Book review: Tuvia Tenenbom's "Careful, Beauties Ahead! "

Tuvia Tenenbom's books all have the same style: Tenenbom goes around the world and uses his disarming personality to get people - often antisemites - to reveal things they would never tell anyone, or he uses faux-naivete to expose the hypocrisy of his targets. 

One theme that goes through his books is that he genuinely likes most ordinary people (and especially their food) while he finds most leaders and officials to be hypocrites.

In his latest book,  "Careful, Beauties Ahead!", Tenenbom is using his trademark interview style, but the subject is more personal than in previous books. Tuvia grew up as a haredi Jew in Bnei Brak, and in this book he spends a year among the Chassidic and Litvish (yeshivish) Jews of Israel. 

As a religious Jew myself, even though I am not haredi, this makes the book more personal for me as well.

Tuvia spends most of the time in Mea Shearim, the religious neighborhood in Jerusalem. He gravitates towards the most extreme anti-Zionist Jews but he doesn't ask them much about Zionism. He asks them about God, about spirituality, about angels, about the resurrection of the dead, about why women cover their hair after marriage. He then returns to the neighborhood of his youth in Bnei Brak.

It is easy to cheer him on when his targets are antisemites in Germany or the UK. When he talks about Torah leaders, it makes makes it more challenging to try to distinguish between his own personal biases and what he actually observed himself. 

For example, he grew up near Rav Chaim Kanievsky, a giant of Torah learning, but he always regarded him as weird. He gets people to say negative things about the now-late leader of Orthodox Jewry, but doesn't mention anything positive about him.  

One striking part of the book is that he discusses how ordinary Chassidim make a "kvittel," a piece of paper that they write their names on, and have glorious stories about how their Rebbes have miraculously discerned amazing details of questioners' lives based just on the kvittel. When Tuvia manages to visit three separate Chassidic rebbes, every one of them tell him that they cannot do anything supernatural with the kvittels. 

For me, who wants to see more Jewish unity, Tuvia's descriptions of  infighting within the Chassidic community and antipathy towards Jews outside it are distressing. The book meanders with his travels, but one theme that emerges is the split between the "old Ger" and the "new Ger" Chassidim, and the threats by the old Ger leaders to ostracize those who want to follow the new one. 

Similarly but more amusingly, Tuvia documents how the the main Satmar study hall/bais medresh has an announcement prohibiting anyone from studying who does not wear an overcoat or who speaks Hebrew instead of Yiddish. An observer tells Tuvia that the rule has nothing to do with Zionism but is meant to exclude Sephardic Jews, whose own bais medresh does not have air conditioning or free coffee, so they would go to study at Satmar. 

In Mea Shearim, there is a lot of anti-Zionist graffiti. Tennebom doesn't definitively identify those who are responsible, but it appears to be youths who really cannot hack all day study in yeshiva. Of course, these are the ones who would be first drafted into the Israeli army. 

One of the sadder parts of the book, for me, was the ignorance of the subjects - and even some of the Chassidic leaders. They couldn't answer basic questions about Judaism. The main exception was a  teacher at the ba'al teshuva yeshiva Aish HaTorah who answered most of Tenenbom's questions (not to Tuvia's satisfaction) and then emailed Tenenbom the sources to the answers he didn't know. But most of the Chassidim could not point to sources for customs; one could not distinguish between a midrash about Korah's followers and what it says in the Torah about him. He also makes a good point about how the haredi world is woefully ignorant of the books of the Prophets. 

Tuvia being Tuvia, he also eviscerates an anti-Haredi secular scholar he interviewed who claims that every child in Mea Shearim is the victim of sexual abuse and none of them contribute to the economy (80% of Haredi women work, but they don't seem to count in the calculations of the progressives.) 

Tenenbom ends off with his observations that despite his criticisms, these are his people. He is more comfortable and feels more at home among the otherworldly Chassidim of Mea Shearim than with the genteel gentiles of Berlin or New York. Most of the religious Jews he meets, he loves. He describes the soulfulness of praying extremely slowly and of a Chassidic shalosh seudos that extends way past Shabbos. 

Despite his many criticisms and jibes, and the book is filled with them, these are his people - and he feels that affinity with them far more than the secular and Reform Jews he meets along the way. 

Conversely, Tuvia writes that he went back to visit the community on the following Simchat Torah . He didn't need more material for the book; he visited because he wanted to be with his new friends for a very happy holiday. 

It was October 7, 2023. 

His new friends asked him what all the sirens meant, since they couldn't see the news during the holiday. When he found out and told them, the universal response to the news of the Hamas massacre of mostly secular Jews was horror and prayers. All the rhetoric he had heard and seen about how much they hate non-haredim disappeared when there was a real tragedy among fellow Jews. 

That is the real theme of the book. Jews love to argue, they disagree vehemently about everything, and in the Land of Israel they ironically have more freedom to be vociferous about their disagreements because one does not put on pretenses of civility among family. But in the end, we are all family, and the supposedly extreme "ultra-Orthodox" are more loving of their fellow Jews than the progressive, secular Jews who pretend to want a world like John Lennon's' "Imagine." 

