OK, Israel’s banker-in-chief didn’t put it quite that way in his keynote speech on the second day of the Herzliya conference, Israel’s premier national-security gathering. Fischer instead called the skyrocketing growth of these two distinct minorities “unsustainable.” He expressed particular concern about the ultra-Orthodox, who don’t work or serve in the army but receive a disproportionate share of government benefits.

While claiming to “very much appreciate our religion and our religious people,” he argued that having so large a group that does not work “cannot continue.” If it does, Fischer warned, “in the long run it’s going to be very difficult in our economy to supply our citizens with a standard of life that keeps improving.”

The numbers are all too well-known to Israelis, but less so abroad, where Israel is known largely as an economic miracle, given its small population and lack of oil and other natural resources. Indeed, most of the economists who spoke at a succession of panels yesterday highlighted aspects of Israel’s impressive economic performance, particularly in light of the global recession. The Jewish state enjoyed a growth rate of 4.8 percent in 2011, with low inflation (2.2 percent).

But Fischer stressed, and others agreed, that the country’s growth—not to mention its social cohesion—would be seriously jeopardized unless the country finds a way to address the challenge posed by these two burgeoning sectors of society.

The numbers he and others cited are truly staggering. In 1980, non-Orthodox Jews constituted 80 percent of the population. Since then, that population had dropped by some 12 percent. By contrast, in 1980 ultra-Orthodox Jews constituted 4 percent of the population; today they account for over 7 percent. While Israeli Arabs made up 15 percent of Israel’s population in 1980, they are over 20 percent today. Only 40 percent of ultra-Orthodox men are employed, while among Arab Israelis, less than a quarter of the women work. Such non-participation rates in the Israeli economy are stunning considering that unemployment in Israel hovers around 5 percent.

The growth of such large ultra-Orthodox and Arab families living off government pensions and other benefits has triggered a sharp rise in poverty in Israel, a situation that Prof. Alex Mintz, the dean of the Lauder School of Government at the Herzliya Interdisciplinary Center, called “intolerable” in his talk. The Israeli government, he said, had to declare a “war on poverty” before the gap between have and have-not Israelis grew even more dramatic.

Fischer and other economists stressed that poverty rates are tied to the growing number of unemployed ultra-Orthodox and Arab-Israelis: The larger the number of children a family has, the more likely it is that the children will be poor. In families where two parents were working, he said, there is little poverty. In families where no one works, poverty rates stand at 80 percent.

How is Israel’s middle class faring? Not great, it turns out.

A recent study by the Finance Ministry published by Haaretz found that wage mobility has been declining for decades and fell particularly sharply over the past 10 years. The study’s authors, Galit Ben Naim and Alex Belinsky, found that Israel had relatively little socioeconomic mobility compared to other Western countries. Tracking salary data for over a million Israelis between 2003 and 2009, the study showed that 65 percent of the people in the bottom 10 percent on average in a given year were likely to remain there in the following year. It also found that overall mobility decreased during the 6-year period they studied. While 49 percent of those in the lowest economic rung remained there a year later in 2004, 56 percent of those in that same category in 2008 remained there in 2009.

Dahlia Moore, dean of the department of behavioral science at the College of Management Academic Studies in Rishon LeZion, called this the “sticky floor.” But there’s apparently a sticky ceiling in Israel as well: Some 86 percent of the top 10 percent of earners were likely to stay there the next year. The lack of downward mobility was even higher for the top 1 percent and the top 0.1 percent. These lack of mobility rates are far higher than those of the United States and the European Union.

Such inequalities helped trigger the middle-class protests last summer in Tel Aviv and around the country—Israel’s own version of “Occupy Wall Street.” While the demonstrators did not openly blame the ultra-Orthodox for the growing financial pressures and rising housing prices they face, resentment about what secular Israelis consider a “leech” class, as one young student at the conference called them, runs deep.

The solution to such growing poverty and income inequality depends on “changes in behavior,” Fischer told the conference. Other experts spelled out what he implied: having smaller families, joining the army, and getting jobs. Some 6,000 ultra-Orthodox Israelis are now in college, Fischer said, a good indication that they might work after graduating. He added that there are already signs that reduced government welfare payments were having a positive impact on Arab-Israeli families: More Arab men are now starting their own businesses or seeking work.

Fischer’s tough warning is consistent with his blunt style. Greatly admired within the business community for his creative, but cautious, stewardship of the central bank, he is credited with having helped Israel avoid the financial bubbles that have swamped Europe in recent years by keeping credit tight and buying up billions of dollars in foreign currency reserves to ensure that, in a time of financial stress, Israel would not run short of hard currency reserves. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government has run a responsible fiscal policy, he has said. Such policies may serve Israel well in an unpredictable region where political earthquakes can easily trigger economic and financial upheavals.

***

Jan. 31, 2012: The hottest ticket in town right now is the revival of Cabaret, the iconic musical set in 1931 Berlin about a star-crossed romance between Sally Bowles, a young nightclub singer at the Kit Kat Klub, and a naïve young American writer named Cliff Bradshaw. While the play was staged in Israel over 20 years ago, this is the first original Israeli production of the Broadway classic. Based on euphoric reviews and word-of-mouth in a country that hates the sound of silence, the run at Tel Aviv’s Cameri Theatre is sold out for the next three months.

Continue reading: A sense of foreboding

Naama Margolese, a shy blonde girl with blue eyes and glasses, became a household name in late December when Channel 2 TV aired a report about the ultra-Orthodox men who regularly taunted her on her walk to school.

In the report, Naama whimpered, “Mom, I’m scared,” as she clutched her mother’s hand during the 300-yard walk from their home to school. In footage, Naama wears skirts to her ankles and covers her shoulders like the rest of the students at her Orthodox school, called Orot, for girls aged 6 to 12. But ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, men call Naama and her friends whores and spit on them. The school’s ultra-Orthodox neighbors told the TV reporters the Orot girls deserved to be sworn at and attacked for violating the Torah’s command to cover up.

Naama’s story is the latest incident of ultra-Orthodox harassment of women to be reported in recent weeks. Days before Channel 2 aired their report, Tanya Rosenblit, a 28-year-old woman from Ashdod, publicized the half-hour standoff that ensued when she refused an ultra-Orthodox man’s demand to move to the back of a public bus from Ashdod to Jerusalem. In September, nine religious male soldiers refused to stay in an auditorium where women were singing during an official military ceremony. In response, the army expelled four of them from their prestigious officers’ course.

Ultra-Orthodox demands on women in the public sphere are not new: In Jerusalem’s insular neighborhood of Mea Shearim, for example, signs imploring female visitors to dress modestly have plastered the stone walls for decades. But in recent years, the calls have radiated out of that Jerusalem shtetl to larger Orthodox sections of Jerusalem and beyond. Health clinics and post offices have begun to hold separate hours for men and women. Advertising agencies have stopped featuring women on billboards in Jerusalem—even after they covered up their models with long sleeves—because fundamentalist Jews would vandalize the signs.

In the past, these stories garnered only minor news coverage. But Naama’s story sparked a public uproar because she is so young, because police seemed to be doing nothing, and because all the lead characters are religious. Late last month, at a conference for Israeli ambassadors in Jerusalem, President Shimon Peres called on Israelis to “save the majority from the talons of the minority.” He added: “We are fighting for the soul of the people and for the substance of the state.”

***

Founded in 1950 by Jewish immigrants from Bulgaria, Romania, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco, Beit Shemesh’s old city is full of the stucco-sided public-housing blocks typical of ’50s Israeli construction. It was once a mostly traditional or Orthodox town, but in the last two decades, more stringent ultra-Orthodox newcomers have moved in from Jerusalem.

These new ultra-Orthodox residents tended to congregate in their own neighborhoods. They postered public walls with pashkevilim, large block-print Hebrew papers that are vital media for people who shun mainstream Israeli TV, radio, and print news. On a sidewalk near a synagogue, they put up signs asking women to cross to the other side of the street and not to stop to chat because doing so would attract undue attention from the pious. On buses that run through their neighborhoods, the ultra-Orthodox have managed to impose an unofficial rule that women must sit in the back. Beit Shemesh is also home to a new, tiny sect of ultra-conservative women who cover up in the style of the most observant Muslim women, from head to toe.

Continue reading: ‘We don’t want to live here like in Tehran.’

Had you asked us six years ago where we dreamed of raising a family, we’d have answered “Israel” without hesitation. But recently we’ve begun to doubt whether we should raise her in the Jewish state.

It’s not the escalating situation with Iran that gives us pause, or the fact that our daughter will one day serve in the army: We decided to live in Israel with full knowledge of the security threats it faces. The reason we are concerned about raising a daughter here is that the government is standing by as war is waged against girls and women.

Since the founding of Israel in 1948, the Orthodox have had the power to decide who is a Jew and how a Jew can live and die by controlling the mechanisms of marriage, divorce, and burial. What this means practically is that the government body that oversees all major life-cycle events—as well as regulating food production—is a religious institution, the Chief Rabbinate of Israel.

Orthodox religious law is the law of the land: Only a man can marry a woman, only a man can grant a divorce. And because of Orthodoxy’s systemic exclusion of women from positions of power—its refusal to allow women to be rabbis, or to recognize female Reform and Conservative rabbis—the interests of women have been disregarded.

The Orthodoxy of the rabbinate has caused friction in Israel before, but the well-publicized events of recent weeks have brought tensions to a boil. Though some had heard of the gender-segregated public buses now common in cities like Beit Shemesh, the other incidents of discrimination against women and girls came as shock: a 28-year-old woman asked to ride in the back of a public bus, an 8-year-old child called a “whore” and spat on by grown men, and a gynecological convention that barred women speakers. These incidents, carried out by ultra-Orthodox Israelis and tolerated by the ultra-Orthodox leadership, provided the majority of Israelis with clear evidence that the rabbinate’s power has helped create a rotten attitude toward women in major segments of Israeli society.

If this sort of discriminatory behavior were isolated in a few neighborhoods of the country, it would be a shame, but we would hesitate to tell others how to live their lives. Increasingly, though, it’s not isolated, and the discrimination and marginalization of women are tacitly permitted by the state. If we allow this trend to continue, Israel will cease to exist as a strong and vibrant democracy.

***

Due to Israel’s coalition-based government system, where coalition partners are given control over ministries in return for voting as a bloc, governments from David Ben-Gurion’s to Benjamin Netanyahu’s have preferred to add an ultra-Orthodox, non-Zionist party to their coalition rather than create a coalition without parties such as United Torah Judaism. Such a non-ultra-Orthodox coalition could, in one vote, break the rabbinate’s power. But the major parties are stuck in a kind of prisoner’s dilemma: Each party fears that if it votes against Orthodox control, while the other does not, the Orthodox would ally with the opposition to crush it. So, the status quo persists.

Young Maccabee girls in their camp in Zikhron Ya’akov, 1939. (Library of Congress)

In this context, our daughter will not be considered Jewish by the state. That’s because Erin’s mother had Conservative Jewish conversion in Canada before Erin was born, and because we decided it was insulting to ask Erin, who lived her whole life as a Jew, to “convert” just because a state-employed rabbi decided she is not Jewish enough.

We could not be married in Israel because of Erin’s official lack of Jewishness, despite the fact that we are observant Jews who keep Shabbat and a kosher home. (Our marriage certificate is from the state of Illinois.) Likewise, our daughter could in the future be legally barred from marrying the person she loves in Israel. If the laws continue as they are, the two of us will not be able to be buried in the same state-run cemetery, and our daughter would be excluded from burial in a Jewish cemetery when her life is spent. She’ll be a citizen, just as we are, and she’ll serve in the army, just as Ariel did. But if the status quo persists, she will go from cradle to grave knowing that in the eyes of the government of the state of Israel she is not a Jew.

