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Remembering Shlomo Yankel Gelbman, Chronicler of the Satmar Hasidic Movement
Last Shabbat saw the passing of one of the most astonishing Jewish historians of our time, although he was almost entirely unknown to the guild of university-trained scholars. Rabbi Shlomo Yankel...
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Article 21
http://tabletmag.com/audio/podcast_feature253.mp3 Hella Winston, author of Unchosen When sociologist Hella Winston began to study the Satmar Hasidim in Brooklyn, her focus was on the spiritual life of...
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Article 20
Yesterday’s New York Times offered a journalistic walking tour through the Hasidic section of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The piece opens with promises of “anachronistic pleasure”: knife grinders and...
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Article 19
It’s the rare news item that runs in both Al Jazeera and the Times Herald-Record of Orange County, New York: Abraham Wieder, the mayor of the ultra-Orthodox upstate village Kiryas Joel, wrote a letter...
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• President Obama’s spokesman said that the United States plans to “finalize the steps” for resumed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks over the coming month. [JTA] • Even so, prominent officials on each...
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Joining the Breslovers—and My Cousin—for Rosh Hashanah in Uman
I spent Rosh Hashanah in Uman, a city of 90,000 in Ukraine, and there are at least three good reasons why I shouldn’t have. As a secular academic, specializing in Yiddish literature, what could it...
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Article 16
This week, New York City’s Department of Transportation abruptly removed a 14-block stretch of bike lane that ran along Brooklyn’s Bedford Ave., a major thoroughfare that at this particular stretch...
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Article 15
• A new book offers a theory for the central place anti-Semitism held in Nazi ideology: Hitler’s mother, who had breast cancer, died after receiving the then-standard treatment—administered, as it...
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Article 14
As we reported last Friday, a contested bike lane that runs through an ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in Brooklyn was abruptly removed by New York’s Department of Transportation, stoking tensions between...
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Article 13
Last we reported, the feud between Brooklyn’s Satmar Hasidim and the borough’s bicycle enthusiasts had rounded the bend into full-scale performance art: cycling activists, protesting the Department of...
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Article 12
• The Israeli Air Force revealed new pilotless drones (the size of Boeing 737s) that have a long enough range to be operational against, say, Iran. [NYT] • The French and Spanish foreign ministers are...
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Article 11
The new issue of New York has a long, comprehensive article on the Great Brooklyn Bike Lane Brawl: the fight in south Williamsburg between the resident Satmar Hasidim, who aspire “to faithfully...
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Article 10
If the Williamsburg bike-lane battle represents the Platonic ideal of a New York (and New York) metro story, then Baruch Herzfeld—self-appointed liaison between the pro-lane hipsters and anti-lane...
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Article 9
Last week Josh Gleason reported for Vox Tablet on Luzer Twersky, a young man who spent the first twenty three years of his life in Satmar communities, only to break away two years ago. We got a lot of...
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Article 8
• Turkey has taken a more active role mediating the current Lebanese mess than the United States: Such is the new global reality of U.S. limitation. [NYT] • Russian President Medvedev visited the West...
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Article 7
The Times has a feature today on Kiryas Joel, New York, the ultra-Orthodox Satmar enclave (about an hour’s drive north-north-east of New York City) that is the American town with a population of over...
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Hasidic Reaction to Sept. 11
Sept. 11 was, and still is, thought of as an event that brings all Americans together in solidarity. But the past 10 years have also revealed how differently every community makes sense of this shared...
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The Music of Yossi Green, Satmar-Raised Composer
One evening last month, under a ceiling visibly weighed down by a library of over 10,000 books, Yossi Green, one of the most prolific and talented composers in the world of traditional Jewish music,...
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The Satmar Rebbe and the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry, Part 1
This is the first of a two-part investigation into the life of the Satmar Rebbe, Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum. Read part two here. ***Continue reading "The Satmar Rebbe and the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry,...
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Part 2 of The Satmar Rebbe and the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry: Fateful...
This is the second of a two-part investigation into the life of the Satmar Rebbe. Read part one here. ***Continue reading "Part 2 of The Satmar Rebbe and the Destruction of Hungarian Jewry: Fateful...
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Controversy over Worksheet at Orthodox School in London
An Orthodox Jewish school in London has sparked furor after a worksheet for three year-old students described Nazis as “evil goyim.” An anonymous whisteblower sent a copy of the worksheet, written in...
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Does a New Documentary on the Ex-Orthodox Help or Harm Its Subjects?
The stories we, as Ex-Hasidim, tell after leaving the Hasidic community are often of extreme importance to us. They provide a narrative through which we can articulate the contradictions making up our...
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A Town Divided
A documentary that premiered in New York City this week at the DOC NYC film festival, captures the conflict and drama surrounding Kiryas Joel, a village occupying a square mile within the town of...
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New York’s Yiddish Press Is Thriving
Call it: A Tale of Two Hasidim. One of them, a man of about 20, stands at the entrance of a kosher supermarket riffling through the pages of Der Yid, the Satmar community’s Yiddish-language newspaper....
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Everybody Knows
The incidents now pass without much notice, a steady, familiar drumbeat of violence and hate targeting visibly Jewish people in New York City. Early on the morning of June 15, a Saturday, two men in a...
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