Friday, October 28, 2005

The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels

Chaptzem -- and the Jewish Week -- review the newly released book everyone's going to be reading this fall. According to Chaptzem, the Internet and blogs play an important role:
the author makes contact with many Chasidishe bloggers that live in Williamsburg and hide their internet from everyone. As a matter of fact one of the more salient characters interviewed by the author of this book is a well known Williamsburg internet poster... who she wisely disguises as 'Dini'.
He concludes:
I am actually impressed by how the author of this book as able to get so deep into the secret lives of these people. However there is a lesson to be learned from all this, these so-called 'bums' are frustrated and are anxious to talk and they will talk to anyone that will listen to them. Now here is a message for our Rabbonim, please be the one's to listen to these people and understand them and help them out, or else this will be only the first of such willing public exposes of the inner circle and shmutz of what goes on.
Review on Bloghead when Amazon delivers the book. It will be interesting to compare to Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers, which already covered some of this ground in the Lubavitch community a couple of years ago, and to see whether the secular author really did manage to understand what she was seeing/hearing.

(Via Failed Messiah and Yeshiva Orthodoxy)

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