For us, nothing is more painful. Our grandparents devoted their lives to supporting the state and its establishment, and we’ve devoted ours to building Israeli organizations that have connected thousands to Israel. But all of that is irrelevant in the eyes of the bearded men who have power over critical aspects of the lives of this country’s 6 million Jews.

This is not what the pioneers who founded this state worked toward, and it isn’t what generations of Diaspora Jews fought for.

***

It is time that the world Jewish community knew about this systemic bias in Israel—and time for Diaspora Jewry to act. It is amazing to think that while American Jews raise money for the state, lobby their political representatives to support Israel, and send their children on Birthright, the rabbinate denies the Jewishness of many of these Diaspora Jews.

This schism between who is a Jew in the Diaspora and who is considered a Jew by the state of Israel will only grow, considering that more than a quarter of Jewish students entering the first grade in Israel this year are ultra-Orthodox, as Dan Ben-David, director of the Taub Center in Jerusalem, has noted. This means that if we want Israel to be a Jewish state for all the Jewish people, as well as a democratic state that respects the individual rights of its citizens, we have a small window to break the Orthodox monopoly on the Israel’s core institutions.

Next year’s Israeli election is the perfect opportunity for the American Jewish community—and the rest of Diaspora Jewry—to act. Diaspora leaders need to demand from the leadership of the Israeli political parties that they make liberalization of the rabbinate a priority. It’s no secret that Israel’s political leaders and Israeli government programs depend on financial and political support from Diaspora Jews.

The Jewish Federations of North America, the Jewish Agency, the United Jewish Appeal, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the Jewish National Fund, and so on, should give the Israeli government a 90-day window to enact legislation to protect the rights of women and the non-Orthodox. Jerry Silverman, Sheldon Adelson, Howard Kohr, Ron Lauder, and other leaders of powerful Diaspora Jewish groups: Enough with the back-room diplomacy. It is time for Jewish leaders, especially in the United States, to make it clear that no money or lobbying support will flow to the government of Israel, or government-sponsored programs, if the state’s official institutions discriminate against non-Orthodox Jews. No pluralism and no recognition of women’s rights equals no cash and no lobbying support.

Our grandparents, parents, and peers did not work so hard or sacrifice so much to be judged unfit by official representatives of the government of Israel because of the crime of being Modern Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform. Our women do not deserve to sit in the back of buses, or to be spat on by those who cover themselves in black from head to toe. We need to use the means at our disposal to pressure the state to protect the future of the Jewish people. Our daughters demand it.

CORRECTION, January 9: This article originally stated that close to 50 percent of Jewish students entering first grade in Israel this year are ultra-Orthodox. In fact, the number is 27 percent. The error has been corrected.

• Speaking of: the Israelis and the Palestinians meet today in Amman. Keep expectations very low. More later. [NYT]

• Amid the latest tensions in Israel, ultra-Orthodox protesters marched in striped prison uniforms and yellow stars. And would you believe some folks found this tasteless? [NYT]

• Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which won a plurality of votes in two rounds of parliamentary voting and is the most popular of the Islamic parties that won majorities, said it will not recognize Israel and will try to cancel the peace treaty. [JPost]

• Hamas and Turkey grew closer as the head of Hamas’ Gaza government visited Istanbul. [NYT]

• Ilan Grapel, the Israeli-American law student, writes for the first time about his detention this summer in Egypt, and defends his trip. [WP]

This film is not covering entirely new turf. In 2001, Sandi Dubowski’s Trembling Before G-d also profiled gay Orthodox men and women. But DevOUT’s subjects are are settling down, raising families, and forcing their communities to come to terms with their existence, with varying degrees of success.

Neille, from South Africa, and Gulzar, from Pakistan, made the film while master’s students at the Columbia University School of Journalism. Neille spoke to Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry from her home in Johannesburg, about the movie, the difficulties their subjects have faced, and how these two non-Jewish, straight women made such a powerful film on such a sensitive topic. [Running time: 18:13.]

It’s difficult to say exactly why I went. While I’m proud of the lineage, it’s mostly a harmless point of family trivia. I find even my immediate family’s mainstream brand of Orthodoxy foreign to me, never mind my extended family’s extreme observance. But my mother, who is always (but lovingly) on my religious case, has recently begun to invoke the Makove Rav in remarking upon my relative non-observance. (She went to the yahrzeit the year before I did and returned inspired.) I am, she tells me, letting him down. These exhortations are hard to take seriously. Who is this rabbi, and why should I care? Does it matter that I’m his descendant? When my mother offered to pay for a trip to Hungary, I agreed to go, if only to understand what I’m supposed to feel guilty about. This would be spiritually invested voyeurism.

Mako is in Hungary’s southeast corner, close to the Romanian border. It’s known, if at all, for its onions—some of the most arable land in the country is here—and as the birthplace of Joseph Pulitzer. Size-wise, it’s somewhere between a shtetl and a village: small enough that Reb Mechel, my cousin and the closest thing the yahrzeit weekend had to a host, didn’t feel the need to give directions or an address beyond “Mako.” I arrived on a Friday from Budapest, via a train and two buses, and stood clueless in the town square until I spotted a Hasid, whom I followed.

Only a block away, just past the refurbished synagogue, was an off-white, no-nonsense-looking building. Hasidim were scattered about, walking in little circles, talking on cell phones and smoking in the small parking lot, where a banner overhead referred to my forebear, in Yiddish, as “a great tzaddik … the miracle-worker of his generation.” This building was where everybody stayed—a Hasidic hostel. About 10 years ago, Reb Mechel had bought and thoroughly renovated a former egg factory so it could comfortably accommodate those making the annual pilgrimage to Mako. The building included two industrial kosher kitchens; a few dozen guestrooms, each with a bathroom offering a negel vasser kit (for ritual washing); a large main dining room, as well as a smaller women’s one; and at least one mikveh.

The men who arrived for the weekend (and a handful of their accompanying wives) were from all over—Austria, Israel, England, Belgium, New York, Los Angeles, Toronto—so the lingua franca was Yiddish. For me that meant halting conversation; the little Yiddish I know was learned in a college classroom, from a non-Jew. My pronunciation is hopeless. Many of the other attendees were related to me, though I couldn’t keep straight exactly how, and everybody I met wanted to know what I was doing there. I’d quickly mention my connection to the Makove Rav—aside from Reb Mechel, who’s a generation closer and has no mothers in the way of his connection to him, I had the most direct line, which garnered me instant credibility, even celebrity. People called me “der zun!” or “der ainekel!” (the son! or the grandson!) and when they did I suddenly felt very underdressed. At least I’d had the foresight to bring a white shirt.

***

The yahrzeit proper, when we were to visit the gravesite, was on Sunday, so Shabbat should have been a gentle spiritual warm-up.

Except that the current and very much living Makove Rav was also in Mako. Background, quickly: When my great-great-grandfather died in 1943, the vacant rebbe position went to his son-in-law, because his son could not travel from Nitra, in modern-day Slovakia, to Mako to take up the post. The current rebbe is that son-in-law’s son—my first cousin twice-removed, if I calculate correctly—and he lives in Kiryat Ata, Israel, near Haifa, and has hundreds of followers in his congregation there. This rebbe set the tone for the entire weekend. Our meals, in particular, were rebbe-dictated. We sang when he sang, we ate when he ate (and took a piece of his leftovers), and we hushed (or shushed others) when he held forth. He spoke in a low, mumbly Yiddish; the second his mouth opened, he was surrounded by a huddled mass, heads angled and ears cocked, competing to hear him.

Continue reading: The rebbe only micronaps

Faith unites us, knowledge gives us freedom. We shall therefore prevent any theocratic tendencies from coming to the fore on the part of our priesthood. We shall keep our priests within the confines of their temples in the same way as we shall keep our professional army within the confines of their barracks.

Suffice it to say, it didn’t quite work out that way, not even from the start. In his new Nextbook Press book, Ben-Gurion: A Political Life, co-written with the veteran Israeli journalist David Landau, Peres describes the deal that Ben-Gurion made with ultra-Orthodox rabbi-politicians at the time of Israel’s founding: kashrut in all public institutions, Shabbat as the day of rest, rabbinic control of marriage and divorce, and the exemption of full-time yeshiva students, who at the time numbered only in the hundreds, from army service. This would all seem a violation of Herzl’s vision, but Peres defends Ben-Gurion’s consensus-building move as wise and pragmatic, “because the number of people in Israel who defined themselves as people of faith was large.” In a dialogue between the co-authors, the president of Israel declares:

Israel is a secular state. The Orthodox have bargaining power, so everything has to be done by compromise. But Israel is not under religious control: It’s not a halachic country, it’s not a theocracy. Ben-Gurion opposed religious coercion and opposed anti-religious coercion.

True, Israel is not a theocracy the way, say, Iran is one. But stop any bareheaded Jew on a Tel Aviv beach and ask them if there’s religious coercion in their country, and the knee-jerk response will be yes. For many Israelis, “religious coercion” doesn’t mean forced synagogue attendance, but the evasion of military duty by tens of thousands of young ultra-Orthodox men; the harassment of Reform rabbis and citizens who drive on Shabbat; the overflowing of public money to yeshivas and to ultra-Orthodox families that don’t pay taxes; the premature ending of Daylight Savings Time before the High Holidays to facilitate penitential ritual; and the hurling of dirty diapers at women wearing prayer shawls at the Western Wall, a spiritual magnet for all Jews that has been turned, with the complicity of governmental authorities, into an ultra-Orthodox synagogue. As for “theocratic tendencies,” we have the hegemony of the ultra-Orthodox-dominated, state-funded Chief Rabbinate over marriage, divorce, and conversion, protected by the ultra-Orthodox parliamentarians in the Knesset.

How did all this come about? The reasons are over-determined, as the Freudians say. Landau presses Peres, who as a young man was Ben-Gurion’s emissary to the ultra-Orthodox on the conscription issue, on whether they had perhaps miscalculated the staying power of Orthodoxy in Israel. “He wasn’t thinking about what was going to happen later,” says Peres of his mentor. “Anyway, to be completely frank, in negotiating with the venerable rabbis, I felt like I was sitting with my grandfather.” In The Imaginary Voyage, Peres puts it even more frankly: “Whenever I had to make a decision touching upon the relationship between religion and state,” he tells Herzl, “I asked myself whether grandfather would agree with what I’d done.”

As a child in White Russia, Peres studied Torah at the knee of his pious grandfather, who years later, we learn in this new book, was murdered by the Nazi Einsatzgruppen—burned alive in his synagogue. After the Holocaust, out of guilt and nostalgia, along with a sense of moral obligation, Ben-Gurion and his secular comrades understandably felt a need to indulge the surviving practitioners of the separatist Judaism that kept Diaspora Jews afloat for centuries. Besides, they probably figured that ultra-Orthodoxy, in a sovereign, modern state, would soon wither away. How wrong they were.

***

To this day, there are no civil marriages in Israel. A Conservative rabbi, steeped in Maimonides, cannot perform a legally binding wedding in the Jewish state. Yet each year, thousands of Israelis hop over to Cyprus for civil marriages recognized as valid by Israel’s Interior Ministry. Some time back, as a publicity stunt, a couple married by a Reform rabbi in Israel had their civil ceremony in Las Vegas, where they were wed by an Elvis impersonator.

