Leah Vincent, ultra-Orthodox Judaism and Non-Jews

[Karl Radl]

Leah Vincent, ultra-Orthodox Judaism and Non-Jews

Leah Vincent, nee Kaplan, is a jewess who has written an engaging memoir about her time in, and recovery from, ultra-Orthodox Judaism called 'Cut Me Loose'. (1) What I like about 'Cut Me Loose' is that it is refreshingly honest in its attitude about the frankly medieval ultra-Orthodox cult, which, lest anyone claim otherwise, is actually an increasing threat in its numbers and religious radicalism in both Israel and the jewish community. (2)

Vincent leads the reader in a literary tour through the screwed up world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism and introduces her primarily secular readership to the much suppressed fact that if people think Islam is screwed up and medieval. Then they would positively implode if they even began to scratch the surface of ultra-Orthodox Judaism.

We are introduced to the fact that a jew is required to say the mantra 'May His Name be Blessed for Ever and Ever' upon hearing the Kaddish (a chanted pseudo-hymn praising Yahweh standard in any synagogue service), but one cannot mention god while in an impure place. In Vincent's case this was the toilet from where she could hear the daily services in her father's synagogue. (3)

Naturally I am sure there are some people who will immediately try to claim this is not a representative example, but I am afraid it is.

You can find everything that Vincent mentions in Orthodox manuals on the halakhah for everyday life; such as Rabbi Solomon Ganzfried's popular work the 'Kitzur Schulchan Aruch'. If you are particularly interested in the intricate (and often hilarious) legal rulings of Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox authorities on the subject (and apparent evilness) of toilets then see the first volume of Goldin's translation.

The modesty rules in Judaism are extremely stringent and as brutal and unforgiving as anything in Islam. For example the following are considered immodest and strictly forbidden by Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox Judaism:

Showing your natural hair (4)
Bare legs (5)
The 'wrong kind' of walk (6)
Dying your hair (especially if you dye it blonde like an evil shiksa) (7)
White Sneakers (8)
Patterned Tights (9)
Red Clothes (10)
Yellow Clothes (11)
Purple Clothes (12)
Showing your Elbows (13)
Showing your Knees (14)
Eating in the Street (15)
Trousers (16)

Another is that a woman's singing voice is considered to be immodest by the Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox (17) and can cause men (especially non-jews) to rape the woman whose singing is heard. (18) Even a girl touching an unrelated jewish boy of the same age is considered to be a heinous crime, (19) while writing letters to a boy is an almost unpardonable offense. (20)

Indeed women are considered to be biologically incapable of learning anything more complicated that cooking and childcare. (21) One rather wonders where all the feminists and counter-Jihadis who complain respectively about (non-jewish) 'rape culture' and the Islamic suppression of women are when it comes to the beliefs and behaviour of Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox jews.

As Vincent herself expresses it:

'There is little room for the single girl in Yeshivish life. For a woman, the rhythm of observance is tied to family. One is either a daughter or wife.' (22)

'I had been groomed to handle men – God, my father, my future husband – with relentless worship.' (23)

'''When I get older," I told them. "When I get married and I'm away from my parents, I'll figure out how to be more independent."

Naftali dismissed this idea. A married Yeshivish woman has no wiggle room.

He was right.' (24)

The simple fact is that the jews are the one people that feminists largely ignore and the counter-Jihadis laud, while they are the same people who think it is evil for a woman to be heard singing and that this act justifies her being raped.

If you want to go for sheer superstition then it is difficult to beat Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox Judaism, as while Christians have their demons and Muslims their jinn; the jews have their dybbukim.

The dybbukim are malicious evil spirits that are the dislocated souls of the dead. Once they have possessed an individual then it is believed that they are possessed/marked for life (25) and can transmit their possessed/marked status even through giving an innocent gift to another person. (26)

Sounds rather worse than the exorcisable demons of Christianity and Islam doesn't it?

Even being disobedient to individual rabbis can apparently have fatal consequences according to Judaism as Vincent relates:

'A week before, just after Elisha had arrived home, he had passed on the juicy information that the butcher, a man as tall as a door and fat, too, had yelled at my father in the synagogue, angry about some ruling my father had made. Because he got to hang out with the men, Elisha always overheard the best gossip. We all agreed that the butcher must be crazy. Most of my father's congregants worshipped him, sometimes speaking to him in the third person and always using a tone of respect.

