Again and again on EasyJet flights, stinky ungodly women are forced to change their seats so as not to infect any pure ultraorthodox men who may, through the machinations of some diabolical force, have been seated next to them.

If the women refuse, other passengers — far from, say, acknowledging overt gender discrimination — put pressure on the women to make them move.

Of course this goes on all the time on EasyJet and non-EasyJet to-and-from Israel flights, but only occasionally does a woman resolve to turn down, for instance, the one cup of free coffee that EasyJet offers as compensation and instead contact IRAC, which sues on her behalf and makes all sorts of money for her. The discrimination is so comically obvious, and enjoys so wide an audience, that when these particular suits come forward, airlines simply pay up. The latest beneficiary is Melanie Wolfson.

Since this is such a slam-dunk, UD proposes the following source of income in these uncertain covid times: Groups of women organize themselves to “seed” selected haredim-heavy flights. Inevitably, on any given flight, a number of these women will be seated next to out-of-my-sacred-space-godless-harlot men. Every one of these women files a lawsuit (knowing what will go down, the group will include someone designated to film events on board) and thereby earns for herself and her co-conspirators compensation in the tens of thousands. Takes more time to make than a coffee, but is more satisfying, and lasts longer.

Haredi children are kept segregated from the rest of society; over a quarter suffer from food insecurity, according to the Israel Democracy Institute. [Haredim] hold that this lifestyle is the fulfillment of God’s commandments.

Michael Luo, in the New Yorker, quotes from Mark Noll’s The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, thereby entering the timely … no, urgent question of why so many American evangelicals believe so much socially destructive bullshit. As Luo notes, “Recently, some pastors and other evangelical leaders have begun to express alarm at how unmoored some members of their congregations have become.”

This lack of mooring is no innocuous weirdness: “During the Trump era, it became clear that the wasting of the evangelical mind could even have dire consequences [for] American democracy.” As in, the terrorist assault on the Capitol was way evangelical Christian.

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Once again UD will point out that a cult is a cult is a cult: Luo’s description of the evangelicals is point by point a description of ultraorthodox Jewish cults – you need only switch a few words:

Fundamentalists also believed that they needed to separate themselves from an increasingly secular society. All of this had a dampening effect on Christian thinking about the world: there was little need to pay attention to history, global affairs, and science, because the present epoch would soon pass, ushering in Jesus’s return; saving souls was all that mattered. “Evangelicals pushed analysis away from the visible present to the invisible future,” Noll writes. “Under these influences, evangelicals almost totally replaced respect for creation with a contemplation of redemption.”

It’s utterly haredim (a contingent of ultraorthodox Jews was also, by the way, Cap-trashing): The vulnerability to any conspiratorial swill; the separation from any world outside themselves; the ignorance of history, global affairs, science; the hopped-up slopping about in end times. And of course the propensity toward violence.

Solution? Hey, “the cost of education for haredi boys is covered by the [Israeli] state, in spite of the fact that they study no core state curriculum after age 13. No math. No science. No English.” The system of ultraorthodox yeshivas here in the States is an exact replica, folks. The closed world of Jewish and Christian fundamentalism threatens democratic culture very directly, yes? But as long as the state takes no interest in the education of these lost souls (fear: they’re violent; cynicism: they’re powerful voting blocs) we remain at their mercy.

Go here for my previous work.

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MARCH 4: CAPITOL SHUT DOWN: QANON DRIFTS

FARTHER FROM THE AMERICAN MAINSTREAM

Speaking recently to a reporter about Donald Trump’s controversial pronouncements, the leader of The Proud Boys stated plainly: “Nobody here is crazy,” adding that the “most important thing in the world is the return of President Donald Trump. Without him there is no point to anything… Trump is coming,” he declared, without a trace of irony. “Trump will come on March 4 and we will make America great again.”

This reporter’s conversation with the Proud Boys leader meandered, at one point touching on murdered policemen at the Capitol. He nearly exploded with anger. “It wasn’t us,” he insisted. “It was Antifa. They did all of this to make us look bad.”

Sadly, Americans have become accustomed to scenes of violent Trumpist protests, including full-on abuse and assaults on law enforcement officers.

Corona has amplified everything and everything is elevated to crisis levels. Civil disobedience is not just a disturbance but becomes a “super-spreader event” where mass numbers congregate, accelerating contagion and leading to extreme health consequences.