Every so often, there’s a movement by Secularists in the Knesset to remedy this absurd situation, but it always fails. Coalitions are fragile, and ultra-Orthodox parties, supported by legions of faithful voters, are able to thwart such maneuvers. “Israel is the only democracy in the world where Jews don’t have freedom of religion,” groused Nitzan Horowitz, a Knesset member from the Meretz party, after a civil-marriage bill he sponsored was shot down in July.

Israeli disregard for Jewish religious pluralism creates an unpleasant wedge between this country and American Jewry. But the sad truth is that most Israelis don’t much care. As a secular sabra businessman once explained to me: “For me, a Rabbanut wedding is like getting a driver’s license. In both cases, you play by the rules.” It has long been remarked that American Jews are Protestant Jews, and Israeli Jews are Catholic Jews. As in Italy, you’re a bad Catholic or a good Catholic, but still a Catholic. In other words—and despite the laudable blossoming, in some communities, of Israeli renewal-style Judaism—the shul the average Israeli doesn’t go to is still Orthodox.

In reality, of course, Israeli society is not truly polarized between dati and hiloni, “religious” and “secular.” You can be religious without being Orthodox, though in Israel this mainly means mesorati, or traditional. This large category is characteristic of Jews from Arab lands, who observe many rituals and go regularly to synagogue, but are not strict Sabbath observers. This does not, however, make them pluralists. I’ve lectured many times to IDF officers—a mixed audience of religious-nationalist, mesorati, and secular Jews—about liberal Judaism in Israel. When I am challenged to explain where one “gets the right” to pick and choose what religious laws to observe, I say that the Reformim behave much like mesorati Jews, to which the rejoinder will often be: You’re wrong, because the Moroccan Jew who drives to Teddy Stadium to watch soccer on Shabbat knows he is sinning. You don’t.

***

Behold a central irony of Israeli Judaism: Ultra-Orthodox Israelis may be widely resented as draft-dodgers who sponge their living from hard-working, tax-paying citizens. But they are, at the same time, widely perceived as custodians of the flame.

For its part, the Rabbinate unabashedly prefers the Tel Aviv metrosexual who goes windsurfing on Yom Kippur and eats pork in a pita on Pesach to a devoted Reform Jew who teaches her daughter to read from the Torah. The former, in rabbinic parlance, is a tinok shenishba, equivalent to a child abducted by heathens or Cossacks who cannot be blamed for his ignorance, and is so far gone as to be a prime candidate for hazara beteshuva, the full embrace of Orthodoxy. The Reform Jew, by contrast, is a defiant apostate, a scofflaw who dares suggest an alternative to old-time religion. When first I moved to Israel, I found in my mailbox on the eve of Rosh Hashanah a flyer sternly warning Jews not to be tempted to hear the blowing of the shofar at a Reform congregation, for these folks are a neta zar, a “foreign sapling in our holy land.”

Such a blinkered worldview encourages a cynical symbiosis, providing the secular Israeli with ample reason to remain distant from Judaism. Thank you, he or she says to the Rabbinate, for affirming your authority and authenticity. You have reminded me that Judaism is rigid, coercive, and sexist, which is why I want no part of it. Perhaps the sorriest legacy of Ben-Gurion’s political deal is widespread Israeli alienation from the beauty and wonder of Jewish tradition.

A story is told—in several versions, though not by Peres and Landau—of a meeting in 1952 between Ben-Gurion and Rabbi Avraham Karelitz, a Russian-born ultra-Orthodox leader known as the Chazon Ish. The rabbi seeks to persuade the prime minister of the need to defer to Torah scholars by citing a passage from the Babylonian Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin: “If two camels met each other while on the ascent to Beth-Horon … How then should they act? If one is laden and the other unladen, the latter should give way to the former.”

Was there a part of Ben-Gurion, champion of the Bible and Hebrew culture, that believed that his own camel lacked Jewish gravitas? He famously said, as quoted again by Peres, “that in Israel, in order to be a realist, you must believe in miracles.” In exempting the yeshiva students from the draft, did he also believe that their lives of study and prayer would bring about the protection of the Almighty? Or by giving a green light to “theocratic tendencies,” did he have another agenda entirely?

The Israeli religious philosopher and scientist Yeshayahu Leibowitz, a sternly Orthodox Jew, wrote in 1977 that Ben-Gurion had told him in the 1950s: “I will never agree to the separation of religion from the State. I want the State to hold religion in the palm of its hand.” For Leibowitz, this meant that “the status of Jewish religion in the state of Israel is that of a kept mistress of the secular government,” which he deemed “contemptible.” But in the ongoing Israeli soap opera, it often seems like the mistress is running the show.

Such dire comparisons are not unusual for Hasidim. As in other fundamentalist communities, everything is understood to be powerfully meaningful within a single, comprehensive worldview. Renting apartments to artistn, like watching television or buying a “trayf” cellphone—that is, one that takes pictures or accesses the web, thereby offending Hasidic standards of modest conduct—has the potential to undermine the sacred mission of an entire Hasidic community and, therefore, of the Jewish people as a whole.

Some Hasidim also understand Sept. 11 as an occasion for miracles. In 2002, a Skvirer Hasid published a Yiddish book on the attacks, recounting cases of people who, thanks to supernal intervention, missed their plane or left late for work and so escaped the destruction. The book’s title, Himl Signaln, or “heavenly signals” in English, is telling in its ambivalence. Were these attacks terrorist messages that came from the sky—one possible meaning of himl—or were they divinely ordained signs from on high?

Here, the two possibilities are one and the same, the former guided by the latter. Therefore, to cite but one example from the book, a devout, God-fearing Jew who worked in the twin towers survived the attack on Sept. 11 because he had a doctor’s appointment that morning—not by happenstance but by a miraculous intervention that affirmed his piety.

Many Americans found their faith—in religion, in government, in humankind—shaken, or at the very least troubled, by the events of Sept. 11. American Jews were alarmed at anti-Semitic responses to the attacks, including malicious rumors that Jews “knew” to stay away from the World Trade Center on that fateful day. The Hasidic response to Sept. 11 appears to be quite different: The attacks did not cause them to question their faith in God, nor did defamatory conspiracy theories disturb their embrace of Jewish chosenness. Sept. 11 may have altered the convictions of many people, in some cases radically. But for others, including these Hasidim, it reinforced strongly held beliefs, becoming for them a case study in divine authority and a metaphor for urban destruction.

The remembrance of Sept. 11 in this one Jewish community offers an object lesson in both the power and the limits of catastrophe as a shared experience. The terrorist attacks galvanized people around the world, riveted by the horrifying images that swiftly circulated through the mass media. The global outpouring of sympathy for New Yorkers was extraordinary. But it did not take long for Sept. 11 to become a divisive subject, whether locally, nationally, or worldwide, as debates proliferated: what its causes were, who was at fault, how it should be responded to, how it should be remembered.

The 10th anniversary of the attacks may well seem an appropriate time for Americans to come together as a nation, especially in a period that is so politically riven. At the same time, it is worth remembering that even events of the enormity of Sept. 11 do not change everything, though at first it may seem as though they do. Rather, they erupt in the midst of busy lives, each going about its busy-ness with a different sense of purpose. Catastrophes evoke an intense desire to restore life to its former business, to reassert its sense of purpose. Those whose lives rest on firm foundations of faith, like these Hasidim, are most likely to reaffirm their convictions. Those who are by nature skeptical find that they have that much more to question.

Born in Vienna in 1924, Halperin moved with his family to Palestine in the wake of fear produced by the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933. They settled in the religious neighborhood of Bnai Brak, where Halperin’s father would eventually found the ultra-Orthodox Zikhron Meir quarter. Halperin studied in a local yeshiva, but after a few years, he showed interest in more than the Gemara. Attracted by the new physical culture of the Yishuv, Halperin began a regimen of exercise and weightlifting. His parents were furious about it, and his yeshiva buddies thought it was strange. But Halperin approached his rabbi, Avrom Yeshaye Karelitz (better known as the Chazon Ish), the don of the Litvish ultra-Orthodox sect, for approval. Karelitz was known for having engaged in some secular studies of his own, notably the natural sciences, and he told Halperin to carry on pumping iron.

Halperin soon became obsessed with body building, and in 1948, he left Palestine for the United States to study physical culture. Upon his return to what was then Israel, he opened a gym called “Heroes of Israel.” This led to a complaint in the newspaper Davar, which asked that if Halperin was such a “Hero of Israel,” why had he spent the War of Independence in America? In a letter to the editor, Halperin responded that he was, in fact, ready to fight as war broke out in 1948, but had received special permission from the Israeli army to travel to the United States. In the wake of these accusations, he quickly changed the name of his gym to “The Samson Institute.”

Questions of heroism notwithstanding, Halperin organized the first Mr. Israel contest in 1950, and one reporter called the show “a symphony of muscles.” Halperin won the contest, but instead of focusing on the issue that the winner of the event was also its organizer, the Israeli press made much hay from the fact that the winner was a yeshiva-bokher from Bnai Brak. In the eyes of the press, this was proof positive that the new state was creating supermen out of nebbishy, peyes-wearing Clark Kents.

In the early 1950s, apparently at the behest of an American wrestling promoter who was visiting Israel, Halperin entered the professional wrestling world and began to travel to Europe and the United States to perform. He never lost touch with his religious roots. After returning triumphant from a tour in the United States in 1955, Halperin went straight to shul in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim, where, as he walked down the street carrying his tallis bag, hundreds of ultra-Orthodox kids followed him joyfully shouting, “It’s Samson the Second!”

But Halperin’s strength wasn’t only a feature of his body. The first inkling of a giant entrepreneurial spirit came to light when he turned his gym into the first chain of health clubs in Israel. He called the men’s version “The Samson Institute” and the women’s “The Venus Salon.” He also briefly served as a personal trainer to the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, traveling back and forth from Eilat to Adis Ababa.

In the United States, Halperin was part of a stable of popular Jewish wrestlers promoted by the Warsaw-born wrestling impresario Jack Pfefer. Among them were Blimp Levy, Abie “The Jewish Tarzan” Coleman, Max Krauser, Sammy Stein, and Herby Freeman, among other Yiddish-speaking grapplers. Jewish fans relished the chance to see these Hebrew behemoths compete in the ring. And while it’s well known that wrestling results were often predetermined, Halperin refused to throw matches. Even grizzled American sports writers, like the New York Daily Mirror columnist Dan Parker, were amazed by Halperin’s tenacity.

But in Israel, Halperin battled heavily with the police. He was arrested a number of times in relation to improprieties in the way he ran his businesses. In 1962, he was arrested after a partner alleged that he stole 50,000 Israeli Pounds from the coffers of “New York,” a restaurant Halperin owned on Tel Aviv’s Dizengoff Street. He was also investigated for failing to declare the large number of goods he was bringing into Israel after his trips abroad. In spite of these obstacles, Halperin continued to open restaurants and hotels. In 1965, he ran for mayor of Tel Aviv and lost. His bread and butter remained wrestling—but even that couldn’t keep him out of trouble.

In 1966, Halperin organized a wrestling bonanza in Bloomfield Stadium in Ramat Gan. After the the final match, Halperin entered the ring and addressed the crowd. As he spoke, he was jumped by the angry loser of the main event, a man known as Fuad the Terrible, King of the Arabs from Nazareth. Fuad the Terrible’s real name was Alexander Deligorgos, and he was actually an Armenian from Haifa, not an Arab from Nazareth, but, to the shock of the audience, he began to choke Halperin and slam him to the mat.

