Another mystery for Karen Armstrong
Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, origin do not want their daughters to be educated in the same classroom as schoolgirls of Middle Eastern and North African descent, or Sephardim, claiming that they are not as religious…
Batting off accusations of racism, the parents, who live in the West Bank settler community of Immanuel, have argued that their wish to separate their children is motivated only by religious and cultural differences between the different Jewish communities.
“The Sephardic Jews are less observant, they dress differently,” said Carter Schwartz, a 31-year-old protester with an American accent. “It’s like sending kids of a totally different learning level to Harvard, and the government forces [Harvard] to take them in.”
And thus we see how religion makes people nicer and more compassionate.
Dressed in their traditional black garb and wide-rimmed hats, bearded marchers held aloft banners saying “God will rule for all eternity”, a reference to the supremacy of religious interests over secular law, and “High Court against the people”.
Right, and that’s why people like that are so terrifying.
The Haredi Jews are seen as an economic drain on society, with many of the men choosing years of subsidised religious studies over paid employment. A soaring birth rate has led to predictions that they could form a majority of Jerusalem’s half-million population in a decade.
In recent months, they have proved a disruptive presence, littering Jerusalem with rubbish and soiled nappies to protest against a new parking lot that would encourage more traffic on the Sabbath and clashing with police to prevent the exhumation of ancient human remains that they claim are Jewish to make way for a new emergency hospital wing.
Right, and that’s why people like that are such a pain in the ass.
Where were the women in the rally in Jerusalem? Are they not also part of the parents refusing to send their daughters to a school with Jewish girls of Middle Eastern, or Sephardic, descent? The two photos in the Independent article show men only and boys. The issue was about girls and if I am not mistaken the small figure being lifted up is also a boy.
It’s ironic that:
“the parents of European, or Ashkenazi, origin do not want their daughters to be educated in the same classroom as schoolgirls of Middle Eastern and North African descent, or Sephardim, claiming that they are not as religious.”
Throughout the medieval period in Europe, the Sephardic Jews were treated as elites among Jews. Many times they had a secular education and often had great wealth. It was also the opposite in the 18th century when the Sephardic Jews who lived in some big cities tended to discriminate against non-Sephardic Jews who wanted to pray at their synagogues by forcing them to sit separately from the rest of the congregation.
What a turn for the books.
Where’s the mystery? “Batting off accusations of racism” ?
Ah, religion, the time-honored method of creating division among people where none previously existed and of justifying pre-existing discrimination and prejudices based on racial or class grounds. It’s made the modern world. Some Haredi don’t recognize the state of Israel but they apparently have no hesitation in accepting welfare or imposing their superstitions on others.
Annoyance:
No, they didn’t “bat off” those accusations. They may have denied them, but they certainly did not dispose of them. They are racists. They are the very definition of racists.
Man, there’s someone who could use some lessons in framing.
Ken, you’re not kidding. But my irony meter broke when reading:
Emphasis mine.
I should have remembered that you talked about this important stricture before at N&C, OB. Namely, the prohibition of publishing/viewing photographs of women; the newspaper Yated Neeman in April 2009 digitally altered photographs of the newly installed Israeli cabinet to replace two female ministers with pictures of men, while another newspaper blacked the women out of their published photograph.
……….Am I missing something? Wasn’t Sarid saying you can’t negotiate with theocrats?
Not from me.
No, Ophelia has it right. Sarid is saying precisely that. He’s anti-religious and left-of-left-of-centre politically. Maybe that was a bad translation that lost something (you can say something in Hebrew that literally translates as “having no god but…,” but really means “recognising no authority other than” – maybe he simply used it in a case where it ended up being “having no god but god”). Calling him just a liberal commentator makes me suspect there wasn’t much background knowledge at work here. He’s a former politician, government minister and party leader on the national level and the big make-or-break moments at the end of his political career had to do with trying to prevent the religious parties getting too much leverage (or letting them a bit as a sacrifice for the peace process).
Perhaps the Templeton foundation can help. How about funding a crack team of accomodationists who, at a moments notice, can fly down to these religious hotspots and explain to these sadly mistaken individuals how to understand religion properly.
Armstrong and Ayala, the A-team of accomodationism?
This seems a reasonably complete and accurate link for anyone who wants the basics on Sarid:
http://www.citizendia.org/Yossi_Sarid
What is relevant to our purposes but not mentioned there is the commitment to separation of religion and state.
Good idea, Sigmund. It’s remarkable how important it seems to be for the “A-Teamers” to address the intolerant atheists, yet they never seem to want to explain it to the violent religious. It’s almost as if they knew which course of action would be more likely to get them killed…
Thanks, Stewart; very useful background.
On Sarid –
Thanks for setting me straight! That’s what I get for reading too fast, so I retract my #6. The problem was what Stewart pointed out – the construction “having no God but” is too easy to read literally. But if I’d kept reading (you know, for actual context), I wouldn’t have made that silly mistake.
And I, knowing that Sarid couldn’t possibly have said anything smacking of support for the ultra-Orthodox position, had to go back and read more closely to see what it was that caused you to react as if he had…
Marie-Therese asked:
Where were the women in the rally in Jerusalem?
I’m thinking they were probably at work earning a paycheck to keep their husbands in divinity school. Mostly the men in these groups don’t work, they merely study scripture all day while their wives work to support them and the above-average number of children they have.