Ben Buckman.net

Yehuda Mirsky in the Jerusalem Post writes about the latest phase of the Jerusalem's haredization (takeover by ultra-orthodox fanatics), gender-segregated bus lines.

He closes,

When I finally got home, at about 2:30 in the morning, my wife was, luckily for me, awake. I told her something that I had been thinking and scared to say for a long while: that the Jerusalem of my dreams, the Jerusalem where heaven and earth kiss, the Jerusalem of my father's childhood, is finally dead.

The piece mentions a ruling by a preeminent 20th century rabbi, Moshe Feinstein, that public transportation "was not erotic contact, and that one who experienced it as such should engage in painful introspection." But the haredim the author encountered had never heard of Feinstein, let alone his views on this subject; fanatacism makes the whole lifestyle of endless learning and immersion in wisdom a grotesque charade.

(By coincidence, I watched The Frisco Kid last night, not for the first time, and these haredim could learn a lot from Gene Wilder's character Avram: "I cared more about a piece of paper than about my best friend!")

What's saddest perhaps is that only a few people showed up for the counter-demonstration against the bus lines. Are people too scared of haredi violence? Or do they not care?