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Original, unedited article here.

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As Gertrude Stein (edited) wrote, A cult is a cult is a cult.

The right. Note the last word in that sentence. Of course the ultraorthodox have long since alienated the political left in Israel; now, Haviv Rettig Gur observes, they’ve lost much of the right. And forget the center.

That leaves… that leaves nothing at all. That leaves the haredim where – in principle – they’ve always wanted to be. More or less where a lot of don’t mess with Texans wanted to be before the lights and the water went out. On their own. Snug as a bug in their own little rug. Dreaming of secession. Stop the world I want to get off.

And if checking out of civilization means that a Jew living in a first world country in the twenty-first century conducts his wretched existence at a seventeenth-century level… if it means that a contemporary, proto-cultic Texan enthusiastically endorses for her entire political leadership degenerates who detest government in any form and respond to state-wide crises by leaving the country…

If it means that, okay. Most people think basic solidarity with your fellow creatures improves life; but if you disagree, go for it. Ride ’em cowboy. Choose cult over culture.

Just don’t expect people to agree with you when you complain to the Knesset that

“It’s not our fault! You, who sent us to live in such crowded conditions, it’s your fault!”

It’s not Israel’s fault that, like all cults, the ultraorthodox cannot change. Cannot improve themselves or conform even a tad to any mainstream or reform any aspect of their practices. Cults become desiccated; they cannot grow – except, of course, in sheer numbers. They cannot thrive. Everyone knows that except cultists.

Over here, it’s not our fault Texans are literally as well as figuratively off the grid. We didn’t elect Ted Cruz. Just like the haredim, you make your bed, you lie in it.

Freedom ain’t free, huh?

The virus was a punishment from God, [one ultraorthodox man] said — retribution for the Jews’ failure to obey religious rules. The only cure was religious observance …

[The] sons [of an ultraorthodox woman very sick from covid but not hospitalized] said they had no regrets. The timing of her death was set by God…

The New York Times provides snapshots of, and commentary about, the haredi death cult.

Sara Yael Hirschhorn tries to help Israel come to grips with its death cult.

… With buses being torched on streets, violent protests against both law-enforcement and journalists, the inability to implement effective crowd-control over thousands (and the admission that such control was effectively impossible), the complete failure to keep institutions closed and public gatherings within specified regulatory limits, and the abdication of enforcement mechanisms, it seems clear that the State of Israel has lost control over the Haredi, or ultra-Orthodox Jewish, sector of its population. 

… The State of Israel [has] come to the conclusion that [it] simply can’t impose the conditions required by law on a resistant and sometimes violent community of over one million citizens. 

… Because there is no equal application of the law, lawbreakers win widespread impunity, and with no political leadership to ensure the primacy of the law, the national interest, and the safeguarding of life, Israel is well on its way to being a failed state... This breakdown of social and political relations should be understood as a civil war.

… The behavior of the Haredim, both by their willful disobedience of COVID restrictions and their now violent resistance, is effectively spreading terror amongst the Israeli population at large. And other Israelis – Jews and Arabs, religious and secular, men and women, are afraid.

… [This] is now a concerted, coordinated effort to embed and embolden Haredi autonomy from state control and wider social norms. Their leadership, if not all members of the community, understand that the subtext of the pandemic is about power.

… [T]he ultra-Orthodox are no longer acting out confusion, negligence, situational difficulties, or financial and spiritual strain.

… There is a deliberate intent and concerted effort to wield Judaism as a weapon and to use the Torah in service of a kind of Jewish terrorism – and no regard to who may get hurt. There should be no space for a death cult – complete with the glorification of the martyrs – in Israeli Jewish society.  

“They don’t teach [their children] science so they don’t understand how viruses work… They don’t understand math so they don’t understand what an exponential function is. When you double or triple each time the number of people each person infects, then that is causing a lot of them to die and a lot of them to be sick, and along with them the rest of us.”

There’s our January 6 insurrection, and there’s the haredi insurrection.

“It has begun to dawn on people that we have basically an insurrection here of individuals who refuse to obey Israeli law, from what we mandate in the schools to health care and all down the line, everything that we do.”

You could live a whole life inside a dream, inside a small, every-moment-busied world where everyone looks and acts alike and you never have to think for yourself or imagine a free identity for yourself. You could live in a cult.

