As a Muslim I would like to make a few comments here in response to 22:

Even the taliban didnt have ‘chopped up private parts’ as this is a practice that occurs in Africa mostly amongst varying religions.
Divorce was pretty easy for a woman as well is remarrying.
Also I want to make the distinction that Taliban does not equal correct understanding of Islamic Law.

The Central Park jogger was not very prudent but she had no agenda at all, she just wanted to get in her usual evening run.

But Naomi Ragen, like Rosa Parks, has an agenda, but unlike Rosa Parks, she is not part of the group concerned and what the group is doing is not bad. It is just a life style choice that doesn’t hurt any one or deny anyone rights such as voting, seeing where you are going, etc.

Just good old-fashioned, seat-of-the-pants common sense. If only everybody weren’t so intimidated by political correctness!!

Rosa Parks: you figure that was her first trip downtown? Hah! And all those blacks at the Woolworth’s; you think they were there for the tuna melt and an egg cream? Believe me, Bubbala, they didn’t just want a cup of hot cocoa, they were looking for trouble. They probably went there 50 times driving people crazy with all their mishegoss, until they finally found that big sheriff walking his German Shepherd. Some people think the world is made of rainbows and butterflies and unicorns. But trust me; they’re them and we’re us. Was it really so terrible for those white people to keep just a few toilets for themselves? It’s the liberals who talk about TOLERANCE, but they had to zhalave the white people a few toilets of their own, where they can have a nice, peaceful bowel movement of their own?

And that Schwerner and Goodman buried in a ditch in Mississippi; you think they were there to make latkes for Hanukkah? Or to pick up some of those famous confederate kippot? What, they couldn’t stay home and vote in Brooklyn? It was their business to go to Mississippi to tell the KKK who could vote there? Nu, what did they expect, a ticker tape parade? They didn’t know they’ve been whipping schvatzers for hundreds of years? Sure, brotherhood sounds all warm and fuzzy, but good fences make good neighbors. Trust me. You’ll see when you get older.

And don’t get me started on that Central Park jogger!! Jogging? And for what? So she could have perfect thighs? So she could show all the men in her office, “See, I’m one tough cookie, and no pushover!” Better she should have been making a kugel for her husband. And what do you figure she was wearing that night in Central Park; a tweed overcoat? Of course, she didn’t actually put on a sign saying, “Pease rape me and beat my brains in with a rock.” But you can bet she wasn’t baking a challah and saying kiddush with those wild animals in Central Park.

That’s not allowed.

When they try to make you think their way, it’s an assault on your culture.

When the decide that’s hopeless, and mind their own business, it’s isolation, insularity and indifference. So they can’t win with you, they do wrong either way.

They feel passionately that the Torah way is the way, and they want a community where that is the way. Where they can live it and not have their standards of modesty offended every minute. That is a disgusting experience, leads to family break-up, and on top of that, touching is against their rules.

Can you spare them a few square blocks?

They have their own money. Oh right, they have too much. Or, they have too little and parasite off everybody else. Can’t win again.

No, they don’t think you are living right. Well, the Lubavitch have open arms for you and no judgement at all. If you find the whole thing silly or irrelevant, have a good laugh at them, and find a Haredi-free environment.

But that’s not your thing. Their mere existence gives you hives. You seek them, to confront them.

It is YOU who are assigning them some kind of moral high ground. You CARE what they think. Otherwise you would be bored and cold, not annoyed and hot.

Well, shalom alechem, yid. You care because you ARE of them, in a fundamental way. There are a lot of ways to be a Jew. Find yours and leave them alone. If Naomi Ragen’s life is any model, you may go to the right some day. She is BT too. Like lots of us. Anyway, peace. Shalom. Like that.

Naomi Ragen is religious and studied extensively, religiously, but she lives in a religiously mixed neighborhood, NEAR the Haredi area. She does not live right in it. I got that from an objective-sounding article, linked to her own web site.

There is nothing terrible about that, but she cannot be described as a disaffected Haredi woman.

The initial news reports mentioned that she sat in the men’s area at least two previous times, on different days, and was confronted only VERBALLY, before eventually encountering a physical confrontation. The word probably got around the Haredi neighborhood, as this is very unusual, and feelings may have run high, and the next time, the third time, she was confronted with more than words.

My take on that is that she would have sat or tried to sit in the men’s area a hundred times, until she got more than words, because getting more than words is the only pathway to a news story and a lawsuit. Newspapers do not write: “Woman spoken to in a very nasty and unpleasant way on bus, harangued to go to the women’s area, five times in one week, a real annoyance. Back to you, ta ta”

I hate to use the phrase “she asked for it” but once, just this once, it happens to be true. It has to be. She wants this practice of separate seating ended, and she wants widespread secular or liberal community support for a legal effort in that direction. You don’t get that by having snotty remarks made to you or even yelling.

