stop me before I rant again

[Michael Eisenstadt]

Gerry,

I dont know how much you want to know about
Israel considering your heritage ;-) but I thought
I'd bring to your attention a book I just finished
reading, Real Jews by Noah Efron, an Israeli
professor. (you might ask for it through Interlibrary
Loan at your local public library).

It is about the Haredim, the super orthodox,
not to be confused with religious West Bank
settlers, these are the old timey jews in black
studying the bible being their main occupation.

It is a more or less sympathetic look at them, 
written primarily to inform secular Israelis who 
resent the Haredim as corrupt free-loaders. 
According to Efron, the Haredim are about 
10% of the population and as far as one can 
tell, this percentage is not changing very much 
despite the large families they have. Apparently 
a lot of their children abandon the faith and 
become secular. The reason they have such
political clout is, in part, because they practice
massive fraud in elections with faked IDs, 
multiple voting, and voting the cemeteries.
At recent elections, secular poll-watchers were
in place at Haredim precincts but it turned out
to be very hard to closely surveille the IDs of
the voters as regards their real identity.

But it is not as you say. Israel, surprisingly, at
this moment is having an economic boom with 
a strong growth rate. 

As best I can tell from reading Ha'aretz and
the Jerusalem Post, the Israel I defend is NOT
on the ropes. If anything their internal strife that
you speak of seems far less than that here in
the US. Why do I get the sense that it would
delight you if they WERE in internal strife?

Could it just be that you got an attitude towards
these folks? I hope not.

Nice though that you remember the Israel of
the 50s which was a far less corrupt society
than it is now (the way it changed was explained 
to me by an Israeli math teacher/rabbi on a 
Pan Am flight from NYC to Houston in 1979).
It's a complicated country.

Mike