Though this gimmick had apparently been planned by Halperin and Fuad the Terrible beforehand, the two had neglected to inform the police, who didn’t know what was happening and rushed the ring to break the wrestlers apart. Convinced that Deligorgos was an Arab attacking a Jew, the audience broke down barricades and tried to attack him. A small riot ensued, and many police were injured trying to protect Fuad the Terrible, who was nearly lynched by the crowd. As a result, Halperin had a hard time finding facilities willing to host his wrestling extravaganzas. The police claimed Halperin was a provocateur and refused to provide security for his matches.

As wrestling wore him down, Halperin began to focus on his many businesses. In addition to his gyms, hotels, and restaurants, he opened the first automat in Israel, on Ben Yehuda Street in Tel Aviv, and he also launched Israel’s first automated car wash. He founded a sports-oriented, “Samson” summer camp for kids. Halperin was a gregarious type and, in spite of his occasional troubles with the authorities, an excellent businessman.

Although he was never typical of any particular strain of Judaism, Halperin always remained religious, and in the 1970s, he returned to yeshiva to earn his rabbinical ordination. In 1981, he founded a political party—and called it Otzma, or strength—and ran for Knesset. More suited to business than politics, Halperin would eventually open the most successful optical chain in Israel: Optika Halperin. Part of Halperin’s profits went to charity, and the chain’s low prices, his ads touted, “smashed the monopoly” of Israeli opticians, forcing them to reduce their prices as well. With the profits from his chain of optical stores, Halperin began to invest in the business he felt was most profitable: the Sabbath.

In the decade following 2000, Halperin funded the development of a credit card that would not function on the Sabbath. He also paid for the installation of Sabbath sirens throughout Israel that alert citizens to the start and end of the weekly day of rest. In 2005, in a political coup, he attracted thousands of Israelis to Tel Aviv’s Nokia Stadium to declare their support of the Sabbath and to encourage storekeepers to close on Saturdays.

But Halperin’s last great business venture was perhaps his happiest. Last year, he opened “Zisalek,” the first glatt kosher ice cream shop in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood Mea Shearim and the only ice cream shop in Israel with separate lines for men and women. The shop was such a hit that its opening nearly caused a riot. Halperin claimed to be shocked at Zisalek’s popularity. But a riot? He was used to that.

Sentencing Lebovits to the maximum term of up to 32 years in jail, DiMango told the courtroom that both the victim, who was a recovering drug addict, and Lebovits, who had been abused as a boy, epitomized “the ultimate harm and havoc” of sexual abuse. At the time, Lebovits was one of a string of men who had been hauled before a judge on what seemed like an almost monthly basis to face charges of sexually abusing boys. By last spring, the Brooklyn District Attorney had indicted and prosecuted almost 30 men over a period of about 18 months, many of them teachers and rabbis, in what was perceived to be a crackdown on abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world.

Then, this April, without warning, Baruch Lebovits walked out of jail.

Lebovits was free on $250,000 bail following the arrest of a rabbi, Samuel Kellner, on charges of bribery and witness tampering. Kellner was charged with giving a boy—not the boy who addressed the court, but another alleged victim—$10,000 to falsely testify he had been abused by Lebovits and of threatening to bring more victims forward unless the Lebovits family paid him $400,000. Today, the matter is still unresolved.

Brooklyn D.A. Charles Hynes told a press conference that he remained confident the victim whose testimony secured Lebovits’ conviction—the young man who had addressed the court—was telling the truth and that Lebovits would return to jail. But, regardless of the outcome, the episode represented a major setback for Jewish victims of abuse.

For the past few years, survivors’ advocates have been chipping away at the communal wall of silence that has surrounded abuse in the ultra-Orthodox world and at the various halakhic justifications that have been given for dealing with the issue internally through Jewish courts, known as beit dins. The allegations that now complicate the Lebovits case epitomize some of the worst fears within the community: that the so-called victims are liars, that the secular authorities do not always get the right man, and that, without rabbis as a firewall, innocent people can be publicly shamed and put in prison.

There is little doubt, even among leaders of the ultra-Orthodox community, that sexual abuse of children is a serious problem. As more victims and their families have come forward in recent years, reports of abuse have proliferated. Dov Hikind, a state assembly member whose district includes Borough Park, claims to have gathered material on hundreds of such cases, largely from personal testimony.

The more pressing issue is how to solve that problem. Victims’ advocates and law-enforcement officials continue to urge survivors to report cases to social services or the police. But some leading rabbis in ultra-Orthodox communities like Borough Park continue to insist that adults who suspect abuse must consult a rabbi before reporting it to the authorities. Earlier this month, Agudath Israel of America, the top Orthodox rabbinic authority in the country, released a statement instructing its followers that only a rabbi can decide whether there is enough suspicion in each case to override the Jewish law of mesirah, which prevents Jews from reporting each other to the secular authorities.

Rabbi Yosef Blau, Yeshiva University’s spiritual adviser and a prominent advocate on behalf of survivors, said Lebovits’ harsh sentence followed by the allegations of witness-tampering and bribery would only make a mistrustful community even more suspicious. “We are dealing with an element within the Orthodox community that feels American society is not their friends,” said Blau. “One would have to think that anything that increases that fear is just going to make it more and more difficult to work with them in future.”

In the wake of Lebovits’ release, at least one advocate did not do his cause any favors. Rabbi Nachum Rosenberg, who regularly uses YouTube and a recorded telephone line to rail against abusers, sided with Kellner. In a telephone interview days after Kellner’s arrest for witness tampering, Rosenberg said that he did not know whether Kellner was guilty. “I wasn’t with him at the time,” he said. But shortly afterward, he asserted that the allegations against Kellner were false. “It’s a 100 percent hoax,” he said, before launching into a tirade against Hynes, which included the accusation that the D.A. turned a blind eye to abuse in return for favors from the strictly Orthodox hierarchy. (The D.A. declined to comment on this and other issues related to Lebovits’ case.)

Kellner denies the charges against him. Nevertheless, many advocates are wary of springing to his defense. One, who did not wish to be named, called Rosenberg’s allegiance with Kellner “unfortunate.” “You can’t maintain credibility in these cases by refusing to hear people are behaving badly,” the advocate said.

If Rosenberg comes out of the episode with his reputation diminished, then the D.A. fares little better. During Lebovits’ trial, his family claimed the accusations against him were financially motivated. Yet the D.A. appears to have done nothing to follow up on those claims.

Instead, Lebovits’ defense team hired a private detective to gather the evidence that eventually led to Kellner’s arrest. That detective, Joe Levin, was quoted soon after Lebovits’ release, on the blog Failed Messiah, saying that despite the material he gathered against Kellner, he still believed that Lebovits was guilty. But in a more recent interview, Levin claimed that he was misquoted. “He is clean,” Levin said of Lebovits.

What is clear is that Lebovits’ case highlights just how complex sexual-abuse prosecutions can be. Victims, often as a result of the trauma they have suffered, frequently appear in court with convictions for drug use or petty crime. Victims’ advocates can be erratic and prone to see conspiracy at every turn. Abusers often turn out to have once been abused themselves. Last year, Lebovits’ defense team was joined by the high-profile lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who has called for a new trial. But Lebovits’ fate seems to rest on Kellner, whose next court date, a hearing, is currently set for September 6.

Paul Berger, a staff writer at the Forward, is the co-author or contributing editor of seven books. He has also written for the New York Times, the Daily, and the Jewish Chronicle.

Clarification, August 23: The phone conversation between reporter Paul Berger and Joe Levin, the private detective hired by Lebovits’ defense team, during which Levin said that Lebovits was “clean,” took place in April. Since then, Levin twice declined to comment further on the Lebovits case. In an interview with Tablet Magazine today, Levin said that he had made the original comment in haste, that he had not been misquoted on the Failed Messiah blog, and that he did not wish to talk further on the record because both the Lebovitz and Kellner cases are still open.

I’m not a lonely old man living alone in the middle of nowhere. I am a 36-year-old New Yorker, born and raised in Brooklyn, and I have many friends scattered throughout the five boroughs. It’s just that I’m not used to meeting neighbors and sharing no more than vague and grudgingly polite pleasantries with them. Where I come from—the Hasidic communities of Borough Park, Brooklyn, and New Square and Monsey, N.Y., northwest of the city—the neighborly indifference that most New Yorkers are used to doesn’t exist.

In the past, each time I moved to a new home my fellow Hasidic neighbors came knocking. They brought piping hot pans of potato kugel, plates of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies, and rolls of cinnamon cake. Then they would ask for my name and occupation and spend a few minutes trying to place me within an appropriate sphere of mutual friends, relatives, and acquaintances. In my case it was usually, “Deen? I don’t know any Deens, but I know a Deem. You sure your name’s not Deem.” I was sure it wasn’t.

Several years ago, I decided to discard religious observance and the austere lifestyle with which I was raised. I left my long black coat and black hat to gather dust in the storage room of a friend’s basement along with a small collection of religious texts and audio-cassettes of old Talmud lectures. My ex-wife and five children moved to an apartment in New Square, and I rented a small apartment not far from them, on the outskirts of Monsey. I wanted to live close to my children and my siblings and their families. I also found it comforting to remain living among Hasidim, even though I no longer lived like them. If others thought them freakishly stuck in 18th-century Poland, I thought visiting 18th-century Poland was just fine as long as the kugel was hot and the neighbors lent a hand when my car battery needed a boost.

However, seduced by lower rents, cool bars, and the prospect of being closer to friends in Brooklyn, I decided two years ago to move to Bushwick—Brooklyn’s newest bastion of hipster faux-bohemianism. There are many many differences here, of course, but I was most struck by the standoffishness of my new neighbors. It started the first day, after I parked my rented U-Haul in front of my new apartment and unloaded the last items from the truck. I was sitting on the stoop for a quick cigarette, and just as I crushed the butt underfoot, three of my upstairs neighbors stepped out of the building, two of them outfitted in vintage sneakers and plaid shirts, with scraggly bed-head hairdos. The third had long bleached-blond hair and black leggings and carried a beat-up guitar case.

I smiled and introduced myself. “Hi, I’m Shulem. Just moved in.”

They gave me limp handshakes, mumbled their names—the bleach blond, I remember, was, Brian—and took off.

Later that night, I was kept awake until 4 a.m. by the guitar-playing in their apartment, which was directly above mine. I wasn’t disturbed by the music. Instead, I wondered how I might join their jam session. But these people and their ways were strange to me, and I imagined a conversation stunted by our lack of common interests. The more prudent approach, I decided, would be to make their slow and steady acquaintance.

Two months passed, however, and the hipsters on the third floor had yet to make another appearance. Weren’t they curious, I wondered, who I was, or if we had any mutual friends or relatives? Granted, it was unlikely, but how did they know?

One day, I sat on the front stoop and ached for some casual neighborly conversation. From the corner came two young guys in white shirts wearing backpacks, who, for a moment—and I don’t know why—I imagined were lovers. As they came within earshot, they gave me friendly smiles. One of them offered a cheery “Hi.” They turned out to be Mormon elders. Whatever, I thought, and decided to engage in a theological debate. But the elders didn’t know why one should take the Bible as the word of God other than the fact that they fervently believed that one should. Then they offered me some pamphlets and went on their missioning way.

