The Discrimination Against Ashkenazi Culture

Mizrahi Judaism is an utterly ridiculous concept. Is Spain in the East? Is Morocco in the East? It's actually the far West

The Haredi Way is the Avant-garde  (Source)

I dreamed that the Haredim [ultra-Orthodox Jews] began protesting against the discrimination of Ashkenazi culture. Enough with the Sephardic hegemony! Long live the Ashkenazi revolution! And a professional Mizrahi [Jew of Middle Eastern or North African descent] came to me: What are you talking about? The Ashkenazim have been ruling this country for 120 years. And I say: What are you talking about? The secular Jews? Tell me, what's Ashkenazi about them? They've completely Sephardized themselves. There's not a trace of the glorious Ashkenazi culture in them. They speak with a Sephardic accent, eat falafel instead of kugel [traditional Ashkenazi dish], have never worn a shtreimel [fur hat worn by some Hasidic Jews] in their lives, don't know Ashkenazi customs, haven't read a word from Rabbeinu Gershom to the Rema [important Ashkenazi rabbis], they don't have an Ashkenazi mentality, they know three words in Yiddish: tits, belly button, and ass. Culturally, they're completely gentiles. A committee should be established to empower the heritage of Ashkenazi Jewry! You suppressed Yiddish literature, erased Haredi painters, crudely excluded Hasidic dances, and when have they ever played Ashkenazi melodies or cantorial music on the radio? The secular Jews even exterminated the Yiddishe Mama [stereotypical Jewish mother], and today their mothers yell at their children in the street.

And the Mizrahi gets angry (although it's not politically correct to write that a Mizrahi gets angry): Can you compare this to the discrimination against Mizrahim? And I say: Mizrahim? Mizrahi Judaism is a completely ridiculous concept. Is Spain in the East? Is Morocco in the East? It's actually the far West. Where did you get this nonsense of calling yourselves Mizrahim [Easterners]? Maybe from Orientalism? Because the correct idea is Northern Jewry and Southern Jewry. A single glance at the map makes this clear. So why Mizrahim, maybe to avoid calling yourselves Sephardim because it's too religious, even though it's your true tradition, which you deny in self-hatred? In short, you didn't preserve your tradition, and we did, hence your jealousy and hatred. You, unlike us, dress like modern gentiles and think like modern gentiles, not like the Israel of old. Secularism is a culture, and culture has an origin, not just people. But what can you do, its origin is not Jewish. Your entire social structure is completely gentile, you even believe in democracy, which is a Greek-pagan invention.

And the Mizrahi shouts (although it's not politically correct to write that a Mizrahi shouts): You're going to tell me who's Jewish! My grandfather was much more Jewish than you. You Ashkenazi Haredim are extremist-fundamentalists-living in Poland, compared to the moderation of Mizrahi Judaism, that is, Sephardic. And you, who enjoy the budgets, should thank democracy! And I say: No thanks! Don't you see that democracy is in global decline and turning into ochlocracy? According to Polybius, this is a necessary historical stage on the way to the kingdom of the House of David, who is known to be Ashkenazi, as evidenced by Rashi being his descendant. By the end of the century, there will be no democracy, phooey!

And now the Mizrahi laughs (I think it's okay to write that a Mizrahi laughs): So you're against democracy too and want an Ashkenazi king? You're a real clown. And I laugh: Of course! The spread of populism on the world map is identical to the spread of Facebook, and this might finally be the end of democracy. Some Hitler of Facebook will arise, just as the first Hitler was of radio, which is a similar medium, oral, but he won't deal with genocide but with the destruction of culture. The first Internet war will be a cultural war. This doesn't mean people won't be eliminated, but that the people who will be eliminated will be cultural figures, and people will be culturally eliminated. And then they'll finally understand that you shouldn't give power to the masses, which nowadays they tend to call the public, as if that's better. And the whole world will understand that the way to deal with technology is the Ashkenazi Haredi way. Not necessarily religious Haredism, there can be secular Haredism, or Buddhist, or Muslim.

The big mistake is identifying Haredism with fundamentalism. The National Religious are the fundamentalists of Judaism. Haredism is something else, a completely different proposal for the world, which it completely missed. Haredism is an intensification of traditionalism, not of religiosity. It deals with cultural preservation, but not in a museum-like manner, rather in a living one. The essence of Haredism is zealously guarding culture and adopting only media technologies and social structures in which the culture can exist. Not every culture can exist in every medium and every structure. The book destroyed many cultures. Among them, of course, secret cultures. The book murdered the Zohar [central text in Jewish mysticism], in the very act of printing it became dead. Facebook is killing secular culture and it doesn't even know it yet. People no longer read literature. And even literary people prefer Facebook to a book. If there isn't a literary community of the Haredi type, the novel will soon die in our days, amen. And only the dream will remain.

And the Mizrahi chuckles: Come on, you're nothing more than a reaction to secularism! And I answer seriously: Exactly! And that's exactly how history progresses, through reactions, in a dialectical manner, and we are the next stage. Haredism is the next era after the Enlightenment, hence its tendency towards black, it's actually a counter-revolution to the Renaissance, it fights against man for the sake of culture, to return us to the blessed darkness of the Middle Ages. The story with the individual ("Me, me, me!") is over and now it's just the decadence of that era. After post-modernism and post-humanism, there will be neo-Middle Ages, the new darkness - and that's Haredism.

When something becomes so old that it seems completely obsolete - that's when it always comes back, because everything is in waves and circles, that's the fractal nature of history. Only the fools of every era think that time is an arrow forward, in their direction of course, forever, and therefore are unable to see the future, because there's a limit to how far one can progress in one direction. And they are always, always surprised by the oldest and most stable movement in the universe, from atoms to galaxies - the cyclical movement. And that's why Haredism is the avant-garde. Also from a literary perspective. The literature of the future will look much more like a page of Talmud than a page from a novel. This is the end of long texts. That's it.