Imagine it: An entire life dictated by other people, by unquestionable holy writ embodied in an authoritarian figure, by – above all – the imperative to breed new adherents. Your entire adulthood could be engrossed in the production and maintenance of ten or thirteen children.

It seems a strange brew to those of us outside the haredi dreamlife; but if, for instance, you attend an ultraorthodox school “where the only history taught [is] Jewish history” — wrap your head around that: the only history — your bizarre ignorance and withdrawal, your almost comical hyper-provinciality, doesn’t seem bizarre. It constitutes an ordered, heavily populated world. It is the only world you’ve ever known.

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Henry James put it best: “[T]he world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.” The most successful cults must labor every moment to tamp down the world as it is; they must illude and stupefy and above all keep their members very very busy every moment, so that these benighted people can, against all odds, forget, deny, and dispense with the world. Rabbis must keep alive among sect members the delusion that they are special, anointed, in exclusive possession of the truth. (“I grew up with a sense of the Haredim being special and different. …I discovered I’m not so special or different, that there are millions like me. That’s what suddenly made me say ‘That’s it, I’m leaving.'”) They must even include regular violence in that busy-making mix, as we see in constantly rioting haredim in Israel, and in the national shame here of ultraorthodox Jews having been part of the Capitol insurrection.

Anyone could have predicted that the current pandemic would shake a lot of haredim awake; its own authoritarian rabbis predicted it, which is why many of them defied – continue to defy – the lockdown and other covid-related laws of Israel. If you don’t keep your people very busy and very inside a dream, they are going to begin to perk up.

By definition, pandemics are global, unignorable, penetrative, realities; surviving them depends on a respect for and understanding of science — the great enemy of any cult. The despicable way in which panicky rabbis have endangered the lives of their followers by attempting to disallow simple health measures among them has certainly attracted the attention of the secular world; but it has also nudged awake the moral conscience of elements of their own sects.

“When I had a lot of time to think [under lockdown], the questions flooded up again,” [one ex-ultraorthodox woman said]. “Suddenly, the rabbis didn’t know what to do. They aren’t doctors.”

And now, as this New York Times piece notes, an already discernible drift away from ultraorthodoxy has become outright flight, so that Israel faces a strange and terrible social problem: The sudden emergence into its secular world of significant numbers of isolated, traumatized, and ignorant people. People who cannot do simple math, may speak only Yiddish, and have never used a computer.

[D]eserters often find themselves in a netherworld, estranged from their families, community and the only way of life they knew and, lacking a secular education, ill-equipped to deal with the outside world.

Most Haredi boys’ schools teach little or no secular subject matter like math, English or science.

Out of one netherworld, into another: An exquisitely horrible fate. But the Israeli state holds the blame: They let – continue to let – the haredi sect remain etherized. They have not been willing to awaken it, and now it’s nightmare time.

The Capitol-Trasher cult; the ultraorthodox cult; the integralist Catholic cult. Their leaders: Marjorie Taylor Greene; primitive authoritarian rabbis; Pater Edmund Waldstein. These groups are violent; they don’t recognize laws and institutions; they are irrational; they are primitive.

Everyone is so surprised that it turns out a significant minority of the Cap-Trash cult didn’t even vote in a presidential election whose result caused them to try to overthrow the government of the United States. They didn’t vote for Trump.

Why are you surprised? Cultists don’t vote. Or if they vote, it’s in robotic blocks, obeying commands from the cult leader.

Get with the program and perceive their world long enough to defend yourself.

They are trying to kill you and kill your world, and you totally need to defend yourself against them.

They’re not cute. Okay? Waldstein thinks burning non-cultists at the stake is a good idea. Greene wants to put a bullet through the head of Nancy Pelosi. Israeli haredim teach fifteen year old boys to burn down city buses and attack police. Why do you cling to the idea that because these people present themselves as god-fearing they deserve your respect?

Read Don DeLillo’s Mao II, his novel about cults, if you’d like to pause and understand the deep reasons people join cults. Or don’t bother learning the deep reasons. The imperative is to fight them with all you’ve got. With all we’ve got.

[S]ecular critics fail to acknowledge the changes for the better in the haredi world (albeit at a slow pace), with more of them working and joining the army, and with the birth rate per woman dropping from 12 to around eight.