"The butcher," Elisha continued, his eyes wide, looking from Deena to me and back to Deena. "His wife found him dead, completely, totally, absolutely naked on their bathroom floor. The butcher is dead."

Elisha grinned, nodding his head slowly. In shocked silence, Deena and I pondered the strength of God's swift and brutal judgment on my father's behalf.' (27)

While this belief in superstitious brutality is certainly not unique to Judaism; it usually benefits from a veil of respectability that is cast over it by its many apologists. When you rip off that covering it unveils a veritable gorgon of absurd superstition and demented hatred.

That hatred is primarily directed not against apostates from Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox Judaism (although they do like to refer to Reform Judaism as Deform Judaism), but against non-jews.

The way that jews refer to blacks in private may shock some readers, but it is never-the-less well known if you have spent any time in the serious study of jews and Judaism.

Vincent gives the following example of such conduct:

'I didn't know any black people, except for Lakisha. Kenny, the custodian in my brothers' elementary school, back home in Pittsburgh, was black, but no one talked to him, although sometimes my brothers would sing, "Kenny, Kenny, he's so smelly, flush him down the toilet bowl!"' (28)

She continues in regards to the attitudes of her father, Rabbi Kaplan, the head of the largest Orthodox congregation in Pennsylvania towards blacks as follows:

'The first problem arose when I objected to my father's use of the word schvartze.

"'African American,' please," I begged.

"Schvartze just means 'black'," he chided me. "Black aren't like other non-Jews. They live just like animals." His understanding of God's will was vastly different from that of his other father, a rabbi who had marched with black preaches in the 1960s, demanding civil rights.' (29)

Vincent here is touching on the often under-appreciated fact that, as MacDonald notes, (30) it was primarily jewish, and not black, activists who were instrumental in the success of the 'civil rights' movement of the 1960s. What Vincent either doesn't comprehend, or is being bemusingly chutzpathic about, is that being a 'civil rights' activist most certainly does not automatically mean that one doesn't hold racist attitudes towards blacks.

Simply put what it means is that while Rabbi Kaplan's father obvious had reasons for being involved in the 'civil rights'; it doesn't follow that he necessarily liked blacks. The simple fact is that 'civil rights' legislation favoured jews by opening up positions to them (removing the university quota system for example) and blacks were simply a smokescreen (or cannon fodder dependent on how you wish to view it) used in achieving this objective.

This attitude is neatly summarized by Vincent in regards to her own feelings at the time as follows:

'I had complained about the racism rampant in Yeshivish communities, but I was not so perverted as to be friends with non-Jews.' (31)

In other words; Vincent complained about racism, but was extremely racist at the same time. This is a classically jewish piece of double-think; multi-racialist universalism for the goyim (i.e. non-jews) and ethnic nationalism for the jews. (32)

This view isn't as illogical as it might sound at first; given that to Judaism the word is divided between Israel (= the descendants of the Israelites = jews) and non-Israel (= humans not descended from the Israelites = non-jews). In other words in Judaism the view of jews is specific to a group of people with a specific ancestral origin; where-as the view of non-jews is literally 'everyone else'.

This then makes sense of the common term for non-jews employed in Judaism: 'gentiles' (= those of other nations).

What is noteworthy in this is the ethnic viewpoint of Judaism views non-jews as an ethnic group by themselves with several sub-divisions across classical racio-religious lines (hence the 'schvartzes' [blacks] and the 'shiksa' [blonde female Europeans]).

This is demonstrated by Vincent when she discussed the programs for bringing secular jews back into the Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox fold. To wit:

'In addition to the large families of eight or ten children that helped Yeshivish communities rapidly grow, our way of life expanded by reaching out and bringing the unaffiliated into our fold. An entire network of schools and programs existed to teach irreligious Jews about Yeshivish Judaism.' (33)

Now re-read the above and ask the obvious deductive question: if Judaism is a purely religious group based on confession of faith then how can 'irreligious Jews' even exist?

