“…the throngs of devout Jews showed to which extent the ultra-Orthodox live by their own rules, some of them archaic, while wielding disproportionate power in the modern state of Israel.

Parents of European, or Ashkenazi, descent at a girls’ school in the West Bank settlement of Emanuel don’t want their daughters to study with schoolgirls of Mideast and North African descent, known as Sephardim.

The Ashkenazi parents insist they aren’t racist, but want to keep the classrooms segregated, as they have been for years, arguing that the families of the Sephardi girls aren’t religious enough”

From the New York Times.

The very, very insular world of Hasidic Jews is a fascinating one (peep this photo essay from Chloe Dewe Mathews of the English community’s annual trip to the archetypally grim and grey holiday town of Aberystwyth, which looks a little like a sudden slip sideways in time), but it’s also fucking scary. Why worry about ‘fundamentalists’ outside your borders when you have them this close to home?

PS: ‘Not religious enough’ = euphemism of the year