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With covid putting these socially corrosive bitter-enders right there in everyone’s face (not that non-cultic Israelis haven’t been seeing haredim for what they are for years), it’s maybe possible that …

No. Things won’t improve. In Israel, things are much too far gone. As large numbers of haredim begin to drift away from their once-authoritarian rabbis, that country will find itself with scads of unemployable uncontrollable disaffected and often quite violent people out and about on its streets.

… feast your eyes. We’ve followed the appalling haredim on this blog forever. We have zero sympathy for those, like Nathan Lopes Cardozo, who are shocked and devastated and yada yada because this wonderful pious group of Jews turn out to be – to a significant degree – a twisted cult, indifferent to their own well-being and the well-being of everyone who shares a world with them. “It’s enough with using the term ‘small group,’ because this is nonsense. These are thousands of rioters who are uninterested in Israeli laws, they look to rabbis and to no one else.” A former police chief speaks. Haredi leadership, writes Israel Hayom, is “not condemning the attacks on the cops, and thus are full participants in the [violence.]”

“[M]y whole world is falling apart; [it is] as if Judaism has become a farce,” moans Cardozo in the face of a community dying in droves from a pandemic they think doesn’t exist because they think science doesn’t exist; a community torching buses and injuring police as a state they loathe (because they don’t believe in the existence of states) attempts to make them recognize, much less obey, its laws. Cardozo didn’t notice any of this in the last twenty years or so? Didn’t notice the way they treat women, fail to educate their children, fail to contribute to Israel’s defense, fail to seek employment of any kind?

Weepy demands that the haredim suddenly transform themselves right now into rational law-abiding contributors to civilization are pathetic. More than any religion with which I’m familiar, ultra-orthodoxy displays the death-wish Christopher Hitchens believed a feature of all religions. He was wrong that this characterized all religions. But the evidence is in; he could have been writing about large portions of the haredim when he wrote:

[L]urking under it at all times in all its forms is a desire for this life to come to an end. For this poor world to be over. The yearning, the secret death wish that’s in all of it: ‘let this be gone!’

Another writer on Hitchens notes him singling out as characteristic of some religions “a contempt for all things of this world… [which amounts to] an acceptable form of nihilism.”

Even more insidiously, demands that the government of Israel stop enabling this miserable lot are hopeless. It will get much, much worse.

The incident was one of a number of attacks on journalists in Israel and the United States, as they reported on the high virus transmission rates in ultra-Orthodox areas and the mass gatherings that may be helping fuel that rise.

Actually, after this latest one there was yet another one, reported only a few hours ago. Ultraorthodox men – and women – in Israel and the United States are beating up anyone they perceive to be a threat to their illegal gatherings.

Virtually all cults, as you know, eventually devolve into violence. (“LOCK HER UP LOCK HIM UP LOCK EVERYBODY UP”) Ultraorthodox Jewry is textbook cult.

Jacob Kornbluh, a journalist who knows the ultraorthodox community intimately and is recovering from having been beaten up by rioting members of that community (as we speak, hundreds of them have gathered threateningly around his house), says the most important thing of all. He took part in a Haaretz-sponsored zoom session this afternoon (UD watched it) about the (sometimes violent) refusal of ultraorthodox Jewish communities in New York and Israel to mask and distance and stay home, and when asked about the motivation of these people, he said… see the title of this post.

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A relative of Kornbluh’s asks the haredim, on his Twitter page, “Are you all out of your minds?”

But I don’t think it’s a madness of crowds thing. Like Kornbluh, I’m not sure there is a reason. You have to contort yourself until you’re way off the charts intellectually to get anywhere with this mystery.

Haredi Jews in Israel and to a lesser degree in the United States live in crowded conditions and have less access to information, not to mention fewer intellectual tools for fully understanding the pandemic by virtue of an education devoted almost exclusively to the study of religious texts. However, unlike any other impoverished, undereducated minority, the Haredim have consciously chosen this way of life by adhering to an ideology that looks upon the modern world as a threat. It undercuts the argument that they are blameless victims of a virus.

So UD would like to suggest that consciously choosing an ignorant, impoverished life was the last conscious thing the haredim did. The reason one can’t get anywhere with them is that they are in a group trance; their life is perennial twilight sleep. In her great short story, “Holiday,” Katherine Anne Porter’s narrator recalls visiting a hardworking German American farm family in Texas. She was struck by “the repose, the almost mystical inertia of their minds in the midst of [their] muscular life” – and if you change muscular to communal I think you get the daily existential reality of many haredim, people who intuitively understand the advantages of sleepwalking through life. Saul Bellow used to say that most of us sleepwalk through life; entire spiritual practices – Buddhism, say – are devoted to trying to shake us awake.