I went back to thinking about my upstairs neighbors. I craved for a more substantial engagement with them, but they always flitted by, and the opportunity seemed maddeningly elusive. A friend, another ex-Hasid who lived several blocks away, suggested they might just be very quiet hipsters, that he knew plenty of hipsters who were perfectly friendly, and besides, there was no such thing as a hipster. “Call it what you will,” I said, “but I’ve got some pretty strange neighbors. And Mormons they’re not.”

Several more months passed. My upstairs neighbors appeared rarely, and when they did we exchanged the briefest and most reticent of pleasantries. I couldn’t explain why I thought about them; it wasn’t that I needed friends. I just wanted some of the old inappropriate nosiness, dammit.

Of course, I could’ve initiated some nosiness of my own. I could’ve discarded the advice a secular friend once gave me regarding the non-Hasidim of New York: You’re allowed only two questions for every one statement. Secular people, I was told, don’t take kindly to interrogations. Unlike Hasidim, who will ask a dozen or more deeply personal questions within 60 seconds of meeting you—including, among other things, your amount of credit card debt and the amount you receive in food stamps—non-Hasidim, I was told, prefer small talk on topics of no real concern to anyone: the long line at the bagel shop, the odd smell on the subway platform, annoying Park Slope mothers.

Eventually I gave up. I’d hear my neighbors on the staircase in the hallway, or I’d see them chaining their bicycles to the second-floor guardrail, and if I said, “Hi,” I got a “Hi” in return, but never more. If I made a remark about the weather, they said, “Yeah.” If I said their party the other night sounded like fun, they said, “Yeah. It was pretty dope.” (Dope? Where were these people from?) If I remarked that someone really ought to stop keeping the outside door open, I got an odd look followed by another “Yeah.”

Halloween came around, and a friend and I were leaving for a party when one of the neighbors passed in the hallway wearing an assortment of odd garments in a variety of colors.

“Are you a hamburger?” my friend asked.

The neighbor suddenly turned. “Yes!” she said. “You realized! That’s so cool!”

My jaw hung open. It wasn’t exactly a conversation, but it was certainly more than the usual monosyllabic response. But before I could say anything she was down the stairs and out the door.

The next day, outside on the front stoop, the girl appeared again, this time sans costume.

“Hey,” I said. “You’re the girl with the hamburger costume.”

“Yeah,” she said, and walked off.

Shulem Deen, a former Skver Hasid, is the founding editor of Unpious.com.

• George Mitchell resigned as U.S. special envoy for the Mideast, ostensibly for having served his two years but actually because the peace process is on life support. [Politico]

• “I don’t see Hamas as a terror organization,” said Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. “Hamas is a political party.” [JPost]

• Nakba Day is Sunday, but the clashes have already begun in East Jerusalem. [Al-Jazeera]

• A fascinating look at the Alawite sect—it’s like a non-mainstream, neo-Platonic version of Shiism—and how its adherents came to power in Syria despite comprising only 12 percent of the population. The Alawites of French Syria are eerily reminiscent of the Jews of British Palestine. [NYRB]

• Jordan has agreed to buy natural gas from Egypt at a higher price than it did under the Mubarak regime, making it likely that Israel will eventually do so as well. [JPost]

• Reflections from a Times reporter on Jeff Hall, the neo-Nazi whose son allegedly shot and killed him on May 1. [NYT]

• Jeffrey Herf argues that the Muslim Brotherhood’s rise in Egypt is bad not only for Israel but for Egypt itself as well. [TNR]

• Some ultra-Orthodox newspapers airbrush women out of more than just photos. [Unorthodox Gymnastics]

• The head of an Orthodox day school in Buenos Aires was assaulted to shouts of “Jew, Jew!” [ADL]

Wishing you a sunny afternoon.

The Spandex Uprising: Having had enough of the oppressive 30-minute limit on treadmills during peak hours, outraged health club members will take to the streets. They will march and stamp their feet and shake their fists overhead. “Hey,” they’ll eventually say, “isn’t this is pretty much the same thing we were doing in there?” “Yes,” I’ll say, “it is.”

The Freedom Mutiny: Infuriated by what they perceive as undeserved and overly positive reviews of Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, female authors around the country rise up, rightly insisting they can write just as dreadfully if only the book-review editors would acknowledge them. Known among book-review editors as The Adorable Revolution. I’ll watch the riots on TV, worried that irate women will start burning my books; my publisher will point out that would be good for sales.

The Spiderman Revolt: Enraged by the seemingly endless number of Broadway plays based on cartoon characters and Disney films, a group of playwrights defiantly create an series of intelligent, meaningful plays that explore both the emotional and existential dilemmas facing modern man. The shows close in a week. Also called the Lion-King-Has-No-Clothes-But-Appeals-to-the-Lucrative-Families-With-Young-Children-Target-Market Uprising.

The Boston Snark Party: In a daring midnight raid, a group of revolutionaries steal all the snark in the world and dump it in Boston Harbor. By morning, most blogs and comment threads are deserted, Twitter scrambles to find a single feed of any value, and Republican politicians cancel all press briefings for a lack of anything to say. Also known as the Dear-God-Please-Let-That-Happen Rebellion.

The 2 a.m. Turmoil: Again the schmuck at Starbucks gave me regular instead of decaf. I lie awake in the dark, plotting violent acts of revenge involving petite vanilla bean scones (3 for $2.25) and his stupid face. Also known as the Pike’s-Place Uprising or the Wearing-a-Headset-Doesn’t-Make-You-Lady-Freaking-Gaga Rebellion.

The Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease Revolution: Outraged by the needlessly repressive public-smoking bans being passed in cities around the nation, I take up the filthy habit just to violate them. “This is a free country,” I say, attempting to shout between violent fits of phlegmatic coughing. Damn right.

The Toyota Insurrection: For the fourth time, I take my car to the mechanic, and the awful grinding noise it’s been making for three weeks ceases the moment I pull in. “I don’t hear anything,” the mechanic says, and I pick up a crowbar and smash the hell out of my car, shouting, “Do you hear that? Does that sound right to you?” Also known as the That’s-Not-Covered-By-Your-Warranty Riot.

The Thermal Revolution: Though still a few weeks from spring, I defy common sense and adamantly refuse to wear layer-upon-layer of winter clothing anymore. Followed immediately thereafter by the Upper-Respiratory Insurrection.

The Freud Uprising: After year of handing over half my salary to my therapist with nothing to show for it, I tell him to go to hell. He tells me that I’m not angry with him, I’m angry with my mother. I pick up the crowbar I stole from the mechanic and begin smashing his office to bits, shouting, “Who am I angry at now, huh? Who am I expressing negativity toward now, Doc?” Alternatively known as the Pottery-Barn Atrocity, and the Furniture-Isn’t-Covered-By-Insurance Revolt.

“What’s more dangerous for Israel,” asks an op-ed in Maariv. “Islamization or Haredization?”

“Haredization,” or hithardut in Hebrew, shares the same root as “Haredi,” the religious ideology that is colloquially known in the United States as “black hat” or “yeshivish.” Often translated as “ultra-Orthodox,” “Haredi” literally means “one who fears,” in the sense of fearing God.

But while the word “Haredization” makes sense in English, too (at least to those who have heard of haredim), its meaning in English tends to be limited to the rightward tendencies of Orthodox Judaism. In Hebrew, “hithardut” has broader connotations, partly because of the extent to which religious and civil society—synagogue and state—are intertwined.

Say “hithardut” in Israel and you call up visions of an increasing number of citizens who refuse to join the workforce or serve in the army—and must be supported, and defended, by the very Jews who risk getting beaten up by Haredim aboard certain public buses if they dare to sit in the section designated for the opposite sex.

Perhaps the most widespread use of some form of the word “hithardut,” though, is in reference to demographic changes in a neighborhood, city, or town. In this sense, it is similar to the English term “gentrification,” especially since both connote potential downsides (being priced out of a gentrifying neighborhood, being made to feel unwelcome in a “Haredifying” one) of a demographic shift.

Much of Israelis’ resistance to Haredim—and you are not likely to hear the word hithardut spoken in a warm tone of voice—can be traced to the disproportionately large influence over Israeli law and politics, personal status, and Judaism that is wielded by a minority that says it doesn’t believe in the authority of the state institutions that fund and protect it, and whose members periodically stage riots if they disapprove of the way the state exercises its authority.

When Haredim move into a non-Haredi community, the pent-up resentment is literally brought home, leaving longtime residents to fear —with some justification—that it won’t take long before they feel they are being pushed out of their homes, especially if they don’t keep Shabbat or adhere to the Haredi dress code. Sometimes that fear gives rise to rhetoric about “Haredi infiltration” and a “total takeover” that can sound, disconcertingly, almost as though it could have come from white homeowners in suburban America who are worried that letting a black family move next door will lower their property value. It is, after all, far easier for non-Haredim to target the new neighbors than to change the government policies that planted the seeds for their resentment.

Shoshana Kordova is an editor and translator at the English edition of Haaretz. She grew up in New Jersey and has lived in Israel since 2001.

Earlier: ‘Filipinit’
On Fire
Cast Lead
Refugees
On Strike
‘Politi’
Abducted
‘The Peace Process’
No Confidence
‘After the Holidays’

• It doesn’t help that three haredi non-profits are accused of embezzling millions from the state in phony stipends for yeshiva students. [Ynet]

• WikiLeaks revealeth: The U.A.E. considered keeping the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh quiet. Which would explain why al-Mabhouh’s death was originally reported as having been caused by cancer. [Arutz Sheva]

• The IDF killed a Hamas militant near the Gaza border fence, where tensions still simmer. [AP/NYT]

• Jewish-American liberals are beginning to have trouble stomaching Israeli occupation and Palestinian disenfranchisement! Wait, what’s the news hook? [NY Jewish Week]

• List! The 20 most stylish Jewish mommies in history. Tablet Magazine contributor Mayim Bialik comes in at five! [Raising Kvell]

• Avi Cohen, among the greatest Israeli soccer players ever, died at 54 after a car accident. [Haaretz/Forward]

Modern girls and modern rock and roll:

A phone message deemed sufficiently mysterious might be passed to SAC’s general counsel, Peter Nussbaum, which is how Nussbaum wound up talking last winter to an ultra-Orthodox rabbi named Milton Balkany, who said he had information that was potentially damaging to SAC. The rabbi had, wittingly or not, called on a December day when everyone in Cohen’s orbit was on high alert. The morning’s New York Times featured a story about rumors linking SAC to the government’s investigation of a rival fund, the Galleon Group—which has since blossomed into one of the largest insider-trading probes in Wall Street history. The same afternoon, Cohen’s ex-wife, Patricia, filed a sensational civil suit alleging that he had traded on inside information in the 1980s, while they were still married. (Cohen has moved for dismissal.)

Balkany introduced himself as the dean of a Jewish girls’ school in Brooklyn. He may as well have been calling from another planet—one governed by shtetl values dictating that Jews should accord a high degree of loyalty to each other. The rabbi claimed that, in the course of his work counseling Jewish prisoners, he had learned that the government was pressuring an inmate to give up information about Cohen, and that, as a fellow Jew, he didn’t want to see harm befall the hedge-fund manager, even though they didn’t know each other. It quickly emerged that Balkany wanted something in return—$2 million in cash for his struggling school, Bais Yaakov of Midwood, and a $2 million loan for his former yeshiva, Mesivta Torah Vodaath, one of the oldest and largest of Brooklyn’s ultra-Orthodox high schools. And one more thing: He wanted a 20-minute meeting with Cohen for his son-in-law, an aspiring financier who dreamed of pitching his idol on an investment idea.

