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Satmar


The Riddle of the Satmar The Riddle of the Satmar
Thursday, May 23, 2013 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

In this review of an adulatory biography of the Satmar rebbe, first published February 17, 2011, Allan Nadler considers Judaism's most traditional—and most alienated—community. 
If I Forget Thee? If I Forget Thee?
Tuesday, January 15, 2013 by Allan Arkush | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

As a recent seminar at New York's Mechon Hadar testified, throughout Jewish tradition, everyone—even the anti-Zionists—recognizes that the Land of Israel has more sanctity than any other place.  But what follows from that?
Spinoza in Shtreimels Spinoza in Shtreimels
Tuesday, September 4, 2012 by Carlos Fraenkel | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

Philosophy professor Carlos Fraenkel wrote that “the cultural relativism that often underlies Western multicultural agendas [is] a much greater obstacle to a culture of debate than religion.”  Today, in an exclusive preview from the Jewish Review of Books, Fraenkel relates how his theory fared among a group of Hasidim.
Lives of the Ex-Haredim Lives of the Ex-Haredim
Tuesday, August 2, 2011 by Joshua Halberstam | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

"Wherefore art thou Romeo?" Juliet calls out in pristine Yiddish from the heights of her fire escape.  Melissa (Malky) Weisz, who plays Juliet in the recent film Romeo & Juliet in Yiddish, probably asked the same question in a more vernacular Yiddish—and with very different expectations—in her earlier life.
The Riddle of the Satmar The Riddle of the Satmar
Thursday, February 17, 2011 by Allan Nadler | Jewish Ideas Daily » Daily Features

A prospect terrifying to secular Israelis and Zionists worldwide has been the rapid growth of the Jewish state's ultra-Orthodox (haredi) community. Given the stranglehold of haredi political parties on recent coalition governments, and the encroachments by non-Zionist haredi clerics upon Israel's chief rabbinate, once religiously moderate and firmly Zionist, the fear is not entirely irrational.
Editors' Picks
Fans or Voyeurs? Ilana Sichel, Los Angeles Review of Books. Ex-Orthodox women’s literature is becoming an unlikely subgenre of its own, but the quality of the writing is not quite keeping pace with its popularity.