Primrose Road

The Jewlicious blog offers a good reason to say that "today, we are all Chabadniks":

"Sure, we’ve all poked fun at these guys. I mean they are Hassidic Jews after all, with their funny hats and beards, and their odd ideas about the Messiah. We’d take advantage of their hospitality and kindness while always asserting “I am not a Chabadnik.”

But all that’s changed now. Rabbi Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg were targeted solely because they were Jewish. Had any of us been in Mumbai the day of the attack, we too would have been similarly targeted by mere dint of our religious affiliation. It wouldn’t have mattered in the least to the cowardly terrorists if we were atheist Jews, or cultural Jews, or left wing peacenick Jews, or secular, LWMO, Reform, Conservative or Reconstructionist. If they called out for Jews and you had the balls to raise your hand, they wouldn’t have asked if your Mom was Jewish or if the Rabbi that performed your conversion was on the approved list of Rabbis put out by the Rabbinate in Israel. They would have targeted you without further question."

Be sure to read on at the site.

From The Guardian: Some Haredim in Israel are extremely vocal (and physical) about women following their sect's specific moral and dress codes. For example:

"Signs warning women not to enter if they are wearing trousers, short sleeves or a skirt above the knees, hang in the neighbourhood. One is affixed outside Kreus's two-room house where he lives with his wife and 11 children. 'Every week there's a complaint about the way women dress,' said Kreus.

Extraordinarily, he admitted to slashing the tyres of women who have driven into the neighbourhood who, he said, were indecently dressed. 'There was a mess with the police,' he said. 'Now I'm trying new creative methods, not using violence. Now I make a small hole in their tyres and the air deflates slowly. I'm not destroying their car.'"

The article doesn't do enough to explain that this is one specific sect and that not all Orthodox (and not all ultra-Orthodox, even) Jews engage in these disgusting acts, but, yes, the sect is all-too-vocal about the way secular and slightly-less-observant Israeli women dress:

"He maintained that separation was necessary beyond the boundaries of the neighbourhood. 'Having secular people on the buses is a problem. They go like animals, without clothes. Non-religious girls don't dress properly. They encourage me to sin,' he said.

With the demographics skewed in their favour, government authorities are acquiescing to the growing demands of the ultra-orthodox. The transport ministry, which regulates and funds bus transport through private companies, has allowed operators to provide 'kosher' or 'pure' routes, where women are required to sit at the back and cannot board unless appropriately dressed.

More than a dozen women have filed complaints after being verbally or physically attacked on the buses. 'Sometimes it's an official group but often it's one or two men who start to complain and the other men follow,' said the Israel Religious Action Centre's legal director, Einat Hurvitz. 'The drivers allow them to intimidate the women.' Haredi women also participated in the bullying."

In Israel, these small groups have a (rather loud) political voice, which is one reason why forming coalitions in the Knesset can be so difficult.

From the Fall 2008 issue of the Nextbook Reader, on Israeli-American-German filmmaker Omer Fast's Spielberg's List:

"The beginning of the film seems like just so much more Holocaust testimony: first-person descriptions of the camps, the smokestacks, the dogs, the hunger, the widely plumbed range of Nazi inhumanity. One might watch this testimony with the same measures of sadness and respect and anger and exhaustion with which most Holocaust testimony, at this point, is taken.

"But the film starts to breed some strange incongruities ... The interviewees, it begins to become clear, aren't talking about their experiences in the camps themselves but about their experiences as extras in the film Schindler's List.
...

"Where the woman in Poland had actually been at a fake place, the medic in Jerusalem seemed to have been absent from something real: His participation in a real event was a far less emotional experience than her participation in a staged one."

Also some interesting stuff on dybbuks and women, the "Jewess" and Obama hate this month.

My father's state-ist advice to me as a teenager: "Never go to Alabama. Never, ever go to Alabama."

A kind-of-creepy $50,000 "family relocation project" grant is available to Jewish families willing to move to Dothan, Alabama.
There's a Family Relocation Project Prospect Questionnaire on their site.

I'm curious as to how many people will take Dothan up on its offer ...

On Saturday, a post over at Jewlicious criticized Sarah Silverman for her YouTubed comments on the writers' strike, straight from the picket lines. The post was entitled Sarah Silverman is a Moron and the Writers' Strike is Exhibit A.

When I initially commented on the post, I suspected that the writer's anti-Silverman sentiments might actually be veiled anti-union sentiments. After all, it's not like Silverman was waving excrement-on-a-stick at passersby in the video; she actually gave a fairly good explanation of what the WGA strike is all about, and why the writers' demands are "extemely reasonable." But after reading through additional follow-up comments, I realized that perhaps the underlying sentiment/attitude is not anti-union at all; it is -- ::drumroll, fanfare, etc.:: -- anti-Jewish-woman-making-a-living-off-of-publicly-raunchy-comedy. Note the love shown for George Carlin and Lenny Bruce in the follow-up posts. Apparently there's something about Sarah that makes it impossible for her vulgarity to be accepted as irony over there on Jewlicious.

Even her seemingly genuine attempt to explain the writers' strike was dismissed as an egoistic attempt to draw attention to herself. I hate to go this far, but the Jewlicious post was ultimately (and those who know me outside the blogosphere know that I rarely express this sentiment) anti-women. And to see so many young Jewish women buying into that idea ... well, I'll end on that note.