Word: hasidim
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Bushmills, or the fact that I don't sing and can't dance, but my cousin's wedding, in an artists' colony in western Galilee, had left me feeling a little disjointed. Like most clean-shaven agnostic half-Jews, I get slightly nervous around Hasidim, perhaps because we can't both be right about life. And though my cousin is of mixed-blood, like me, and was never particularly religious, his wedding guests included real-deal Hasids: Ultra-Orthodox men chanting and praying and rocking back and forth, in their fedora hats and tzitzit strings hanging around their waist...
...Jewish experience specifically. He had just defended its emphasis on good and evil back when a lot of religious leaders were denouncing the books as occult. "The following, I think I can tell you," he said, warming slightly to the topic. "Rowling is an astute observer of society. [Hasidim] have their inner truth, and inner logic," just as Rowling's world does...
...Apparently the Hasidim weren't aware of the movie's premise. As Spurlock says, "I'm not looking for trouble, I'm just looking for answers." A true American innocent abroad, the filmmaker figures that, if he asks nicely, maybe radical Islamists won't want to kill us. He's a Rodney King figure pleading for people to just get along. And even if Spurlock's one-man Peace Corps campaign doesn't work, he'll have fun trying. More fun than the viewer, sometimes. While embedded with U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he gets to fire a rocket launcher...
...devote years of effort to the Hasidim? Harris contends that they once constituted three-fourths of East European Jews and consequently a majority of U.S. Jews probably have Hasidic forebears. "I felt like putting them back in the world in some manner," says Harris, adding that they "represent some antique version of myself...
...author ends her project with mixed feelings about the Hasidim. "I'm more attracted to Judaism because of them," she says, but she sees little appeal in their way of life. As someone who believes in God but is also assimilated, remarks Harris, "I did not like the Lubavitchers' rigidity, the absoluteness of right and wrong that they perceived. I consider unsureness to be the proper condition of life." --By Richard N. Ostling. Reported by Michael P. Harris/New York