Jewish Author Finds Joy and Love in Book Exploring Hasidic Community in Israel
Tuvia Tenenbom has gone undercover to find out people’s real opinions about Jews in Germany, and also in Israel.
But for his new intriguing book, Careful, Beauties Ahead! My Year With the Ultra-Orthodox, the jovial journalist went to the Israeli town of Mea Shearim under his real identity.
Hasidic Jews have fascinated many for maintaining curls, black hats, black coats, the Yiddish language, and sometimes having insular communities. Tenenbom said that people warned him that Hasidim would throw stones at him. But that wasn’t the case when he spent about a year and a half with different members of the Haredi community in Mea Shearim.
Why did the community allow him to live with them, conduct interviews, and take pictures?
“I did not treat them as aliens or look at them like animals in the zoo,” Tenenbom told me in an interview. “I treated them as human beings. They responded in kind. It helped that I spoke Yiddish and that my great-grandfather was a great rabbi. But they know I’m not religious.”
The book is full of laughs and great scenes, including one where he jokes that he wonders if his egg salad would be poisoned, though he enjoys the food. He includes that there were some signs that said Zionists were not real Jews.
“I found out that was a minority of idiots that did that,” he said. “It was some extreme teenagers.”
He said there was great unity on October 7, and that the whole community prayed for those who were kidnapped.
Tenenbom stayed with numerous families and couples that were products of arranged marriages, known as shidduch. Did he feel that they really loved each other, or had learned “to love each other,” as sung in Fiddler on the Roof?
“I live on the Upper East Side and I’ve never seen love as I have in Mea Shearim,” he said. “I don’t see this kind of love in Manhattan. It doesn’t mean everything is perfect there, but the love there, it was beautiful to see, based on living there for a year and a half and seeing how they behave.”
He said that some people have only “kosher” phones, but he also saw that some had iPhones.
Tenenbom said that had his life unfolded differently, he might have been a rabbi there, as he was religious earlier in his life. He said members of the community told him they were betrayed by journalists in the past, who claimed to like them and then wrote material demonizing them.
“Most people who write books about Haredim don’t even speak Yiddish,” he said. “How can you write a book without knowing their language?
Tenenbom also said he found great humor during his experience.
“I spent my time laughing from morning to evening,” he said. “I came in thinking some might be nasty,” he said. “I have found they are the opposite of bitter people. Many Jews in New York are neurotic. I couldn’t find a neurotic Jew [there].”
Tenenbom, who has been married for many years, said he told the community there that Haredi women were beautiful. He said the people took the compliment without being offended or sensitive.
Different portions of the book have him asking questions you would not expect to be asked, and Tenenbom has the rare combination of knowledge, guts, and flair to write a book that can have elements of critique and respect at the same time.
Tenenbom, the author of Catch The Jew and I Sleep in Hitler’s Room, said it is easy to stereotype people if you only see them in films or in negative news stories, and don’t spend time with them. Known for his suspenders, his love of good food, and his time producing plays at The Triad Theater on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Careful Beauties Ahead! is his best book yet.
Perhaps the only way to top this for his next book, is if he goes undercover as a college professor at Columbia University.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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