while they were assisting in searching for dead and wounded in the deadly crush during Lag B’Omer celebrations at Mount Meron, the IDF said late Saturday.
“We entered the gravesite to search for injured people and suddenly a commotion began that there are female soldiers in uniforms who are touching the wounded,” a soldier told Army Radio earlier.
“They started to kick and spit on us. The female soldiers were kicked, spit on, and punched from every direction,” the radio station quoted the soldier saying. Hebrew media reports said five female soldiers were targeted.
“Haredi politicians and their political allies” put immense pressure on civil authorities to do what everyone except the benighted haredim knew was madness: Pack hundreds of thousands of excited people, late at night, inside a space intended to hold a few thousand. Israel’s “worst-ever peacetime disaster” has laid bare the fact of Israel’s ongoing decline into a hapless third-world theocracy.
With this year’s event taking place in the shadow of COVID-19 — having been canceled last year because of the pandemic — consultations involving the Health Ministry, police and other officials concluded that no more than 9,000 people should be allowed to attend. [One hundred thousand attended.] Agreement to this effect was never brought to the government for approval, however, because of infighting among ministers on other matters… Meron mountainside has essentially become a kind of extra-territorial zone, over which the government has for years failed to fully impose its authority.
There’s definitely humongous huffing and puffing this morning about the scores of state officials under investigation blah blah but of course the people suicidally massing all over the place barely acknowledge – and certainly detest – the state, and certainly intend to ignore all of its reports, directives, laws… Whatever bizarre and distasteful secular emanations waft toward them, Israel’s whirling dervishes intend to keep whirling exactly the way they always have.
I mean, does it seem strange to you that in all the finger pointing no one is even considering pointing a finger at the people responsible – the rabbinical leadership of this haredi sect? That’s because it’s hopeless – Israel has allowed itself to generate huge populations of hostile irrational reactionary cultists; it has, in fact, allowed them to establish significant stretches of Israel as their own “extra-territorial zone.” Israel is becoming a failed state.
And for that reason devastating.
Israel is one of the few countries whose fundamental character is imperiled… Modern Israel cannot survive [Haredi cultural regression]—there will be no one to fund it—unless the Haredim fundamentally change their behavior and worldview, of which there are no signs. It is more reasonable to foresee that, if anything, the process will be accelerated by secular flight…. [Even small changes will draw from the Haredim] charges of “anti-Semitism” and probably rioting in the streets.
Dan Perry lays it out in eighteen stark paragraphs: Israel is a democracy rapidly transitioning to a rather violent theocracy. One of its most powerful political parties simply rejects the authority of the state; suicidally and homicidally ignores covid laws; and bars women from running for office because public life of any form “isn’t their natural place.” If women must go outside, gender segregation and heavy physical covering is a must.
Established as a secular democracy, Israel is well on its way to making Saudi Arabia look enlightened. Yet because its current cultural grotesquerie has been a gradual process, people don’t really see it. They don’t see the secular brain drain, the out-of-it authoritarian rabbis, the masses of illiterate children. Maybe they take in the endless court judgments against appalling haredi behavior; but then they miss the fact that the haredim ignore all such judgments.
The Jew with literary history’s most fantastical, malignant imagination – Kafka – could never have imagined contemporary Israel. It exceeds even his mental grasp.