She loves the mad things they say, the mad things they do – in airplanes, on city streets, in schools, at archeological sites… She has been able to count on them for madcap anti-democratic action lo all these years.

Nor does she think the very bad outcome for them in the latest Israeli election will stop them from wrapping themselves in cellophane on jetliners or spitting at insufficiently orthodox eight year old girls and calling them whores, etc., etc. After all, God calls them to this behavior.

No, now that they’re cornered by a secular country that hates them, UD expects the ultras to go positively batshit with rage and paranoia.

But, as one observer points out, the election results have thrown a wrench in Bibi’s effort to shut down Israel’s Supreme Court (“Netanyahu does not have the votes to get himself a government that will … tinker with the Supreme Court“), which means that the extreme and endemic law-breaking of the ultras will be punished. And that will be fun to watch too.

Music to UD‘s ears: An ultraorthodox man demands that a woman sitting next to him on an El Al flight move because he refuses to sit next to women. Instead of letting him rant on and eventually force the woman to move, the flight director tells him what it says in UD‘s headline: Fuck off.

As long as Israel’s courts remain real courts (not guaranteed!), her heroine, Anat Hoffman, who with her organization brought the suit that forced gender equality on El Al, will keep winning virtually every case she brings, just the way she won this one.

Hoffman was on this particular plane; she witnessed the exchange.

I was proud to hear the flight director use the exact wording as promised by El Al in court. It was as if she were reading from the verdict itself, stating in no uncertain terms that the in-flight staff would not ask the woman to change her seat. If the staff had acted differently, and if they had, in any way, asked the female passenger to change her seat ‘for everyone’s benefit,’ I would have encouraged her to sue El Al. That passenger did not know it, but she had all of IRAC—a powerful ally—standing behind her.

Before the flight director finally issued an ultimatum to this man, other people on the plane began to pressure the woman to move, practically bringing her to tears. But, as UD‘s beloved Christopher Hitchens used to say, “Enough with clerical and religious bullying and intimidation.”

The repulsive ultraorthodox refusal to sit next to a woman on an airplane is met with repelled refusal in turn on many flights, UD is happy to report.

I mean, it’s an old story, and we’ve followed it for years on this blog. Crews now have clear instructions to tell sexist shits to sit down or leave the plane, and I’m guessing quite a few do leave, and they try their luck on another flight. Most I figure put up with sickening proximity to a female for the duration of their flight.

Some of course decide to fight, holding up departure, upsetting fellow travelers, etc. A group like this was recently thrown off a flight and they’re suing because religious freedom anti-semitism yada yada. The case will be thrown out, and the VERY slow learning process (of course it’s slow; ultraorthodox children get virtually no education) of these ridiculous people will move forward by an inch.

One long, highly produced, article after another appears there, highlighting the destructive primitivism, and the law-breaking, of Israel’s large, politically powerful, and often violent, ultraorthodox population. Today’s piece recounts the sickening synergy of a government that refuses to deal with the covid-burdened haredim, and the determination of many ultraorthodox to flout any form of compliance with health rules.

I mean, literally sickening. A recent El Al flight full of secular and religious Israelis returning from New York featured a group of ultraorthodox – maskless and gathered in groups in the aisles, both against all safety/security rules – boasting among themselves about having forged documents declaring that they were not covid positive. Of course some were indeed infected, so everyone on that flight has had to enter isolation, etc., etc.

[D]ozens of passengers were notified by the Health Ministry that 11 of those on board were found to be infected with the coronavirus and that they must enter quarantine.

A woman on the plane claimed that she heard ultra-Orthodox passengers boasting that they had used fake coronavirus tests to get on the flight, Hebrew media reported. Other passengers said that during the flight ultra-Orthodox passengers did not wear masks at times and that the cabin crew did little to encourage them to cover up.

… Tal, a passenger on the flight, told the Ynet website that as passengers were getting on the plane she noticed a group of young ultra-Orthodox men boasting that they had obtained faked tests “and saying that they hadn’t taken them at all.”