You can’t sue people for yelling at you, no matter how loud or how often.

Of course she could have just brought a class action suit on the principle of the thing, but how much drama would that have had? Yawn.

Although she was already a successful writer and well known to some, even many, there is no denying that these carryings-on have widened her circle of fame. To me. I have now heard of her. It worked with me. Probably others too.

Someone I knew once said, “there’s a lot of money in disillusionment”.

It’s not about the bus. She wants a Haredi-free world. So do some others apparently. That’s eliminationist, and does not go terribly well with love your fellow, or tikkun olam.

Laya, if you’re looking– your cooking line was spLEndid, thank you!!

After all the hard feelings (whoops, I’ll pay for that…) my puzzlement about women instead of men in the back probably should be swept under the rug, but the arrangement seems to guarantee an optimal ogling view for the men who are seated, since all the women have to walk past. Splitting down the middle would provide less of this, and women in front, least of all.

She has had a lot of success and is not the newby I thought.

Even SHE feels guilty about some of what she has written.

Her case is sad. It shows the pain of being BT and expecting of it more than it has to give. It can’t make you a native-born because that’s not the truth about you. It cannot even give you a pure holy city, to even look at wistfully, through the fence, as an outsider. It just gives you G-d and the tradition to study and live. We BT’s are still in the world, not Gan Eden and life is not perfect and no system is without problems because people are people.

I appreciate your discussion; I learned some things.

I’m sorry, but I don’t buy it. You complain about the generalization of the haredi community that is expressed in comments here. But please don’t forget that the level of tolerance, or lack thereof, between the two groups, is symmetric.

(regarding generalization, there is a difference between generalizing one person’s actions over the community and generalizing the values mirrored by those actions over the community. I haven’t read of a single rabbi in Jerusalem that condemned the hitting of that woman. I’ll be happy if someone here proves me wrong)

I lived in Toronto for the last 8 years, just until recently. It has a very large Jewish community (I think 5th largest in North America, after NY, LA, Miami and Chicago), with all the kinds of Jewish groups that you can imagine. I rode the buses there, and I did see Haredim on the bus, and they may even stayed standing instead of sitting next to a woman. And guess what? There were no riots, no beatings, no mess at all.
So what is the difference between them and the communities in Jerusalem? I don’t know, and I am not knowledgeable enough to even take a guess. However, one thing I am sure of – the Haredi community that we are talking about in this story, in Jerusalem, does not hold the high moral ground, as you imply, and it doesn’t fit this romanticized vision. There are reasons why they are bashed for not being so hoooly, as you put it. and yes, I also bash the IDF on plenty occasions.

B-D, you are very much correct to point out that many hilonim fail to consider that there may be other legitimate value scales other than there own. It hurts me too; but I have to tell you the same thing that I just told JM – it is symmetric. In my opinion, the same claim applies to the haredim in Jerusalem who are the focus of this story. Can you honestly tell me that there is no residue of condescension amongst them as well?

As a side note, I find it astonishing that the words that you directed at me in comment #51, are literally the same words that the secular community here directs towards the haredim (sorry, but I don’t want to give a specific example of that).

If you would read some of her books, you would obviously be more informed as to her affiliations. In your local library I am sure that you can locate such a book.

It is silly to nitpick like this over someone who has been in this lifestyle for over 30 years as to what her motives are.

Many of us have simply pointed out that you speak of a highly romaticized vision of this community that is unfortunately not exactly our experience.

Hopefully, you will not suffer any personal injurious exepriences as many of us have, and continue to promote your healthy cultural, social, adjenda and your healthy optimisim!

So she has been selling tickets to a side-show? That’s her job? Her career? From the outside? She wasn’t born Haredi, from what I gather. Is that exploitative? This lawsuit is far too convenient a cap to a long career of activism and writing about them, from what you say.

The fact remains that they are living their way, and not cutting up their girls. What the reason for her unhealthy, fascinated disgust? She seems to want in, and not to want in, to the Haredi.

She has no right to shred a community she is not a daughter of.

Heck, she would have no right to shred a community she WAS a daughter of.

It’s a big world. She can live another way.

But it seems to me she has found a living in all this.

I am not an expert on her, and I have never read her.

I am sorry for people who have personal issues and religious issues. Everybody should have a nice day.

But I do think we need communities where Judaism is lived high-strength, even though that is not the only way, and does not necessarily work for everybody.

I am so glad you have a fine family. But the fact remains that we do indeed have a birthrate problem, a big one, except in those weird, icky, medieval prison camps called Orthodox areas. Well, I am going to wait for insiders to complain before I am interested.

don;t lose it now please.

