The Great Bike Lanes War of Williamsburg has been raging since at least 2009. Hot girls on bikes ride through Hasidic communities flaunting their blasphemously saucy legs and ungodly cleavage. The Hasidim retaliated by painting over the bike lanes and the hipsters fought back by painting them on again. The Hasidim got the city involved and the hipsters fought back by having a topless bicycle parade. When Mayor Bloomberg told the Hasidim to get with the program, they pointed out that it’s almost election time and they hold a huge sway over who gets elected. The bike lanes were gone the next day.
That doesn’t mean the beef isn’t still on. Just last week a female friend sent me this video of a van full of Hasidim attacking a cyclist for riding through their neighborhood.
We didn’t have this kind of conflict in Montreal. Up there the Hasidim just make the most delicious bagels in the universe and leave everybody alone. Maybe women in New York are just sexier?
3. THEY CAN’T TOUCH WOMEN
I’m not bananas about menstrual blood, but my experience has been that most women wash their hands after inserting a tampon. If a woman wants to give a Hasidic guy change at his photography store, she has to kind of lob it at his hand. This isn’t usually a problem because Hasidim have developed almost freakishly good catching skills.
One of the more amusing side effects of this rule is when newbies accidentally touch them. I’ve seen girls pull back their arm and apologize before realizing, “Wait, why am I apologizing for violating your stupid rule?”
On the less amusing side, we have their total incompatibility with the modern world. While working at a high-tech firm’s marketing department, a colleague of mine and his female coworker were asked to conduct a job interview with a Hasid. Now, I don’t know if you’ve been out there in the real world but the vast majority of clients accepting your bids are women. Sure, the top brass is male but they don’t sully themselves with the day-to-day. I’m told we live in a patriarchy but all me and my peers see are cougars and if we don’t make them happy, we’re out of a job (yes, that has included sex).
Anyhoo, during the interview the female coworker puts out her hand and the Hasid yanks it back while apologizing for this ancient law. They continued with the interview knowing there is no way in Hades they could hire this guy. How are you supposed to schmooze a nation of cougars when you can’t even shake their hands? Of course, they couldn’t say any of this so they made up some excuse not to hire him and vowed to never tell a soul about this, except me, years later, anonymously.
4. THEY CAN’T TOUCH WHORES?
I wouldn’t believe this if I didn’t see it with my own eyes. When I first moved to Williamsburg, it was known more for crackheads than hipsters and I could see the most disgusting whores I’d ever seen from my office window. They didn’t even try. They’d have on one Ugg boot and a slipper and a sideways baseball hat that had puke on it and they’d write odes to state-confiscated children in our hallway that said, “Mami misses you my angels. Come home soon.”
Usually, the only people desperate enough to do business with these Ladies of the Day were truckers finishing a 40-hour drive and Hasidic Jews. The latter group would pull up in a minivan and the junkie hobgoblin would topple in to perform blowjobs half a block away. Ew.
I asked an Orthodox Jewess what this was all about and she said some of them don’t see goyim as human so it was about as sinful as using a blow-up doll. I still don’t get how that doesn’t constitute touching. Maybe if women wore condoms on their hands, they could do more business in the Hasidic community?
5. THEY MIGHT POSSIBLY HAVE A MINOR PROBLEM WITH INBREEDING
I know a guy who works at Mount Sinai and he told me the genetics-treatment center contains a wildly disproportionate number of Hasidic Jews. In fact, they have their own Genetics Disease Center. This may have to do with marrying close to one’s family. Or it may not. You know what? I’m just going to drop this and move on.
6. THEY TAKE STUFF OUT OF YOUR SHOPPING CART
I’ve heard the upper-class Hasidim resent the ones in my neighborhood and see them as trash. I’ve also heard the ones in Brooklyn turn their noses up at the ones upstate where I also live. They do seem weirder in the country. Such a formal style of dress and such a rigid culture don’t seem compatible with nature. A bear even ate one of them. The locals don’t seem particularly fond of them, either, and I’m told it’s because the Hasidic community doesn’t pay their fair share of tax. Residents of upstate New York are big on “What can the state do for me?” which doesn’t jibe with organized religion though it does jibe heavily with my libertarian beliefs, so I’m going to call this more wonderful than weird.
The Home Depot in Monticello, NY is always packed with Hasidim and one of them went up to a female friend of mine, took something out of her shopping cart, and put it in his. When she said, “Oh, hell no” and put it back in hers, he looked like he just heard a ghost say, “Oh, hell no” and then saw the object float from his cart back into an abandoned one.
7. HERPES IS A THING
There have been stories of Hasidic women getting herpes from the prostitutes their husbands frequent—AAAWKWAARD. This trend becomes disturbing when babies are involved.
Brit milah is a Jewish circumcision practice that involves a mohel putting his mouth over the baby’s bleeding penis afterward and sucking the blood. I have heard a lot of pedophile jokes about Catholic priests, but this ripe arena for comedy remains untouched (except for one episode of Freak Show written by two hilarious Jews, David Cross and Jon Benjamin). If the mohel has herpes, he’s likely to give it to the baby and since 2000 this has happened more than a dozen times, including one baby who died from it. Health chiefs in New York are now pushing to have the mohel use a tube to avoid spreading the STD, but there’s no word on how well that’s going…
9. ONE OF THEM IS NAMED LEMON JUICE
There was an infuriating case in the news last year where a Hasidic counselor was convicted of 59 counts of sexual abuse. Fellow Hasidim harassed his victims and took pictures of a 17-year-old girl he had forced to reenact sex acts. When confronted with charges of obstructing justice, one of his supporters said, “Even if it’s true, he shouldn’t go to jail. A Jew doesn’t belong in jail.”
It would be unfair to say the rest of the Hasidic community didn’t despise this guy and rejoice when he was sentenced to 103 years. There’s an entire website devoted to hating him and it was created by a member of his family. However, one of the guys harassing the victims is named Lemon Juice and I haven’t heard anyone criticize that.