The conversation with Nussbaum set off a chain of events that ultimately led to Balkany, a onetime power broker known as “the Brooklyn Bundler,” being found guilty in federal court last month of extortion, blackmail, fraud, and making false statements to a government agent. His trial, in a wood-paneled courtroom in lower Manhattan, played out as a kind of Jewish commedia dell’arte. Balkany, the bearded rabbi, was dressed in customary dark suits accessorized with a black velvet yarmulke. He shared the defense table with a Brooklyn boy made good: the lawyer Benjamin Brafman, a Modern Orthodox Jew who is famous for representing high-profile celebrities like Jay-Z, Sean Combs, and Plaxico Burress. The government’s case was argued by Marc Berger and Jesse Furman, both Jewish and Ivy League-educated assistant U.S. attorneys. In the public gallery, Balkany’s wife and a rotating cast of his 13 sons and daughters made up a kind of Greek chorus, sighing and clucking as the damaging testimony added up.

In his various phone calls and meetings with SAC’s lawyers, Balkany had repeated one phrase as if it would insulate him from suspicion: “I’m not a hold-up man.” He would then invariably assert the value of the work his school was doing in the community, or his good character as a Jew. “I’m not here to threaten some—God forbid, I’m on the other side of the fence,” Balkany told Nussbaum in one taped conversation. “You know, my heart goes out, that a man like Cohen, who obviously has made it, he’s probably even a kohane because his name is Cohen.”

Cohen, the Long Island-raised son of a Seventh Avenue garmento, never met Balkany, and he never came anywhere near the courtroom during Balkany’s trial in November. The closest he got, at least publicly, was a modern art auction at Christie’s, 60 blocks uptown. But the rabbi was the least of Cohen’s problems that month: The government’s insider-trading investigation was reaching fever pitch. Two weeks after the trial wrapped up, government agents served SAC and two other hedge funds with subpoenas and began making arrests.

And yet, from the start, Cohen’s lawyers took the rabbi seriously. Within days of Balkany’s first call to Connecticut, SAC’s outside counsel, a former prosecutor named Martin Klotz, reported the rabbi to federal prosecutors in New York’s Southern District—the same office pursuing the insider-trading investigation against Galleon. The SAC attorneys agreed to take the step of going undercover, taping hours of conversations that were crucial to the government’s case against Balkany. The rabbi, it seems, provided an excellent opportunity for Cohen’s team to do the government “a solid,” as one lawyer who has represented clients in the insider-trading investigation into Galleon put it to me. Stephen Miller, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan and Philadelphia, explained SAC’s decision to participate as a savvy legal move. “They could say they have a culture of compliance,” he said, “and Exhibit A is this case.”

Now Balkany, who assumed that by presenting himself as a concerned “co-religionist” he could establish a real connection to Cohen, is facing up to 20 years in prison. And it’s all because the rabbi made a simple mistake: believing that, just because he imagined they shared a special bond as Jews, Cohen would feel the same way.

***

On November 1, 2010, the first day of the trial, Brafman, Balkany’s lawyer, urged the jury—three men and nine women, all but two of them black or Latino—not to judge his client as a Jew. “I represent the man with the white beard and black yarmulke,” Brafman said, by way of introduction. “Look at yourselves,” he went on. “Nobody on the jury looks like Rabbi Balkany. That’s not a jury of one’s peers.” It was an effective rhetorical gesture, but it sounded almost absurd in the context of a case that turned on Balkany’s effort to trade on his and Cohen’s shared Jewish heritage. “Frankly, I, I really, I’m doing this as a Jew to a Jew,” Balkany had insisted in a taped conversation with Klotz, SAC’s outside counsel. “I’m just stepping in, really, to be of help to him.”

The plan to extort Steve Cohen appears to have originated at the federal prison camp in Otisville, N.Y., an hour or so north of Manhattan, which the Bureau of Prisons has tailored to suit the special dietary and other needs of Hasidic inmates. “It’s like a bungalow colony up there in the Catskills,” joked Gary Friedman, the executive director of Jewish Prisoner Services International, an organization that provides services to Jewish inmates. Balkany was a regular visitor to the camp and, in his recorded conversations with SAC’s lawyers, said it was an inmate named David Schick who provided the connection to Hayim Regensberg, the man Balkany claimed was being pressured to give information on SAC. Schick, the scion of a famous bakery dynasty in Brooklyn, is an Orthodox Jew who defrauded his investors of as much as $200 million in the late 1990s.

Regensberg is serving a 100-month sentence for running a Ponzi scheme, and his lawyer, Robert Baum, told me he believes his client has information that may be of interest to the government. Indeed, some of the details that Balkany dangled in his conversations with SAC have proven to connect to real investigations—particularly concerning a healthcare fund called FrontPoint, which is embroiled in its own insider-trading scandal. But prison officials testified during Balkany’s trial that the rabbi never visited Regensberg during the months he spent negotiating with SAC, and federal investigators testified that no one from the government ever spoke to him about the insider-trading investigations, let alone approached him with an offer to cut a deal in exchange for information. “They haven’t tried to follow up,” Baum told me, in late November.

In Jewish terms, Cohen made a strange target. He and his wife, Alexandra—who grew up in a Puerto Rican Catholic family in Washington Heights—do not, according to tax records filed by their family foundation, give to Jewish communal organizations or to synagogues, but choose instead to shower millions on hospitals, urban-youth programs, and the schools where their children are enrolled—including Brown University, from which Cohen’s son, Robert, graduated in 2009. Cohen also sits on the board of the Robin Hood Foundation, a group devoted to fighting poverty in New York. Of the millions his foundation has given away since it was set up in 2001, the only significant donation to a Jewish cause was $25,000 to a religious-outreach group called Gateways, which is based in the ultra-Orthodox enclave of Monsey, to buy a table at a gala fundraising dinner in 2004. (The group’s director, Mordechai Suchard, told me he couldn’t remember who was being honored.)

In the wake of Balkany’s arrest, and amid a wave of publicity surrounding Cohen’s ex-wife Patricia, Steve and Alex Cohen earlier this year announced a $50 million gift to an organization that is at least nominally Jewish: the North Shore-Long Island Jewish Health System, which will use the money to expand its children’s hospital in New Hyde Park, south of Great Neck, where Cohen grew up. “Stevie Cohen is one of the most charitable people I know, and he’s done extremely well,” said his former boss Howard Silverman, who gave Cohen his start on Wall Street 30 years ago, at the boutique investment firm Gruntal & Co. “He wasn’t into his religion—he was just Jewish, like anyone else.”

Continue reading: a Jewish bond, Republican heavyweights, and “This trial doesn’t need any more drama.” Or view as a single page.

So, why hadn’t I heard of it?

A librarian who reads Tablet Magazine alerted me to its existence, saying she hadn’t seen anything about it in the Jewish press. Indeed, a Google search finds only a snotty thread (based on Amazon’s description rather than on the book itself) on an ultra-Orthodox-run discussion board called Hashkafah, and a rave review on the blog The Velveteen Rabbi (written by a female rabbinical student in the Jewish Renewal tradition). That’s it.

The book is certainly upsetting. But it’s also deeply readable and engaging. It’s the story of Gittel, a girl growing up in Hasidic Borough Park, Brooklyn, who witnesses her best friend’s Devory’s sexual abuse at age 9. The perpetrator is Devory’s brother, a promising scholar home from yeshiva. Horror ensues, but the entire community conspires to pretend nothing has happened. The novel ricochets in time between Gittel at 9 and Gittel at 17. Teenage Gittel should be happy as she prepares for her wedding, but thoughts of Devory haunt her. How will Gittel come to terms with the past? What does it mean to be a true eishes chayil? Who will support her if she refuses to keep quiet?

I expected Hush to be important and harrowing. I did not expect it to be warm and funny, too. The portrait of Gittel’s closed community is simultaneously affectionate and critical. There’s so much rich detail here about life in Borough Park, about growing up sheltered and naive. I laughed out loud at a scene in which little Gittel is confronted with a supermarket aisle of feminine-hygiene products. She initially thinks they’re adult diapers. But her mother gives her an extremely truncated “Eve’s sin” speech and tells her that one day she’ll be a woman and bleed. Gittel, terrified, ogles at all the choices: “Long Super Pads with Flexi-Wings and Long Super Pads with Flexier Wings and the Long Super Fresh Pads with the Flexiest-of-Wings. There were the Overnight Maxi and the All Day and Night Maxi and the Make Your Period Disappear Maxi, which wasn’t there but I kept searching for it anyway.” She then tries to make her mother buy every item in the aisle. “It was extremely important that I have all those wings, all of them,” she says. “What if I used the wrong pad? I needed all those maxis, because one could not know what unexpected circumstances might require the Extra Heavy pad or the Flexiest-of-Wings as I lay somewhere and died a sad and lonely death.”

There’s an equally funny scene involving a group of girls in a basement devouring an illicit copy of O, The Oprah Magazine, another about a young groom’s fervent belief that only goyish women have breasts, and a throwaway line that cracked me up, about someone seeing a specialist for secondary infertility after her fifth child.

Hush is clearly autobiographical. It’s also clearly written by someone who still feels a lot of love for a community that has repeatedly failed to protect its most vulnerable members. “In Bobov, in Satmar, everywhere—it’s a problem,” a sympathetic but powerless rebbe tells one of the characters. When this rebbe tries to take an abusive teacher out of a yeshiva, his own salary is docked for five months because “he could not destroy the income of a teacher, a father of six children, based on assumptions.” The rebbe says the only thing he can ever do is persuade the teacher to leave for another yeshiva, where, of course, he continues to teach. In another case the police try to get involved, but “there were never any witnesses; everybody was so fearful.” The consequences of lashon hara, having an evil tongue and speaking ill of others in the community, are dire. Gittel’s parents fear that the shadchan, the matchmaker, will never find their daughter a husband if she doesn’t shush, and the entire family will be shunned.

As in the novel, real-life ultra-Orthodox enclaves have discouraged families from going to the police after rapes and sexual abuse. The communities promise to resolve such problems internally, through rabbinical courts and counseling. But stories abound about victimizers who continue victimizing without consequence, and the social service agencies that are supposed to deal with sexual abuse have less-than-stellar historical records of punishing abusers and keeping them away from children. At the October 2009 sentencing of a bar mitzvah tutor and social worker who molested two boys, a New York State Supreme Court judge had bitter words for “a communal attitude that seems to impose greater opprobrium on the victims than the perpetrator.”

Increasingly, victims seem to be going to the police despite the dangers, because they don’t feel they can get justice otherwise. In 2009, 40 minors in Brooklyn Orthodox communities agreed to testify in court about their experiences. Maybe things are changing.

Hush doesn’t offer easy answers. The ending feels a bit pat, because the author clearly wants to end on a hopeful note. But I respect the feeling of authentic struggle.

I interviewed the author via email. (The book’s publicist ferried the messages). Fervent about retaining her anonymity, the author started writing the book at 23, then struggled with it for five years. As a child, she witnessed a friend’s molestation and grew up knowing of several other broken, victimized children in her community.

“It’s a book that came out of a need to tell a story that should have been told a long time ago,” she told me. As for the distinctive, childish, funny voice of Gittel, she said, “the voice was obvious to me and I never could have written it in any other way, because that was the experience. We were young girls when these things happened, and our world was processed through that mindset.” She seemed baffled by my questions about whether her use of humor was a strategy to make the story more bearable. “Humor is never a consideration; it’s an instinct,” she said.

