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| Tuvia Tenenbom (center) is seen alongside some Charedi fans. |
“Haredi women, like any other humans, want to look attractive. You can be modest, cover most of your body, and yet look sexier than any woman in a bikini.”
However, this is a problem for haredi men “because spillage of men’s seed is a great, great sin – the biggest sin ever.”
According to Tuvia Tenenbom, this explains why ultra-Orthodox men are taught not to look at women except for their wives. It also explains the title of his newest book, Careful, Beauties Ahead!
Scion of an ultra-Orthodox (haredi) family in Bnei Brak, Tenenbom left the milieu of the yeshiva as a young adult and has lived mainly in New York and Germany. In Germany, his fair looks and facility with the language enabled him to pass for a non-Jewish local.
That ability and his knack for gaining strangers’ trust and asking questions that elicit telling responses about deep-seated attitudes (particularly toward Jews and Israel), assured the success of his previous books: I Sleep in Hitler’s Room; Catch the Jew!; Hello, Refugees; The Lies They Tell; and The Taming of the Jew. I recommend all of them for both their entertainment value and shock value.
Disappointed after having plumbed the depths of humanity in Europe and the United States, Tenenbom came back after several decades to explore “the spiritual world that I ran away from; a world that I loved, and a world that I betrayed.”
Wearing his trademark suspenders and red eyeglasses, the avuncular journalist planted himself for several months in Mea She’arim, the quintessentially haredi Jerusalem neighborhood where signs warn female pedestrians not to walk around immodestly dressed.
