This is the Forward’s coverage of Satmar, a Hasidic sect in New York City.
Satmar
The Latest
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Life Is Feldman’s Story More Than ‘Unorthodox’?
There is something that seems slightly worrisome about Deborah Feldman. She has written a sensational first book, the memoir “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of my Hasidic Roots,” which is newly published by Simon & Schuster and grew out of an anonymous blog she kept while trying to work her way out of life as a…
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Life On That Satmar Sexual Polemic
At first impression Deborah Feldman’s new memoir,”Unorthodox,” reviewed here in the Forward, feels like déjà vu all over again: Girl breaks away from her insular Hasidic sect after a youth of illicitly reading library books and sneaking into movie theaters. With subtitle like “The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” it’s tempting to consider the…
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Culture Escape from Williamsburg
Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots By Deborah Feldman Simon & Schuster, 272 pages, $23 Deborah Feldman’s memoir, “Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots,” begins with Feldman describing her father, a mentally disabled Hasid employed by pitying community members to preform simple tasks, like picking up people from the airport. Sometimes…
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Opinion Following Ultra-Orthodox Money Trail
You’ve already heard about the wave of violence by ultra-Orthodox zealots in Israel: grown men spitting on and cursing terrified little girls trying to walk to school; harassing women who refuse to move to the back of public buses; stoning those buses, private cars and the police, and starting full-blown riots. But did you know…
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Opinion Day Schools Stuck in Neutral
The month of December brought some bad news for Jewish day school advocates. According to the Avi Chai Foundation, which tracks these things, day school enrollment saw a “modest decline” of about 1.4% in the 2011-12 school year, compared with the year before. The sharpest decline was reported among the Solomon Schechter schools of Conservative…
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Life In Williamsburg, Wearing Tank Tops or Nothing at All
The Satmar community’s Central Rabbinical Congress last week banned tank tops, among other women’s popular warm-weather wear. Of course, the hipsters and the Latinos who live in the neighborhood, alongside the Satmars, probably can’t read the Yiddish posters that Hasidim hung on light posts throughout the area to promulgate the ban. We’re not sure if…
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The Schmooze Ex-Haredi Artists Grapple With Their Pasts
‘Protection’ by Leah Vincent A photo of a woman wrapped in phylacteries might not seem very bold after Leonard Nimoy’s “Shekhina” project. But to many of the artists at the opening of a new art exhibit called “All in the Eye,” a photograph of a woman adorned with tallit and tefillin, eye to the camera…
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Culture Who’s That Guy in the Black Hat Next to Cuomo?
Only one ultra-Orthodox fixer appears to have accompanied New York gubernatorial hopeful Andrew Cuomo on all four of his early October visits to Brooklyn’s Hasidic rebbes. A YouTube video (see below) shows the man, wearing the fedora typical of the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox, sitting diagonal to Cuomo in a meeting with Rabbi Zalman Leib Teitelbaum, one…
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