The fact is they can't unless Judaism primarily functions as I have stated; by ancestry not by confession of faith.

Vincent tells us that she 'feared for her reputation' around non-jews (i.e. those not born jewish are evil and likely to deflower the righteous jewish virgin) (34) as her mother 's attitude also informs us:

'My mother wrinkled her nose but said nothing.

"They look out for me," I said, pushing further. "They're not Jewish, but they really like me."

I both feared and hoped that my mother would yell at me for having non-Jewish friends, but instead she looked at me long and hard and then turned her back to the magazine.

"You like them because you're so much better than them. They are trash, Leah. Trash." She bit off that final word, her eyes on the page.' (35)

Non-Jews are trash and jews are superior beings... just let the sheer enormity of that off-the-cuff statement sink in for a moment...

That said Vincent isn't much better than her mother as while Vincent styles her previous musical taste as 'music about dying for God and the destruction of the enemies of religious Jews'. (36) Yet she can also write the following about her first (black) boyfriend:

'Nicholas was a bum. A drug dealer. An uneducated loser. Someone who wore his pants low on his butt, looked at porn, drank forties, and smoked marijuana and cigarettes all day long. A typical goy.' (37)

Note how she refers to all negative characteristics as being those of 'a typical goy' and it becomes abundantly obvious that while Vincent is now a secular jew. She still has profoundly jewish attitudes in regards the relative status and hierarchy of jews when compared to jews.

The simple fact is that Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox, as well as many secular, jews regard non-jews as biologically inferior to jews and act accordingly.

References

(1) Leah Vincent, 2015, 'Cut Me Loose: Sin and Salvation after my Ultra-Orthodox Girlhood', 2nd Edition, Penguin: New York
(2) Cf. Israel Shahak, 2002, 'Jewish History, Jewish Religion: The Weight of Three Thousand Years', 3rd Edition, Pluto Press: Sterling; Yuval Elizur, Lawrence Malkin, 2014, 'The War Within: Israel's Ultra-Orthodox Threat to Democracy and the Nation', 1st Edition, Overlook: New York
(3) Vincent, Op. Cit., p. 2
(4) Ibid, p. 17
(5) Ibid, p. 16
(6) Ibid, p. 18
(7) Ibid, p. 22
(8) Ibid, p. 31
(9) Ibid.
(10) Ibid.
(11) Ibid.
(12) Ibid.
(13) Ibid.
(14) Ibid, p. 38
(15) Ibid, p. 63
(16) Ibid, p. 146
(17) Ibid, p. 9
(18) Ibid, p. 19
(19) Ibid, p. 17
(20) Ibid, p. 36
(21) Ibid, p. 11
(22) Ibid, p. 64
(23) Ibid, p. 95
(24) Ibid, p. 15
(25) Ibid, p. 66
(26) Ibid, p. 178
(27) Ibid, p. 4
(28) Ibid, p. 68
(29) Ibid, p. 8
(30) http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...ghts-movement/
(31) Vincent, Op. Cit., p. 9
(32) http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...wer-struggles/ ; http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...thnic-germany/
(33) Vincent, Op. Cit., p. 26
(34) Ibid, p. 78
(35) Ibid, p. 82
(36) Ibid, p. 23
(37) Ibid, p. 98

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This was originally published at the following address: http://semiticcontroversies.blogspot...daism-and.html

[N.B. Forrest]

"You like them because you're so much better than them. They are trash, Leah. Trash." She bit off that final word, her eyes on the page.' (35)

Non-Jews are trash and jews are superior beings... just let the sheer enormity of that off-the-cuff statement sink in for a moment...

Note how she refers to all negative characteristics as being those of 'a typical goy' and it becomes abundantly obvious that while Vincent is now a secular jew. She still has profoundly jewish attitudes in regards the relative status and hierarchy of jews when compared to jews.

The simple fact is that Orthodox/ultra-Orthodox, as well as many secular, jews regard non-jews as biologically inferior to jews and act accordingly.

Yes: kikes never lose their deeply ingrained sense of superiority to & contempt for the "goyim", no matter their religious or political stance; in their very bones, itz.

Great post.