The haredim are out to prove that religion really is the opiate of the masses; and, like most people suddenly jolted out of a dream by some rough shove, they are truly not going to be pleasant with the wakened world, the threatening modern enlightened world.

Think of it like this: People coming out of anesthesia are sometimes combative: It happens enough to have a name: Emergence Delirium.

You know: Til human voices wake us, and we drown.

If human voices wake the haredim, they will drown; their rabbis know at least this much.

The threat of death and disease should be a powerful countervailing force, but Haredi leaders live in perpetual fear of their followers’ religious observance slacking off and even of them leaving the community. If the momentum of prayer, study, and mass gatherings is halted for even a few weeks, no one can predict what the consequences would be. One study estimates that 15 percent of young Israeli Haredim leave the community.

And after all death (by covid or any other means) is only, if you like, an intensification of trance – Shakespeare calls sleep “death’s second self,” and if UD is correct many haredim, by this reckoning, are already living quite morbid lives, lives quite close to death. The refusal of the world; the refusal of almost everything the world has to offer by way of pleasure, enlightenment, expressivity, discovery; the pale black-suited men and the virtually invisible women… 15% attrition? The rabbis are certainly right that under the unbearable pressures covid places on already unimaginably repressed lives (stuck in a crowded apartment with not much in the way of toys, and no secular books or television or internet) that number will grow. Hence their refusal to acknowledge the existence of a pandemic.

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Zzzzzz: “Borough Park Synagogue With COVID-Positive Rabbi Still Holding Large Indoor Prayer Services, Despite $15,000 Fine”

… starts with the headline: TO MY FELLOW NEW YORK JEWS…

Ultraorthodox Jews do not consider themselves your fellow Jews; they consider themselves the only Jews. Why aren’t they part of the painstakingly nondenominational New York Board of Rabbis, composed of every denomination except ultraorthodox? For that matter, why is the entity we’re calling haredi or ultraorthodox strikingly at odds with itself?

Let’s focus our eyes: We’re looking at splintered sects, often mutually contemptuous (they’re not real Jews; we’re the real Jews), and each led by, or in search of, its own authoritarian.

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What in the world, for instance, does the undisputed leader of the violent mob the other night, a hero of large parts of his community, Heshy Tischler, represent? In terms of any recognizable, organized, Judaism?

[He] threaten[s] Cuomo that “if you touch my boy Trump, I’m going to put you over my knee, Cuomo, and smack you around like a little girl when you cry”; call[s] Mayor Bill de Blasio an “idiot” (and sometimes “the fuhrer”); call[s] Chirlane McCray, de Blasio’s wife, a “retard woman,” as well as an unclear epithet that was variously heard as racist or merely insulting. Earlier this week, he ginned up a mob to corner an Orthodox reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, calling him an informer…

[I]n 2013, … a judge sentenced him to a year and a day in prison for immigration fraud. Tischler and 11 co-conspirators had been charged with extracting fees from thousands of undocumented immigrants to pretend to employ them at jobs that didn’t exist. (“I love Trump but I still don’t agree with him on immigration,” Tischler says now. “I believe this country should be open to everyone.”) “It is clear in the case of Mr. Tischler that there is a wide disconnect between his acts of religious charity and his views about the need to conform to the laws of civil society,” said the judge, Naomi Reice Buchwald, according to a sentencing document. “Not only did he commit the crimes charged as well as an earlier immigration fraud, but he has built up literally pages and pages of debts and judgments that are recited in the presentence report which can only be understood as reflecting a dismissive view of the obligations of a civil society and perhaps worse.”

… “The community is driven and guided by a combination of paranoia and a desire for full personal autonomy while excluding outsiders, outsider point of view, and that which makes them uncomfortable. Trump validates a lot of their attitudes,” said Menashe Shapiro, a political consultant. “Trump is the cocaine, Tischler is one of the dealers (as are super-right-wing radio, blogs and podcasts). The community are the addicts.”

When Andrew Cuomo identified the source of the violence on the streets of New York, he carefully identified it as ultraorthodox, not orthodox.

If I were an orthodox Jew, I’d be ultrapissed at the tendency of many writers on the issue to use the terms interchangeably.