CEO: Orthodox Jews Are “Cancer” To Be “Excised” December 12, 2007

Here’s one to warm your spirits — because I know stories like this always fill me with joy.

Just lovely. Yeah, this one from Globes Online is a real winner:

Zohar Zisapel: Yeshiva students arrangement is a cancer: “The current situation is the result of the political activism of the haredim.”

Diana Bahur-Nir 10 Dec 07 13:10

“When Ben Gurion made his arrangement with the haredim (ultra-orthodox), he saw only a few dozen yeshiva students. Today, this has developed into a cancerous growth that must be excised so that it does not become even more malignant,” said RAD Data Communications Ltd. founder and chairman Zohar Zisapel at the “Israel’s wasted human capital” panel at the “Globes” Israel Business Conference 2007 yesterday.

Zisapel added, “We must revert to the original arrangement, and set a quota of a few dozen outstanding yeshiva students, for whom the Torah is their vocation, which is what the religious world really needs as a reservoir of future rabbis. The current situation is the result of the political activism of the haredim.

Zisapel said, “When studying Aramaic and Gemara instead of mathematics and English, few 20-year olds will be able to join the academic world, not only in computers, but also in other professions.”

Wasted human capital? Has a magic wand been waved, making absolutely all aspects of the Israeli labor force hospitable for non-modern Orthodox Jews? While one can not disagree with the fact that the kollel system has become way too much of a legislated part of the haredi lifecycle — “cancerous growth”?

Unmitigated anti-haredi prejudice not even given the courtesy of a thin veil of rhetoric to use as a cover, the “Aramaic and Gemara” line was only a codeword for “get secularized”. Drop the whole Torah thing. Learn “mathematics and English” (as if one can not learn from English-speaking Torah giants, or find trigonometry in Tosafos). Get “enlightened” and Westernized.

How 1705.