Tal said that she had approached staff about the matter and was told there was nothing they could do. She also said that although the cabin crew assured her they would require all passengers to wear masks during the flight, the ultra-Orthodox passengers moved around, stood in groups praying, and did not wear masks.

“I pleaded with the stewardesses to ask them to put masks on but I got the response ‘you are hysterical, you have nothing to fear,’” she said.

Another passenger, who declined to be identified, told Channel 12 News that the cabin crew did not intervene when he raised the issue of the masks.

“We approached the cabin staff, we asked that they make sure they wear masks, but they assured us that everything was okay and we are panicking for nothing,” said the passenger.

“They were playing with our lives,” he said. “The flight attendants were afraid to confront them and we paid a heavy price.”

You bet they were afraid. Angry, massed haredim are a nasty business on the ground; you really don’t want to rile them in the air.

Like most cults, ultraorthodox have cults within cults, breakaways that get up to even more violent stuff than the mainstream ultraorthodox.

In the 1980s, the “operations officer” of the extremist Jerusalem sect Eda Haredit, Yehuda Meshi-Zahav, led a gang that, among other violent acts, set fire to all Jerusalem bus stops that featured advertisements with images of women.

The descendants of such groups today torch buses, not just bus stops. They spit and shout “whore!” at primary school girls whose skirts fall an inch too short. Tinier and tinier sectarianism has made accommodation to covid measures weak at best:

[S]ome in the community now adhered to the [finally rabbi-mandated] regulations even more avidly than the secular population. But not every sect agreed. Followers of the radical “Jerusalem Faction” — who split from the main community years ago, arguing that [the larger group was] too soft in their attitude toward the secular state — and other extreme splinter groups refused to obey the new orders.

And maybe it’s because years of living with absurd cultists have made Israel itself absurd, but its not uncommon to hear even people in responsible positions say things like this:

“We are talking about a community with values, with a lot of love for mankind. But it does not think of itself as belonging to Israeli civil society.”

What a pretty cliche, love for mankind. But of course for this value-community Israeli civil society can curl up and die.

And, given their mindless defiance, these lovers of mankind are killing themselves too. They’ve already cut quite a swathe among their oldest, and they’re making impressive inroads among younger people.

Among the ultra-Orthodox, the percentage of those testing positive is more than double that of the rest of the population. The true impact of the pandemic is expressed in the death toll: One in every 100 ultra-Orthodox people over the age of 60 has died from the disease, three and a half times as many as in the general population.

Expect more NYT features, as the drama of state failure emanating from powerful, destructive cults plays on.

… on those airlines that haven’t yet figured out how to deal with the ultraorthodox.

[Melanie] Wolfson had paid an extra fee for an aisle seat on [an Easyjet] flight to London that took off October 10. An ultra-Orthodox man and his son were already sitting in the row when she arrived. As soon as she sat down, the son got out of his seat, climbed over to the row behind, presumably to avoid physical contact with her, [LOLOLOLOLOLOL] and proceeded to look for a male passenger who would be willing to change seats with her. A few minutes later, he returned, and the father asked Wolfson to switch seats with a man a few rows ahead. 

It gets better.

The father insisted that she move but made sure not to look her in the eyes while speaking to her…

Wolfson, enraged and humiliated, eventually felt compelled to move in order not to delay the flight, but flight attendants (who’ve obviously had more than enough of this shit) insisted she sue, and IRAC has gone ahead and arranged that for her. She’s only asking for a pittance; I’d have advised her to ask for a hundred thousand – not only for public humiliation and bullying, but for being forced to watch that guy climb over the seats. Can’t have been pretty, and she wasn’t warned in time to shade her eyes.

Although the airline is not based in Israel, IRAC will argue that it was subject to Israeli law while the plane was on the ground at Ben-Gurion International Airport, where the incident took place.

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.”