| נשלח ב-27/11/2005 18:57 |
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חרדים אין די אינטערנעט: ניו יארק טיימס
פארוואס זענען די צייטונגען לעצטענס אזוי פארנומען מיט די אידן אין חסידים?
אין אן ארטיקל פין די ניו יארק טיימס.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/23/nyregion/23computer.html
November 23, 2005
Maintaining Connections, but Keeping the Web at Bay
By JOSEPH BERGER
His blogger pen name is Shtreimel, the Yiddish word for the round fur hat that a Hasidic man wears on Sabbath.
He styles himself a heretic, a Brooklyn Hasid with beard and earlocks who does not believe in God, sneaks away to snack on Yom Kippur and sometimes grabs a hamburger that isn't kosher at McDonald's. On three blogs that he has kept - changing them like safe houses out of fear of exposure - he has confided his spiritual misgivings and mused about hypocrisies he sees among Hasidim, like a willingness to beat up adherents of a rival sect.
Within his community, he scrupulously keeps up appearances because, he said, if he were ever identified as an iconoclastic blogger he would be ostracized and might lose his wife and children.
"People can get connected to each other, and once ideas that are not implanted by the establishment spread, they can explode," said Shtreimel of the Internet, speaking at a Starbuck's on the condition that he and his sect not be named.
Although he and other cyberspace renegades make up a sliver of the ultra-Orthodox world, leaders of insular Orthodox communities are coming to regard the Internet - a gateway to louche American culture and the voices of doubters - as treacherous, even subversive, and are grappling with how far to go in outlawing its use.
Just before Rosh Hashanah, the Orthodox schools and institutions of Lakewood, N.J., a community of 6,500 families in Ocean County, issued a proclamation forbidding children and high school students from using Internet-linked computers.
"Many children (and adults) have fallen prey to the immoral lures that are present on the Internet, and their lives have been destroyed," the seven-page proclamation began.
It barred even adults from going online at home except for the needs of a livelihood - and then only with rabbinical authorization.
Other faiths have also grappled with the Internet, though outright bans are rare. In 2000, the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops adopted a "user beware" policy that warned parents to exercise some common-sense precautions like filters to ward off pornography.
More liberal Orthodox believers see the Internet as "an unbelievable tool" that must be used with sensible precautions, said Rabbi Kenneth Brander, dean of the Center for the Jewish Future, a division of Yeshiva University.
"Judaism does not believe in a Robinson Crusoe type of lifestyle," he said. "Our responsibility as Jews is to bring light into a larger society, and you don't do that by retreating."
For many zealously Orthodox Jews, the Internet is fraught with paradox. In some ways, it has proved a godsend. Knowledge of the Talmud is spread on dafyomi.org. The site onlysimchas.com is a bullhorn for gossip about marriages and births. At aish.com, a round-the-clock view of the Western Wall in Jerusalem is offered.
One Hasidic sect, the Lubavitch, aggressively uses the Internet to disperse its messianic message on sites such as Chabad.org.
"The rebbe taught that everything in this world is created for a divine purpose," said Rabbi Zalman Shmotkin, a spokesman for the Lubavitch, referring to Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the grand rabbi who died in 1994. "The medium itself is neutral. How we use it makes all the difference."
In the heavily Hasidic Borough Park section of Brooklyn, Touro College operates an institution called Machon L'Parnassah - or preparation for a livelihood - which instructs young men and women to use Internet-linked computers for such careers as medical billing. Issac Herskowitz, chief academic computing officer, took pains to note that computer labs are always supervised to avoid private surfing.
So many haredim depend on the Internet for their livelihoods that the irony was not lost on them that the Lakewood ban displayed a keen sophistication about the Web.
Hella Winston, author of "Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels" (Beacon Press, 2005), said Hasidim have had to confront the fact that the Internet has sparked Craigslist advertisements for liaisons between "frum," or observant, married people and has made available explorations of maverick philosophers.
And Shtreimel is not alone in posting his doubts in a public forum (conartistic.blogspot.com is his latest address).
Hasidim and other haredim have never been Luddites opposed to technology. But in building what they call a fence to safeguard Torah observance, they discourage enrollment in college, and social contacts between men and women. Some yeshivas will expel a child if they learn the family has a television.
"If television wasn't banned, we wouldn't have kids studying and learning Torah 16 to 18 hours a day," said Rabbi Shalom Storch, principal of Yeshiva Nesivos Ohr, a day school in Lakewood.
In Lakewood, the rabbis were spurred not by worries about dissension but by the dangers of the Internet for young people. They were troubled by online chats they heard about, like one between an 8-year-old yeshiva student on Long Island and a predatory adult.
Shtreimel said that he first dipped into the Internet out of curiosity and soon was confiding his religious skepticism in e-mail messages. Now he gets about 300 readers a day on his blog and savors writing for the same reasons other writers do.
