Decades ago, when I was reporting a story on New York sex clubs for Playboy, the proprietor of one club showed me a special door that provided Hasidic rebbes a discreet exit when their congregants showed up to be serviced.
I admire that foresight. "Below the belt, all men are brothers," Henry Miller wrote, but really, it just wouldn't do for a sect that preaches the kind of chastity for women that the Taliban would approve to have its holy men cavorting with loose women -- some surely shiksas -- in full view of the members of their sect.
I thought of this hypocrisy when I dropped in at The Corner Bookstore to meet Deborah Feldman, who has just published a memoir of her 23 years in the Satmar sect. In this unlikely venue -- the bookstore is on Madison Avenue at 93rd Street, a chip shot from New York's posh private schools and apartments that sell for eight figures -- the writer and her friends were bracing for trouble, for Feldman is about as popular in her former community as Eichmann. She gets hate mail: "R U ready to CROKE?" There's a web site called Exposing Deborah Feldman as a fraud. The comments on her YouTube videos are vile. So a few robust guys showing up to disrupt an author event -- not out of the question.
I can see why her former community might be peeved by Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots. The author says she is nervous about being out in the world with a controversial book, but you'd never know it from watching her on The View. In her first TV appearance, she's eloquent, appealing and just emotional enough. A potent mix --- the next day, women snatched up every available copy. [To buy the book from Amazon, click here. For the Kindle edition, click here.]
What's so shocking? Well, everything. Her father is brain-damaged. Her mother is English, a hothouse flower, in no way suited to an arranged marriage to such a damaged man. So... she leaves. And leaves her daughter behind. That's scandal #1.
Her grandmother isn't up to the unexpected job of mothering: "Her whole family was murdered in the concentration camps, and she no longer has the energy to connect emotionally with people." Left to herself, Deborah becomes a reader of "forbidden" books; she connects with Roald Dahl's characters, "unfortunate, precocious children despised and neglected by their shallow families and peers."
There's no room for nonconformity in this community. "I had to believe everything I was taught, if only to survive," she writes. And what was she taught? In the slow-track classes for girls, nothing very academic, for a girl could realistically have no higher destiny than marriage at 17 and motherhood a year later.
Can a Hasidic girl be alone with a man? She says: Not even if other women are present. She says: Doors must be kept open. She says: No singing aloud. Blouses buttoned at the neck, skirts to the floor.
Deborah never quite submits. She warns the man who will become her husband: I'm not easy to handle." She's already told us that she's "hungry for power, but not to lord over others, only to own myself." It will take her years to leave, but you can see the jailbreak coming a hundred pages away.
Emotional distance from a husband -- that's not limited to Hasidic marriages. It's the sex that will shock readers unfamiliar with the ways of the Hasids. On their wedding night, Deborah's husband is unable to penetrate her. She gets shingles in the ritual bath. (A friend has a nightmare story; her husband entered her in the wrong place and ruptured her colon.) Fifteen pages later, Deborah is no longer a virgin. You'll be relieved to read that, but you won't cheer.
There's not much joy in Deborah's romantic life. Hasids believe that women are unclean 14 days a month -- the days of their period, plus another week. For seven days after she stops bleeding, a wife must check herself twice a day with a white cloth handkerchief. If she's not still spotting, she goes to the bath and is pronounced clean. Which means she gets to sleep with her husband when she's most fertile and he's randy as a goat.
There are other disconnects along the way, but as in so many things, the real issue is sex. Not the act, but what it signifies -- male control of women. That old story. We see it in far too many places; dehumanizing women is a key component of fundamentalist cults, from hardcore Muslims to certain Republicans.
Men who oppress women -- they say they love them, but it seems more like they fear and hate them -- haven't been taught that sex is our reward for making it through the day. Like their women, these men have been sold the idea that sex is just for procreation. No wonder they feel like they're the ones who are oppressed.
