There is a post on the Yeshiva World News forum about having nothing to talk about with your husband and the comments that follow are quite atrocious. Instead of facing the huge problem of having nothing in common or of…
Tag: yeshivish
The fallout from allowing women to wear tefillin
While the entire frum community is in up in arms over whether or not women can wear tefillin without hurting their chances at a good shidduch, I have moved on and am alarmed at the possible fallout from this weakening…
10 best tznius posters and letters
I’m not exactly sure when certian people in the frum community decided to make tznius into the cause of all the calamities that befall the Jewish people, but it seems that the two major causes of evil in this world…
Will frummies finally celebrate Thanksgiving this year?
Thanksgiving is one of the few goyishe holidays that is actually a debate in the frum community. Unlike most other goyishe holidays, Thanksgiving is a new world holiday and therefore there is some sort of mesorah to celebrate it. It…
Kollel is not BS
Heshy, I know you’re going to spear me like Pinchas for saying this, but I also know that my points in this letter may be novel enough to make it onto your blog. I know you’re generally a good hearted…
Oh no the black hats are coming
I can see the fear in people’s eyes, when I mention that I counted 10 black hats this past Friday night in shul. As if these people didn’t realize that they belonged to a community known for it’s fervent baalei…
When did social media become the new yeshivish industry?
On a daily basis I get emails from dozens of frum people trying to sell me social media services, I have also recently started to receive calls from former classmates of mine who couldn’t do the kollel thing and went…
Letter to the editor: Why make fun of yeshivish people so much
Hi, I happen to run across your blog in doing a search for Pomegranate Supermarket. I read a few of your posts and I have to wonder, why all the negativity about yeshivish people? Many yeshivish bochurim and men (my…
Metzitzah B’peh is banned in Flatbush
I thought Ave-J was banned years ago, it hasn’t been really happening since the late 90’s. Find more bans on 4torah.com
There’s no such thing as mainstream Judaism
Guest post by Pop Chossid The summer before I left for Israel to study in Mayanot (a baal teshuva yeshiva in Jerusalem) for the first time, I had gone to a Shabbos lunch at a rabbi’s home in St. Louis,…
What do you call people who are not modern and not yeshivish?
Whether you like it or not, the Jewish community runs on labels. We need to have labels in order to know what community to live in, what schools to send our children to and what restaurants to eat at. Without…
Before the Baal Teshuva rapper craze there was Black Hattitude
If you can find it, I highly suggest finding the one album by Black Hattitude. They came out during the heyday of yeshivish culture, before some bastardization of the world called “yeshivish modern” came on the scene and their album…
21 ways not to be a Harry
A Harry is one of those terms you hear in the yeshiva world that you don’t hear anywhere else. For someone to even call someone else a Harry would automatically relegate them to some distant yeshiva past because modernishe folks…
I found some yeshivish people in the Bay Area
Upon finishing shemona esrei I saw something that I haven’t seen in a long time. There was a fellow with his hat pushed back high in his head, doing the full on fist pump shuckel. It appeared that he was…
What happened to appreciating what’s on the inside?
Not a day goes by where we don’t hear of a newspaper refusing to publish pictures of women, or of someone photoshopping a picture to appear more “tznius”. Why is there such an overblown obsession with keeping things tznius to…
Dear Heshy: Why do you always bash black hats?
Hesh, Been reading your blog for quite some time and I’ve always wondered what you had against black hats? As someone who was never really part of the yeshivishe velt like yourself (you mentioned that you went to Rochester and…
Another persons experience at the Asifa
By: Reverend Larry Kleinschmeckle They told me Reb Nachman would get me out of gehenom no matter how much internet I use. The Na Nachs one upped Chabad and actually showed up at CitiField. I looked high and low…
There aren’t enough frummies in the Bay Area
I miss those families that have erev shabbos kugel, I find this kind of weird because I’ve never really missed frummies before, but I guess human nature is that we miss the things we don’t have. To say that San…
Who can come up with the best caption for this picture?
Someone, I forgot who, sent me this picture he saw on the Wall Street Journal website. My ideas: Don’t worry you’ll find me. I’m the one without a hat. Jeez these guys smell real bad. You’d think I had tzaras…
Modern Orthodox Chumras
By definition the Modern Orthodox does not make chumras (stringencies) for itself. Generally, modern orthodoxy is about being an observant Jew without all of the social and communal obligations that have been invented over the years to separate from secular…
You know you’re not a yeshiva guy anymore when…
The fellow who started the following thread on Yeshiva World News‘ forum let me know about it so I copied and pasted a bunch of the more interesting postings here: I was a real yeshiva guy. 14 years in yeshiva…
Off the derech community affiliations
One of the things I like most about folks who are off the derech is seeing the differences between their views and how they label themselves depending on their backgrounds. As the unofficial frum community sociologist, I like tp study…
The flagship shul of the American Kiruv Industry
I was bored in shul this past Friday night, so I decided to do a statistical analysis of the people in attendance. I first counted out 120 men, then started breaking it down a bit more, I noticed very few…
Guide to the different crises of the frum community
I am sure that there have been many a crisis throughout the history of Jewish people, like the Golden Calf crisis and the Girls of Moab crisis, but in my lifetime alone I remember a number of crisis taking place…
Harnessing inspiration is next to impossible
I never thought I would enjoy learning, during high school I was in what they called the slow shiur, tghe dumb shiut or commonly referred to as the gimmel shiur. My shiur was full of kids who couldn’t wouldn’t or…