"When I get a comment from a person and he says he likes what I wrote, that's good," he said.
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| נשלח ב-7/12/2005 18:31 |
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און דא זענען זיי ווייטער פארנומען מיט די אידעלעך...
איך מיין ס'איז געוועהן אויף דראדזש אויך.
http://www.heraldnewsdaily.com/stories/news-00109300.html
U.S. Jewish hip-hop artists rap on Torah, Chanukah
Staff and agencies
07 December, 2005
By Jonathan Stempel 1 hour, 1 minute ago
NEW YORK - They have baggy clothing, backward baseball caps, the "bling bling" and racy lyrics. And these days, rappers sometimes wear yarmulkes too.
Hip-hop music, which grew out of black inner cities, isn't typically associated with Jews, but as the genre has grown more popular, some Jewish artists have embraced it as their own, while transcending theological and ethnic differences.
New York-based Hip Hop Hoodios, whose name is a play on the Spanish word for Jews, is a Latino-Jewish group that has recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew. Their lyrics include such sardonic lines as: "My nose is large, and you know I'm in charge."
A popular 26-year-old Hasidic singer, Matisyahu, raps in a brimmed hat and dark suit over reggae beats. "Torah food for my brain let it rain till I drown, Thunder! Let the blessings come down," he says in "King Without a Crown."
The growing genre has also seen artists like Remedy collaborate with mainstream acts like Wu-Tang Clan.
"It's very much a representation of the cooperative state of Jewish and black relations today," said Rabbi Marc Schneier, president of the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, which is chaired by hip-hop impresario Russell Simmons. "I view cooperation, not conflict, as the defining element."
While some commentators still see rifts between American blacks and Jews, many agree that relations have improved greatly. At the same time, hip-hop has gone mainstream.
Experts said hip-hop can appeal to audiences of diverse backgrounds, including Jews, while still maintaining its authenticity.
"It's impossible to separate this phenomenon from a move by Jews in their late teens to late 30s to explicitly identify themselves as Jews in American popular culture," said Joel Schalit, managing editor of Tikkun magazine, who personally likes two Israeli Hebrew-language artists -- Sagol 59 and HaDag Nahash.
"What might be new is that more artists are emphasizing their Jewishness in their content and marketing."
An example: Chutzpah, comprised of two suburban New York natives and a Los Angeles actor, whose first single from a self-titled CD and accompanying DVD is "Chanukah's Da Bomb."
"A lot of people think because 'Chanukah's Da Bomb' is the single, it's for Jewish people," said the group's 44-year-old dreadlocked member, David Scharff. "It's like saying Woody Allen is for Jewish people. It's for everybody."
Formed by music producer Tor Hyams, Chutzpah even enlisted 71-year-old veteran actor George Segal as "Dr. Dreck," its "coordinator."
"The lyrics are quite solid and informative, as well as witty, sharp and funny," Segal said in a phone interview. "That's what makes it work."
Chutzpah treads the line between seriousness and satire. Parody acts in Jewish hip-hop have been common. Among them, 50 Shekel was a takeoff on 50 Cent. M.O.T. was managed by Meshugge Knight, a takeoff on Suge Knight. And 2 Live Jews featured Dr. Dreidle and Ice Berg.
"If you're looking for a tale of 'gangsta' life, Jewish hip-hop might not be the place to start," said Alana Newhouse, arts and culture editor at the Forward newspaper.
"The best Jewish hip-hop artists plumb serious elements of Jewish history, but all are creating a new way to tell the story of Jewish experience."
Beastie Boys are the most commercially successful Jewish rap act, and the only one to achieve mainstream success. But it was only recently that their Jewish backgrounds began to be reflected in their lyrics.
Rabbi Schneier said Jewish hip-hop can resonate with non-Jewish listeners, including many with similar views in other areas.
"Jews view themselves as a minority when it comes to issues of race and changing demographics, and on many questions their responses are identical to those of African-American and Latino respondents," Schneier said. "Hip-hop is a unifying force that resonates with young people."
In the video for "Chanukah's Da Bomb," Chutzpah cruises town in a Volvo with a roof-mounted menorah and raps that Chanukah, "whichever way you spell it," is better than Christmas because it lasts seven days longer.
"Humor (is) one of the only things the Jews had when they were being oppressed for century after century," Hyams said.
"The only difference between us and any other hip-hop group is that they don't say their religions before they say they're a hip-hop group," he continued. "We say it because we're proud of it."
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| נשלח ב-6/12/2005 07:35 |
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נאך אביסל פין אינזערע "סודות."
Homeless men soliciting work By John Sullivan
Times Herald-Record
[email protected]
Chester – It's 8 a.m., and the silver minivan with the nervous Hasidic driver comes by for the fourth or fifth time to look over Al Escalet and the other men before driving off again.
"That (expletive). He keeps passin' by and makin' himself hot," shouts Escalet.
