Yeah, I'm a real bibliophile, a sucker for books. I devoured Israel is Real. It was so good, I bought the company. Oops, that's a line from a Gillette ad. It was so good, I bought the book. (The first read was from the library which meant I couldn't highlight it in my favorite yellow. Bummer. But now I own it, I can read it again. And highlight it.)
But first, I have to finish reading this one, Real Jews, pictured to the right. Ok, first I have to answer the question if all books, to be genuinely Jewish, must have "Real" in the title. Hmmm.
This one, also from the library, is an intriguing look at an aspect of Israeli life that I've really not been aware of: the disdain (hatred?) the majority of Jews in this secular state have for the Haredim, the ultra-Orthodox fundamentalist Jews.
A sample: "That is why I cannot get out of my head the jokes about gassing ultra-Orthodox or pushing them out of planes. Growing up in the United States, I was innocent of anti-Semitism. I never experienced it: I was never insulted; I was denied nothing because of my religion. Anti-Semitism existed as a grand abstraction, like communism, an unseen threat to all that I loved, an organizing principle of my worldview, but it was utterly absent from my life in any practical way. My first encounter with anti-Semitism was in Israel, and the anti-Semites were my people, my heroes, the people I'd moved halfway around the world to join. After many years, I had finally seen the face of anti-Semitism, and it looked surprisingly like my own" (p 10).
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