“Eishes Chayil” worked as a journalist for several ultra-Orthodox newspapers; one such paper plays a role in the book. “The words ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘molestation’ did not exist” in the Ultra-Orthodox press, she said. “As for cherem [a ban by the community of a person, paper, or business], that happens for things far more trivial than [writing about] sexual abuse. When Mishpacha [an Orthodox magazine in Jerusalem] wrote about a modern Orthodox rabbi, there was an advertiser boycott until appropriate apologies were offered.” Sounds familiar.

“It’s been an extremely painful process for me, as the entire issue of abuse remains an open wound in the Orthodox community,” she continued. “Things are slowly opening up but will take a long time. Borough Park is not a democracy, and even when issues are finally acknowledged, they are done in a certain way, by certain people with the approval of certain authorities. An honest discussion about how this happened and why is not a possibility and is the reason so many victims leave the community entirely or break down.”

And does she still identify as Hasidic? “I currently identify as Extremely Confused Jewish Lady,” she said.

How does she think her former community will feel about Hush? “Obviously such a book is not ‘good for the Jews,’ but I don’t think the Orthodox community yet knows of its existence,” she replied. “It is very new, and I certainly did not announce its release at any wedding or bar mitzvah.” She predicted that the story will be “assumed to be a lie, written by some ‘self-hating Jew’ who ‘just wants attention.’ This is not a society that accepts criticism. And for the element that will know it is true, and applaud it, they must stay silent.”

I hope that’s not so. I hope the book finds its way to wounded, fearful kids and their friends, of every faith and ethnicity. Girls who love stories about friendship, feeling isolated, coping with grief and finding the courage to speak out against injustice will particularly respond to Hush. Its heroine is actually far more brave and empowered than Twilight’s Bella Swan, and she even finds a man who is worthy of her love. This is a powerful and beautifully edited act of storytelling.

All of which raises the question: Why? Part of the answer may lie in Peter Beinart’s recent New York Review of Books essay, which called for the need “to save liberal democracy in the only Jewish state on earth.” What Beinart, like others, has failed to take into account is that the various illiberal trends that he deplores do not signal the erosion of Israeli democracy, but the exact opposite.

While it’s true that liberal societies have traditionally evolved into democratic ones (and vice versa), it’s still worth remembering that liberalism has comfortably existed in the absence of substantial democracy (think of Britain and the United States prior to the expansion of suffrage in the 1830s or of classical Athenian democracy that lacked a liberal creed). Theodor Herzl’s utopian novel Altneuland sketches a blueprint for a future Jewish state that is remarkably indicative of this asymmetric relationship. Despite imagining a liberal society where “everyone is free and may do as he chooses” and that abides by the motto “Man, though art my brother,” Herzl conspicuously disregards the possibility of popular democracy. In The Jewish State, he even goes so far as to suggest an “aristocratic republic.” The actual founder of the Jewish state and its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, seems to have followed suit. Although a fervent supporter of universal human rights and of granting “full and equal citizenship” to all the state’s inhabitants regardless of their religion, race, or sex—a right Israel’s declaration of independence enshrines—Ben-Gurion was far less democratic than liberal.

Ben-Gurion’s perception of democracy was as elitist as they come: Not only did he infamously describe the Israeli immigrant classes as “human dust,” but he once declared, “I don’t know what the people want, I know what they need.” The late Israeli historian Amos Elon appropriately compared Ben-Gurion and his fellow founding fathers to a “mandarin class” that ruled Israel like “feudal principalities.”

The watershed moment—the revolution, if you will—when the “old regime” was dethroned took place with Labor’s first-ever national electoral defeat at the hands of Likud in 1977. It is at this historical locus that we can begin to trace the contemporary decline of Israeli liberalism at the hands of democratic forces, which suddenly discovered an unprecedented opportunity to escape the periphery of national politics and taste the previously forbidden fruits of power.

The first example is that of the conservative Shas party. What began in the 1980s as a political association of North African and Middle Eastern ultra-Orthodox Jews has since burgeoned into a highly influential kingmaker of Israeli politics. Unfortunately, while Shas has nobly fought on behalf of underprivileged and historically discriminated lower classes and ethnic groups, it has also waged a commensurately stubborn battle against secular liberalism. That the spiritual leader of Shas, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, has compared Arabs to “snakes” and called for their “annihilation,” while party chairman and Interior Minister Eli Yishai often likens homosexuals to “sick people,” is a sobering reminder that the price of democracy may be paid for in the coin of liberal ideals.

Next there are the settlers. Jewish messianism has always played a prominent role in the Zionist enterprise. However, the conquest of the West Bank in 1967 facilitated the rise of millennialist social and political movements such as Gush Emunim, Tehiya, National Union, and Mafdal, which reinvented itself as a rightist party in the 1980s. Together, their entire raison d’être rested in their commitment to preserve “eretz yisrael hashlema,” or a “greater” Israel. By consistently holding between 10 and 15 seats in the Knesset over the past three decades, not only did these parties solidify a vocal rightist block that remained a formidable impediment to any land-for-peace negotiations, but, more detrimental, they also sprouted militant offshoots that advocated forceful Arab-population removals and violence. It’s worth remembering that the virulent incitement propagated by members of these democratically empowered forces fueled the delegitimizing of the peace process and tragically culminated in the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin in 1995.

Yet another example is that of the ultra-Orthodox Ashkenazi parties. On the eve of Israel’s founding in 1947, many of the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredi, leaders in then-Palestine were hesitant to endorse the fledgling Jewish state and only came on board after Ben-Gurion assured them in the famous “status quo” agreement that their prerogative in all religious affairs would be maintained. Needless to say, the Haredi leaders got the hang of democratic politics in no time. In the bifurcated Israeli parliamentary system, in which tenuous coalition governments often hang on to power with a handful of seats, the Haredi parties have in recent decades repeatedly supplied this electoral lifeline—but at a cost: Their religious institutions maintain a monopoly on marriage laws, among other things, and enforce a rigid criteria that prevents the state from authorizing marriages between Jews and those deemed “not sufficiently Jewish,” which especially affects Jews who undergo a non-Orthodox conversion. As a result, any Israeli seeking to enter into a secular civil marriage—a staple of modern liberal society—can only do so outside of Israel.

Finally, the fourth and most recent threat to the sustenance of Israeli liberalism is that reflected by Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s Russian-immigrant-dominated party, Yisrael Beiteinu. If there ever was a collective failure to assimilate, it is this: Two decades after the influx of a million Jews from the collapsing Soviet Union, the once-boiling Israeli melting pot had evidently lost steam. The same party that offers Russian immigrants a much needed political voice is also founded upon profoundly racist and nationalistic ideals, including tying citizenship to loyalty and conditioning Arab citizenship on service to the state. Not only is such a suggestion vehemently discriminatory, but it essentially seeks to revoke the axiomatic understanding that citizenship is a right, not a privilege—an understanding upon which the postwar concept of human rights is founded.

The implications that arise from this apparent consolidation of Israeli democracy at the expense of its liberal ethos are as complex as they are depressing. That a majority of Israelis still remain staunchly liberal and democratic does not contradict the fact that diverse and powerful illiberal forces are gradually—and democratically—tipping the balance of this delicate equilibrium. One thing that therefore must be said about the current Jerusalem government is that Netanyahu and his cabinet are actually fulfilling their part of the social contract and representing remarkably well the public will. It is in light of this sociopolitical process that it’s no longer plausible to convince ourselves that what we are witnessing is yet another chapter in the historical March of Folly, in which a reckless leadership leads the people astray—if only because the Israeli people themselves are holding the compass.

Yoav Fromer is a New York-based journalist and a former columnist for the Israeli daily Maariv.

Meanwhile, the Beit Din—or formal rabbinic court—that is investigating Tropper has received threatening phone calls over the past few days (among the threats was that the caller would pray for the rabbis’ downfall). This is not tangential to the larger story: the ultra-Orthodox establishment’s main stated justification for not yet passing judgment on Tropper is that, rabbis say, to do so before a Beit Din rules on the charges would violate Jewish law. The threats have not disrupted the court’s probe.

You can read Tablet Magazine’s four-part series on Tropper here.

The Other Shoe Finally Falls [Failed Messiah]
Monsey Beis Din Investigating Tropper Threatened Visit and Phone Calls [5 Towns Jewish Times]

Related: Sex, Lies, and Audiotape [Tablet Magazine]

Earlier: Why the Rabbis Are Silent on Tropper

“During his re-election campaign, Mayor Bloomberg struck a deal on several issues of special significance to Hasidic leaders,” the urban planning site Streetsblog said. “Whether the Bedford Avenue bike lane was part of the bargain, we can’t say.” Commenters on that blog and others are convinced that it indeed was the quid to some quo. Occasionally, the discussion has verged on what we hope was joke-anti-Semitism, as when someone wrote on Gothamist, “It appears some people are being Jewed here.”

As we noted back in June, the New York Times reported that Leib Glanz, a notoriously shady Satmar leader, had scored meetings with New York’s deputy mayor about bike lanes. Additionally, Bloomberg campaigned hard in the Satmar community this year. “The bike lane is used very, very often, it’s a very important artery,” Baruch Herzfeld, a quirky Modern Orthodox hipster who acts as unofficial liaison between Williamsburg Satmars and bikers, told Tablet Magazine. “The fact that this bike lane was taken away smells fishy.” The DOT declined to discuss these allegations, offering only a brief statement: the lane, it said, was removed as part of “ongoing bike network adjustments.”

City To Remove 14 Blocks of Bike Lanes on Bedford Ave. [Gothamist]
DOT Sandblasts 14 Blocks of Bike Lane Off Bedford Avenue [Streetsblog]
Brooklyn’s Bicycle Man Uses Two Wheels To Bring Hasids and Hipsters Together [Forward]

Previously: Hasids on Bikes

So why did it take Shin Bet security forces 12 years to catch a serial terrorist who’d already confessed to murder? A Haaretz op-ed concludes that Teitel may never have been caught at all if he hadn’t started targeting Jews: “as with many other cases of murder and violence committed against Palestinians, the story of the shepherd from Yatta and the taxi driver from East Jerusalem”—his 1997 victims—–“disappeared into oblivion—until Teitel returned and attempted to harm Jews, bringing the wrath of public opinion, the Shin Bet security service and the Israel Police down on his head.” The Jerusalem Post, meanwhile wonders why Teitel was granted a gun license after returning to Israel. On the other end of the spectrum, a commentator on Ynet argued that the secular media is exploiting the case of one outlier to villainize the ultra-Orthodox community.

An op-ed in Ynet is a bit more optimistic, arguing that the bill is a step in the right direction though one that, because it only refers to those who can prove they are “without religion,” only applies to a small percentage of people who wish to wed in Israel. “Before the union is confirmed, the registrar will have to publish the details of the request and each religious court will have the opportunity to examine whether either member of the couple belongs to its community,” the op-ed points out, quoting another commentator. “If there is a dispute over the matter, the religious court will make the final decision…. So, does this mean that the Rabbinical Courts are now (also) determining ‘Who is NOT a Jew’?”

