Jewish Extremism II: Anti-Indulgence Activists October 12, 2008

Haredi activists here in Brooklyn have begun defacing advertisements in a campaign with a new target.

This time, it’s not immodesty. It’s not television or internet. It’s not about secular or non-Jewish music.

This time, it’s restaurants.

The charedi news wire VIN reports:

Over the past several years, the Chasidic community of Williamsburg has experienced several incidents in which anonymous community activists destroyed, damaged or defaced advertising or signage of various business establishments.

The motivation behind the incidents is spiritual. Ads featuring highly detailed images of tantalizing food—and businesses hawking an unnecessarily wide variety of food, such a the now-shuttered Sub on Wheels once parked along a Williamsburg street—are seen as excessive and indulgent by austerity-minded activists, who are alarmed by what they see as an intrusion of secular, pleasure-oriented values into their community.

In two recent incidents, an enormous building-side banner advertising Grill on Lee, a new gourmet restaurant in the neighborhood’s heart, was sliced halfway, and a Satmar butcher shop with large photographs of dish-laden tables in its windows had those photos cut out.

VIN News has learned that the same activists behind the most recent defacings are also those behind the campaign that forced entrepreneur Nathan Lichtenstein, a Chosid himself, to close his Sub on Wheels enterprise.

AN UNNECESSARILY WIDE VARIETY OF FOOD?? Unnecessarily wide variety? Subs? What is “necessary”, then?

“You get kugel. We got potato or spinach.”

“Could I get some lukshen (noodle) kugel with salt & pepper?”

“What do you think this is? Get out of here! Rasha!”

Now even glatt kosher restaurants are on the road to having to watch how many options they put on their menus for fear of having their billboards defaced? Subs constitute an intrusion of secular values? Can one get onions with their secular values? How fragile is the community that it has to protect itself from sandwiches?

While the argument could be made that upscale kosher dining establishments like Circa-NY and Solo (or their heimishe counterparts, restaurants like Boro Park’s Glatt a la Carte) do represent a certain level of acceding to a mindset that is alien to Orthodox Judaism — they are hardly a “Sub on Wheels”, and no one would open such a place in Williamsburg, the bastion of heimishkeit that it is. But is adherence to tradition a reason to limit people’s selections at restaurants to only a “necessary” variety of food?

This is “zealotry” on a whole new level.

I wonder what Brooklyn will look like in 15 years.