The police can't stop the homeless men staying at Camp La Guardia from soliciting work, but the police – responding to complaints from nearby residents – have been known to ticket their potential employers for obstructing traffic.
Escalet and three other men have been waiting two hours on this overcast, slightly chilled fall morning for someone to offer them work.
Escalet is wearing layers of sweaters and a blue cotton hat over his bald head.
The driver of the minivan, a silver-haired, bespectacled man with darting eyes, is waiting for a "regular," someone he picks up daily because the worker is reliable.
"This guy he's waiting for must be a good worker. Either that, or someone's looking for sex," Escalet says, drawing laughter from the other men.
Everyone is frustrated about being passed over.
THE SCENE WITH ESCALET and the other men in front of Camp La Guardia plays out daily, yet is rarely mentioned in discussions about the 1,000-bed facility straddling the towns of Chester and Blooming Grove. About 20 or 30 men from the shelter queue up for work every day as drivers, mostly from Kiryas Joel, or occasionally a contractor from Chester, look for cheap, unregulated labor.
At an average $6 to $8 an hour, the men earn enough for a good meal, some cigarettes and an occasional trip to New York City.
Some "regulars" who have developed a reputation for trustworthiness or hard work, earn much more, though rarely does anyone make more than $100 a day, the workers say.
Homeless individuals are eligible for $45 a month plus $100 in food stamps. The men say, however, they rarely get appointments to see case workers to apply for the assistance, and when they do, the process usually gets bogged down for weeks in bureaucracy.
OFFICIALS WITH VOLUNTEERS of America, the nonprofit paid to operate the shelter, say they discourage the work, which satisfies the men's short-term wants at the expense of their long-term housing and employment needs. VOA officials say they prefer the men work with case workers to help them study for high-school equivalency exams, learn long-term job skills, or go through substance abuse programs to address the underlying causes of their homelessness.
But the shelter cannot force the men to participate in the programs, making the short-term need for cash more attractive to those who are able to put in a hard day's work.
"This is not a prison," said VOA spokesman Andrew Martin. "We cannot control what the men do during the day."
Interviews with the laborers suggest that about 60 to 90 shelter residents work off and on, doing mostly odd jobs. Most work about eight to 12 hours a day at synagogues, construction sites and distribution warehouses in Kiryas Joel and other towns. A few get jobs digging ditches or doing construction for contractors in Chester and Blooming Grove.
Most do not earn health insurance or other benefits and have little recourse if victimized by a ruthless employer. The jobs, almost all of which are off the books, also make it difficult to keep the men from buying alcohol or drugs.
Martin said three shelter residents over the past two months have been arrested for possession of marijuana or other drugs.
"This is not encouraged, just as any day labor work is not encouraged," Martin said. "I can't even begin to imagine what they're doing with the money they're making."
ESCALET SAYS HE IS hoping to earn enough money so he can visit his mother and two brothers in the Bronx. He'll also spend the money on something to eat outside of the shelter's cafeteria food, he says.
"Maybe lasagna, with some garlic bread on the side," he says, dreamily. "Or half a pie of cheesecake. I love cheesecake."
As a former convict on parole for drug dealing, however, he lies at the bottom of the labor pool, even here among society's undesirables.
Still, the Hasidic employers don't ask questions unless they plan on keeping the men as regulars, and the non-Hasidic employers take at least one pay period to find out who's been in prison before letting them go.
That gives Escalet just enough incentive to keep returning to the front gates every morning.
As with any informal labor market, the men at Camp La Guardia are free to negotiate with those they work for. Age and health can work against workers, such as Joe Sabb, a 49-year-old former crack addict who worked with Escalet the day before.
Sabb says the law of diminishing returns kicks in about $6 an hour. "The work is usually harder when there's less money offered," he says.
Escalet wonders aloud whether the Hasidic driver is paying more than that to the worker he's waiting on.
"This guy ain't getting a lot of money, or he's doing a lot of work," Sabb says. "Why else would he wait so long for him?"
Just then, the silver minivan drives off. Sabb says something about work being more frequent after Christmas.
"Christmas?" says Escalet, discouraged. "I don't plan on being here that long."
http://www.recordonline.com/archive/2005/11/20/campies2.htm
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| נשלח ב-6/12/2005 07:30 |
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ווייסט איינער עפעס וועגן דעם?
Author to discuss Hasidic girls
Thursday, November 24, 2005
Author Stephanie Levine will discuss her book, "Mystics, Mavericks, and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls," on Sunday, Dec. 4 at 7 p.m. at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
Levine teaches at Tufts University; her talk is part of the Cambridge Jewish Community Authors Series, co-sponsored by Congregation Eitz Chayim and Porter Square Books.
Porter Square Books is at 25 White St., Cambridge; call 617-491-2220, or visit www.portersquarebooks.com for more information.
http://www2.townonline.com/belmont/artsLifestyle/view.bg?articleid=376111
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