Testing Anti-Charedi Sentiment

What happens when two very secular Israeli journalists don charedi garb, and show up in chiloni redoubts? Not very much, and it proves even less.

The television journalists decide to test the contention that charedim face as much hostility from chilonim as eight year old girls in Beit Shemesh face from Sikrikim and company. They manage to elicit some bemused stares, but no violence. If anything, they are dealt with politely – but then again, they speak politely themselves. The greatest hostility evidenced is in their own mocking of charedim.

Nonetheless, it is fun to watch – especially the guileless tolerance that some of the chilonim display.

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6 Responses

  1. Yehoshua Friedman says:

    In the beginning of the video, before the journalists hit the street disguised as hareidim, one of them says, “if they are nice to us it’s no story and there’s nothing to air.” I’m guessing (very paranoidly, I admit) that this was a fakeout, making you look the wrong way. Wow, how honest these guys are, they didn’t get any action and they showed it anyway. Baloney. They set out to prove that the secular are more liberal and fair than the hareidim and I wouldn’t be surprised if they edited out evidence to the contrary. But of course I don’t have anyone spying on the inside of the studio so I can’t prove it. But the media have been happy agents of the brainwashing of the public both in Israel and America for a long time now. We won’t forget Gush Katif.

  2. YEA says:

    Now I know how to say “oh my God” in Hebrew.

  3. Yisrael Asper says:

    Chilonim who hate the Religious are certainly in a good situation. All Hashem has to do to punish them is give them Orthodox descendents and He will. They will have the Orthodox to thank. There are too many Orthodox babies being born to prevent what happens here in the States from happening in Israel. Here in the States mere exposure to Orthodoxy causes people who would otherwise not become religious and may otherwise have accepted negative stereotypes to believe about fellow Jews they will never meet, certainly intimately, become Orthodox over time just from exposure to the community. The Orthodox will increasingly have to address issues of how to run a State. It will be interesting.

  4. Dr. E says:

    I heard that a couple of Chareidim were inspired by this and decided to test the waters. They went undercover, dressed as Chilonim, and tried to mingle in Chareidi neighborhoods. That did not work out so well.

  5. chardal says:

    >Wow, how honest these guys are, they didn’t get any action and they showed it anyway.

    It’s all anecdotal anyways. But personally, I wear a beard and a kipa (although I don’t wear a hat and I do wear colored shirts) and have never been harassed in Israel for looking different. It maybe different for people in full chassidic garb, but how much is that anti-chareidi and how much is just basic xenophobia that would be experienced by amish, monks, (or for that matter anarchist counter-culture punks) and anyone else who looks very different than the way everyone else dresses.

    You may want to pretend that chareidim in Israel are somehow treated like blacks were in 1950s USA, but it simply is not true. Any prejudice that may exist should be lamented, but to the extent it exists, it is the product of equal parts hiloni ignorance and ideological charedi seperatism and isolation that feeds that ignorance.

  6. cohen y says:

    chardal ,

    It’s a little different when you have a picture of the Other in your old family album.

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