Civil Union Bill ‘Indecent Proposal’ [Hiddush]
An Important First Step [Ynet]
Previously: The Other Civil Union

Israeli Police Clash With Palestinians at Sacred Compound in Jerusalem [NYT]
Jerusalem: Temple Mount Riots Resume [Ynet]
Jews Urged to Visit Temple Mount Despite Prohibitions [Ynet]
Calm Returns to Jerusalem’s Old City After Clashes [AP]

In our opinion, what makes this image inappropriate has less to do with the figure’s portrayed religiosity than his jokey fakeness. But the British Jewish Board of Deputies is fed up with what it sees as a recurrent problem; its chief wrote a letter to BBC citing two other examples of ultra-Orthodox Jews used to illustrate unrelated Jewish stories, saying: “They in no way illustrate the subject matter of the stories in question or, indeed, mainstream Jewish life in the UK or anywhere in the world.”

A BBC spokesman replied, “We always try to use an appropriate and relevant image and are more than happy to discuss this issue with the Board of Deputies to ensure we reflect the breadth of the Jewish community.” Not a bad idea. Maybe next time they should use this guy.

BBC Uses Charedi Picture to Illustrate Jews [JC]

Israel’s Vile Anti-Miscegenation Squads [Guardian]

After that, the story changes depending on whom you ask. The editor of Der Blatt, Alexander Deutsch, told Tablet—via our columnist Eddy Portnoy, a professor of Yiddish at Rutgers University—that, after being contacted by Lander’s Satmar-community liaison Rabbi Yitzhok Fleischer, he “received copy for a paid advertisement and put it in just like any other ad.” Fleischer, he said, “bought the advertisement in the name of the Lander campaign,” and thus Der Blatt sent the campaign a bill (which is now floating around the internet).

Lander, however, told Tablet—as he has been telling reporters since the story broke—that Fleischer (who’s listed as a prominent supporter on the campaign’s website) never contacted the campaign about placing such an ad, and, moreover, that Fleischer himself merely provided Der Blatt with pictures of Lander and didn’t dictate the copy. “Everything suggests that [Der Blatt] just wrote it,” Lander said. So, in this version of events, Der Blatt—or someone trying embarrass Lander—made up the ad, then sent the bill to the Lander campaign.

Regardless of what actually happened, Lander, considered the front-runner in the race, has taken a hit from it. The Stonewall Democrats, a political club supporting a (gay) Lander opponent took the opportunity to argue that this is “not the first time Brad Lander has courted homophobes.” Josh Skaller, yet another candidate in the race, told Tablet in a jibe at his opponent, “If you’re not trying to cut corners, you don’t get yourself into trouble.”

‘Abomination’ Ad Strikes at Core of Heyder-Lander Battle for Borough Park [City Hall]
The Toeivah Continues: Brad Lander icht Nisht a Mensch (aka Lander Slanders) [Room Eight]

Shore, for his part, told Tablet Magazine that he’s not trying to hide anything. When the “About Us” section of Jerusalem Online University’s website is completed, he said, it will explain the former affiliation with Aish Cafe. He also said that he raised funds for both Aish Cafe and Jerusalem Online University independent of Aish HaTorah. “One of the reasons we separated was we were very interested in broadening the spectrum of presenters that are in the course and broadening the potential to reach people, Reform, Conservative, Orthodox,” he said.

Exclusive: Aish HaTorah Masks Involvement Of Online Jewish “University” Meant To Lure Unwitting Students To Orthodoxy [Failed Messiah]

Reading the article and watching the accompanying video one is struck by how little these haredim conform to the traditional image of the settler. Strikingly, this distinction is apparent even to the Palestinian villagers of nearby Bilin, where “the settlers over the fence are viewed as different from the Jewish nationalists in, say, Hebron.” That said, these settlers’ ideological flexibility does not lessen “the harm to the villagers caused by the very existence of Modiin Illit and the contest over its land.” (indeed, in the video, we learn that Bilin’s zucchini and cucumber crop is affected by the settlements’ sewage runoff). This truism, that the land is the land no matter the beliefs of those living on it, does somewhat undercut the “hope” alluded to in the article’s headline.

In 2 West Bank Settlements, Sign of Hope for a Deal [NYT]

Rabbi Sherlo: Blind Men Can Feel Their Dates [Ynet via Failed Messiah]

Organic is the True Kosher [Ynet]

Ultra-Orthodox Riot in Jerusalem; Six Policeman Wounded [Ynet, in Hebrew]

Born in 1950 in Israel to two Hungarian Holocaust survivors, Braun grew up in poverty; her parents’ failing health obliged them to send her to an orphanage as a toddler. At eighteen she joined Marton Braun, a rabbinical scholar (and later advertising executive), in an arranged marriage. The couple moved to London in 1973, where they ultimately raised eight children in the Hasidic enclave of Stamford Hill. In 2001, after attending an art class with her daughter Elky, now a painter, Braun enrolled at Central Saint Martins.

Braun’s art starts with talismanic objects—a dropped handkerchief, moth-eaten puppets, discarded printing blocks—which she carefully arranges into sculptures, then photographs. In 2007 she had her first solo show, at London’s Riccardo Giaccherini gallery, and her work The Martyred Letters appeared in “Sacred on Location,” the traveling portion of a British Library show of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sacred texts. Her work is currently on view (by appointment only) at the Soho Synagogue in New York City.

You described your art to me as a way to “break the silence.” What did you mean?

I grew up in silence. I went to study English in 1995 because I was alienated from our community over a child abuse case. My husband and I supported turning the case over to the authorities, which many in our Jewish community didn’t like. There’s also my parents’ silence: They went through the Holocaust, both of them, but they didn’t talk about it. I almost continued that silence and didn’t tell my children about it.

I don’t think my parents ever came out of the war. Everything was Holocaust: the kind of life they lived, nothing was for pleasure or love. It was just survival, just stifling. And their silence around the subject made the atmosphere heavier.

When I started making art, it helped me start talking. I talked to the whole world about my parents on BBC Radio 4 [for the opening of “Sacred on Location”]. I want my works not simply to be put in a museum—that’s like burying the story again—but for them to circulate in homes, so that the younger generation can talk about this.

There’s something startling about your work The Martyred Letters: the elegant twist of these almost cruelly metallic printing blocks. How did you come to make it?

My husband collects art, and one of his dealers offered him the letters, printing blocks from Vilna in the nineteenth century. He put them in a cupboard at home; he didn’t know how I’d react to these dusty old Hebrew letters. Then one day I discovered them, and I didn’t want them out of my hands. I started brushing off the dust with very fine brushes; then I oiled them to bring out the wood’s beauty.

The letterblocks are actually very small, and I had to put this image together in two photographic shots because I didn’t have enough letters. So the trick was to take two-thirds of a shot, then remove a third and put it to the front. I wanted it to feel like a train for the Jews, to give you this feeling that so many more are coming, just an endless march of people that fills the canvas. I saw in it all those souls, traveling. My dilemma was not just to make a beautiful work for something that’s painful, which almost justifies what happened. So I photographed it almost in the dark—it was an exposure of two minutes—representing the harshness of the conditions. Then I created these pockets of darkness in the letters themselves. I didn’t want too much order, because it was chaos.

This last version was the outcome of many installations I’d done beforehand, and it came together on the anniversary of my father’s passing away. So I put into the letters this saying—“The Beloved, the Pleasant, and the Just”—taken from the Sabbatical prayer for martyred souls.

Tell me about your new work, Awakening Puppets. How did you find the first puppet?

My first encounter with the puppets was at my framer’s. I saw this nineteenth-century Sicilian puppet hanging there in a fragile state, with a fabric body that had disintegrated. He looked like an injured soldier to me. He hangs on a rusty pole, and his joints are very moveable, so I can animate him, make him walk. Some puppets came to me only as heads, so I animated them with silk scarves.

Some of the puppet works are installations, like the one of Isaac and Rebecca’s marriage. The couple is wrapped in the same prayer shawl, as Jews do in Amsterdam, and you can see the groom sneaking his foot over the bride’s. That’s a Jewish tradition—I think it’s Russian—that’s supposed to make sure he’s man of the house. We also believe that all our ancestors join us under the marriage canopy, to take part in the celebration. That’s why Sarah, Isaac’s mother, is floating here.

Some of the puppets are recognizable figures from the Bible—Ruth, David, Sarah—but others are names I didn’t recognize, like Ahitophel, Amnon, Yael.

Yael was actually not a Jew. There’s a beautiful song in the Book of Judges by Devorah, a prophetess and a judge, singing the praises of Yael. Devorah called her general, Barak, to war, to defend the Israelites against the Canaanites, but predicted that the battle would finally be won by a woman, Yael. The enemy general Sisra came to Yael’s tent and asked for water, but she gave him milk and he fell asleep. Then she sneaked in quietly and killed him by hammering a tent peg into his temple.

The British press tends to describe you as if you’ve emerged, fully formed, as an artist in your fifties, but stories like this suggest that you’re making works from ideas that have held your fascination for a long time. Can you describe your connection to art before you became an artist?

That’s the impression: I woke up one day and suddenly decided to go into art. But it wasn’t like that. I made many attempts to make art since childhood, but it wasn’t the way I was brought up, that a girl should be preoccupied with art, but to prepare to have a family and look after the children.

So I just put it on a low flame. But I knew there’d come a day when the children would leave home, and I would come back to art. All those years, I stayed a passive participant in art. I went to exhibitions; my husband is an art lover, so I was surrounded with art in my home.

Some parts of your life story sound very isolated. For example, you lived in the UK for twenty years without knowing English.

I did feel isolated. When I started to learn English, I did feel this otherness. I said to my English teacher: No matter how good my English will be, my accent will always give me away. I remember filling out the application form at the university and thinking, so who am I? There are all these nationalities to choose from, and then the “Other” category. I said, where shall I put my name? The Other.

Now English is like a door to new ideas, new tastes, a whole world of knowledge which was very strange to me before. My art is also about including this other: the overlooked, the aging, all those faded manuscripts or puppets, these folds and creases that nobody looks at. Everything that’s excluded, I wanted to include.

It’s an interesting choice to first make sculpture and then photograph it.

It came about in the last year of my study. I had enlarged a photograph of my dissected womb [after a hysterectomy], and I was gazing at it, sitting in our sukkah—I use the sukkah all year round as a studio. The ceiling of the hut was decorated with pomegranates, and I saw a resemblance, so I took a pomegranate down and covered it with a soft cotton fabric, and I photographed it. When I analyzed the photograph, I saw this potential of sculpting in the fabric alone. I’m a minimalist: I keep reducing, reducing everything that doesn’t add to the work. So I reduced the pomegranate and stayed with the fabric, which became a metaphor for the body, the skin.

I can sculpt for weeks and only when I feel something towards the image, then I decide to take a photograph. After that it becomes a whole progression of selecting, editing, copying, enlarging, exploring light and angles. Also I use some fairly unconventional photograph machines to give you a sense of three dimensions, that sensual feeling of touch.

Your work has frequently been called “sensual,” even “erotic.” As an Orthodox woman and a grandmother, does that bother you?

At the beginning, I explained my work as Holocaust related. And my teacher called it sensual, and all the students agreed. I was in denial, it shocked me, but then I came to terms with what I was doing. I said: Okay, it’s sensual.

What are you working on now?

The next project is faded manuscripts that my husband and I found in Spain. In the twelfth century, the Jews were expelled from Catalonia, and the Spaniards used their books as raw material to strengthen the binding of new books. When those bindings disintegrate, you can see the Jewish manuscripts underneath: sacred works but also marriage contracts, business contracts. They reveal a whole life in Catalonia. These papers are like a baby taken out of the womb, all squashed and creased. It’s the first time they’ve been seen in seven hundred years. I was drawn to them because, to me, it’s a metaphor for what Jewish people are always going through. They’re bound up, they’re stuffed away, but then they bloom again.