Anyways my dear, they are the ones behaving violently gratuitously, not me.

N. Ragen, Of course she is one of them. Read her books. SHe depicts the Charedi centers of Brooklyn, Israel, and Europe, like no one else can. THey’re not much her books, but as a novel they read well.
Oh because she works she is not one of them. ? JM, you seriously should get out and explore this world you defend more.

any library would have them, check on Ebay, or Amazon.

Religious-bashing is cowardly, because they are supposed to be to hooooly to fight back. And if they do, it’s “aha! You’re failing your mission to be hooooly, so I don’t have to! Bad, bad!” Let’s see you bash the armed, muscular IDF, if you’re so brave. They have problems, too. But that might not be healthy.

As this is a Jewish web site, not a neo-nazi web site, can we please chill the “they are all sexual preditors, pedophiles, parasites and engaging in finanicals shenanigans” thing. Every community has a few nut cases, including the secular, and every community has problems. At least they will have a community in a hundred years. Will you?

However.

She cannot be described as protesting from within the Haredi community – even if she has an apartment right in the middle of it. She’s not one of them, though dati.

Where did you get the ruling that inadvertent touching during niddah doesn’t count? No way.

This community has preserved the old way, which while unfair in some ways, worked. It puts about half the population, with some exceptions, in escrow for people-production, to make sure that happens. The people who don’t do this – the Jews who leave this essential social function to chance – do not have a replacement birthrate.

If someone tells me that Naomi Ragen has no children, I am going to become seriously concerned and even irritated with her busybodiness. Jealousy can take some weird forms. Dog in manger?

The commentator with the same nic wasn’t me; I haven’t read the link; the world is full of “Jewish Mothers” thank G-d and my only schtick is there should be more of them.

WHere is the refinement of character, in that community? oh it exists, but the images we see, the masses, I dislike.

You have for example, in Parshat Shoftim,
a man knocked down a tree and inadvertantly his friend got killed from it.

Inadverant, accidental, he walks, correct?

No, he got sent away. Because of the cavalier attitude towards that tree.

So where is this refinement ?

U still seem to be mistaking the wrapping.

U can learn Torah w/out being Charidi, and you can not only learn, but act upon what you learn. This is more important than wearing the black hat and the wigs.

As far as Shomer Negiah, if it is an inadvertant touch it does not apply.

What we object to, is this institutionalization of new rules that are bogus, and not only that they are not really effective, they are a veneer that covers the real problems in that community, and thus does not help them solve the problems that they do have such as the sexual preditors, the pedophiles, this has been very well documented, I am not even mentioning the whole Kollel system where people don’t work and are not cut out to be Rabbis,etc., the finanicals shenanigans and other Torah violations. These problems are ignored while they make up new rules.

IN fact, imo, there would be less such violations if the opposite sexes did mingle a bit like what is natural and normal.

“[Naomi Ragen] wants to become interesting and make a career out of that. For the money. Lots of people have now heard of her who never had occasion to, before, as a writer.”

First of all, do you really think no one has ever heard of Naomi Ragen?? She’s a prolific writer, one that anyone interested in the Ultra-Orthodox world should read. She has sold millions of books, wrote hundreds of columns and done several other things…

…like not being afraid and standing for women’s rights in a patriarcal world!

It’s funny: when I googled “Naomi Ragen”, when of the first pages that appeared was a lovely article in Arutz Sheva… whose first comment was a disgusting insult by (you guessed) JEWISH MOTHER!

Please, check this out so we may understand a little better:

israelnational...

Ah, y Naomi Ragen has lived in Jerusalem for over 35 years… so she is IN the district and she CAN voice her opinion!

I am not talking about any stupid simple-minded eroticism of an unintended brush. It’s not “Oy! Her foot clonked mine! I’m so interested!” No, I am talking about the niddah commandments. Maybe they should scrap that, to make the liberals happy? But the liberals will never be happy. Not until the whole haredi thing is over and done. (But they are so TOLERANT, remember. Right.)

The eroticism angle was much more about the chance to meet, socialize and make new friends.

Maybe they could keep the separation, and put the men in the back. Would you guys accept that? Probably not.

The American woman who is making a point of this does not live there. You can’t vote out of your district. She may be dati, but she doesn’t live there. She sure doesn’t sound married, either, no mention of that. So what would she know?

When in Rome. Or Jerusalem. She’s a colonialist, a cultural imperialist. It’s a big world. She can find a community that suits her, or start one, but she has no call to try to change an existing one.

Unless she has a Joan of Arc complex (very common, in both sexes), or wants to become interesting and make a career out of that. For the money. Lots of people have now heard of her who never had occasion to, before, as a writer.