Chasidishkeit is not a way of life; it's a way of death. It manages to take everything exciting in life - food, sex, adventure, travel - and maul it, mangle it, distort it to a point where there's little left of their original allure. It has a particularly vicious stranglehold on sex.
In high schools...
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Portraying the inner workings of a religious community provides for ample camera material. Judgement was an episode on the BBC TV series Silent Witness back in 2008. A team of pathologists investigate a murder on our streets. Quite banal…
In June of 2003, I met with a writer for The Village Voice in a kosher café in Midtown Manhattan. Over a diet coke, with the writer’s recorder on the table between us, I spoke about my blog, my views on religion, and Chasidic society. I’d been hesitant, apprehensive about the inevitable publicity following...
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This was the question a friend put to me not long ago, after a lengthy discussion on the relative merits of homeopathy versus antibiotics and of germ-theory versus the sin-theory of disease.…
Opinion
What is really so terrible about the Chasidic lifestyle?
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I usually trudge along with Chasidic women to the J train every morning. Like them, I’m close to the JMZ lines. All of us walk mechanically, like robots, toward the loud, screeching subway train.
“Speaking of loud and screechy,” I…
At first all we did was hang out with our own. Fellow Chasidim on the fringe, men only. We didn’t know many women, and those we did know weren’t like us at all. With time we progressed. We met friends,…
As a teenager I read an article in Cosmo about how guys with stubble like the red they can bring to a woman’s cheeks during kissing: It’s a she’s-so-tender-I’m-so-tough type of thing. The first time I saw a Chasid, his beard looked vaguely terrifying. I’ve always hated beards, macho like my Dad’s, like Hulk...
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When I was a toddler, even before my mother started curling my little payess around her finger and brushing it with a bit of sugar-water, she taught me the English alphabet (after I had mastered the Alef Beis, of course). By the time I was enrolled in pre-school I knew that c-a-t spells cat....
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the Revolution. Nu? The one where the Goyim believe that all people were created by the monkeys.
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The Chametz Warrior
Flashbacks to the chametz battles of childhood. One man decides he’s a conscientious objector.
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