There are claims in this book that Hasids have disputed. I can't tell what's true. But I'm sure of one thing: Men who can't live equally with women aren't worth living with. No doubt girls all over Brooklyn are buying this book, hiding it under their mattresses, reading it after lights out -- and contemplating, perhaps for the first time, their own escape.
[Cross posted from HeadButler.com]
Chava Tombosky: Hasidic Women and Drawing Inspiration From Struggle
Kornbluth is obscene .
Tobosky: “I was struck by the great contrast between our experiences in the Hasidic community. …I am a Chaabad Hasidic woman who lives in the public eye as a writer, speaker, filmmaker and singer who has an incredibly supportive husband and community that champions my individuality and artistic pursuits. …The very philosophical foundation of Hasidic mysticism, … is that each person is like a musical note in the symphony of life and that each individual possess G-d given talents meant to be shared with the world. …When we actualize our talents for the purpose of elevating our surroundings we also reveal the holiness inside all of us.”
Kornbluth : working for Playboy writing on sex clubs states that there are special door for Hasidic rebbes a discreet exit when their congregants showed up to be serviced.
Kornbluth admires that foresight. "Below the belt, all men are brothers,"
What does Kornbluth condem the entire Hasidic community for?
(1) Deborah Feldman”s father is brain-damaged and her mother leaft him and her daughter .
(2) Feldman’s grandmother‘s whole family was murdered in the concentration camps and no longer had the energy to connect emotionally with people."
Kornbluth's "opinion blog" is offensive, especially in the Judaism Section.
Satmar Hasids are those very few self-declared anti-Zionist.
That the author finds venue here doesn't say very much about those that invited him does it.
Our next webcast will be next Thursday (March 7) evening. We will focus on what to do when our system fails. Please send me any experiences you faced, so I can cover those with the attorney. I can guarantee total and absolute confidentiality. The only person me who will know you contacted me, is me. I guarantee it. lthomas@millaproject.org
The practices are the same, the results are the same... the cultures are different. Do not try to minimize this story by saying that this is "only" one woman's experience.
I recently read that some of these 'men' attacked girl children for walking on the sidewalk on same side of the road as their girls because of the way the attacked girls were dressed and a desire to not have their girls corrupted. Sick stuff.
Lets hope the more intelligent ones that do want out succeed in escaping.
Im as shocked by behavior like that, as you are.
Not even you, HUFFPOST SUPER USER Wittgenstein have any control or the slightest leverage on birth or death, as much as you'd try. Youre right, its absurd.
Go ahead and change that, my friend.
As for your last sentence, you are fooling yourself that the cause for Muslim hatred is Judaism. If every Jew disappeared off the face of this earth today, do you really think the Muslim extremists would stop? There are those that say many of the evils of the world are due to the gay lifestyle. I do NOT subscribe to this opinion, but I use it as an example that there are plenty of people who think YOU are the problem, just as you think I am the problem.
I don't find her truth amusing at all--more sad and sickening.
We can be nice about it all we want but all religious sects/cults such as these are disturbing.
sometimes there is a tendancy for too much political correctness.
Sheri Moskowitz Noga
I am sure that you know many uplifting stories within Chassidic families. Ms. Feldman wrote of her experiences within her enclosed community. While her story may not reflect all Chassidic families and communities, it does paint a true picture of how Ms. Feldman, her family, her friends and her acquaintances were treated within this particular community.
It is important for society to hear about and understand closed societies in order that a more complete education may be offered these young people. I have no issue with sex for procreation only if this is what both parties accept, but - a ruptured colon because of a lack of basic sex education? really? Fear breeds contempt, which breeds real danger to women.
Besides, the Satmar sect may be quite fundamentalist and oppressive of women (and men) but the doctrine that sex is only for procreation is not of its teachings. Not at all. This is actually not true of any of the sects in Williamsburg, or almost any Hasidic sect altogether (only one significant Israel-based sect comes to mind)