Navigate to News section

Beard War Armistice

Hasidim and Hipsterim draw closer together through eyewear

by
Jenny Merkin
March 04, 2011

A major detente has taken place in the hipsters versus Hasids war … in eyewear. Leaders of the Vizhnitz community have asked their followers to shirk metal glasses and contact lenses for plastic frames, omnipresent on the faces of hipsters across the world. They clearly didn’t get the memo: plastic frames for glasses are cool.

Rabbi Israel Hager, the current head of the Vizhnitz Hasidic dynasty, ironically thinks that metal frames and contact lenses are just too sexy. Students wearing metal frames or lenses were asked to change up their style in a special sermon to yeshiva students during a period where Jews are supposed to be particularly stringent about abiding sexual-related prohibitions. Rabbi Hager warned his students that they should “beware of the dangers hiding on the street.”

Metro-sexual men and students of modern Lithuanian yeshivot were the only ones to don contact lens, YNet writes. A Vishnitz source explains to YNet that the ultimate goal of the Hasidic group is to be so far estranged from the modern world, that they don’t even know it exists, (like Hipsters who pretend they’ve never heard of Lady Gaga): “This is why our segregation is even applied to the type of eyeglasses.”