"Careful, Beauties Ahead!" is at least twice the size of Tenenbom's other books I've reviewed, possibly because the subject matter means so much more to him. Any discomfort one may feel when reading the book is more than offset by Tuvia's honesty, humor and humanity.

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Book review: The Taming of the Jew, by Tuvia @Tenenbom

There is an old joke about two Jews who are about to be executed by firing squad in Czarist Russia. One tells the other that he is going to request a last cigarette, and the other says, "No! Don't make trouble!"

That is how the Jews of the UK sound in Tuvia Tenenbom's latest book, The Taming of the Jew.

The book repeats his style of his previous books - part Borat, part Columbo, but always keenly intelligent, Tenenbom travels the world with genuine curiosity to meet all kinds of people and to get them to reveal how they really feel.

In this book, he visits the United Kingdom, where he meets a serious challenge: British people don't tell the truth. A fan of theatre, Tenenbom recognizes that the reason the British are such wonderful actors on stage is because they hone their skills all their lives, rarely revealing their true feelings, and many times in this book he listens to British people saying things that are the exact opposite of the truth. 

Tenenbom's journey came as the UK was grappling with Brexit and the Labour Party was grappling with its own antisemitism issues. Others have done excellent reviews of the book and there is a lot there  - it is far longer than his other books. 

I would like to concentrate on what he reveals about the Jewish community in Great Britain.

The first Jews he meets are small communities in Ireland, Scotland and Leeds. As he writes about the elderly Leeds community, at first they tell him that everything is great, "but if you continue talking to them, they tell you that everything is a disaster."

In Manchester, there is a significant Jewish community, thousands strong. Tenenbom asks a couple at a pizza shop if they ever heard of any antisemitism there, and they say, not at all. He then asked their eight year old son who responded that he and a friend were pelted with eggs recently because they were Jews. 

The father sheepishly admitted that it was true, and then said, "What do you want me to do? If I tell you about the antisemitic attacks that we experience here, you'll write about them, inviting copycats, and more people will attack us. If I tell you that everything's good, hopefully it will be good."

That is a serious level of fear and denial. And later Tenenbom finds out that two kosher restaurants in Manchester were firebombed and spent months rebuilding. Tenenbom hears similar stories about kosher restaurants in Golders Green, the Jewish section of London. (When I visited Golders Green one weekend in the 1990s, the synagogues there were already fortresses, way before US shuls started worrying about shootings and bombings.)

I follow the news fairly closely and I was not aware of these firebombings. It seems the Jews don't want to make trouble.

In Gateshead, where there is a major yeshiva, the Jews live in absolute fear. The Jewish bookstore keeps its shutter down all the time; Jews are attacked all the time on the streets in similar ways we saw religious Jews attacked in Brooklyn. The Gateshead yeshiva itself does not allow anyone in without authorization. 

The contrast between the security at the synagogues Tenenbom visits and the mosques, which are wide open, couldn't be clearer. Many British synagogues are fortresses and often do not even display their names on the outside. The world talks about Islamophobia but the houses of worship shows who really is in danger.

One other alarming episode is an interview with Lord Stone of Blackheath, who is Jewish. He is more forthcoming than most of the Jews interviewed. He is not close to right wing - he is working on a plan for Jews and Palestinians to join a federation, he has experts working on the constitution for such a Frankenstate, he thinks it is the best chance for peace. He won't directly address the Labour Party antisemitism issue, but then he says something shocking: "I have a bag which I carry everywhere. In it I have my passport nd twenty-seven different currencies. If I had to leave tomorrow, I'd go. I'm 76 and I've lived here for 76 years and I'm a member of the House of Lords and yet.....That's why I've got a flat in Jerusalem."

A Jewish Lord does not feel at home in the country he has lived in his entire life.

(Yesterday, the London Shomrim released a horrific video of a pregnant woman being attacked because she was Jewish. Tenenbom keeps the tone light, but the hate of Jews in the UK is real and dangerous.)

Tenenbom also notes how ubiquitous Palestinian flags and murals are, especially in Ireland. When he speaks to Irish people nearly all of them express hate and disgust for Israel and love of Palestinians. When Tenenbom presses them for details, they know less than nothing about Israelis nor about the Palestinians they show such solidarity with. The Palestinian issue is an excuse to hate Jews and feel righteous about it, that's all. It is proof positive that anti-Zionism is often a thin excuse for good old fashioned Jew-hatred.  It is notable thatTenenbom interview a number of Jewish politicians who agree with the IHRA working definition of antisemitism but are unwilling to apply it to, say, Jeremy Corbin.

Is Tenenbom's characterization of Jews as a group that is too scared to stand up for themselves accurate? To an extent. He did interview Rachel Riley, who didn't grow up with that fear and is now an outspoken voice against antisemitism. There are other Jews in England who are not afraid to make waves with their unabashed support of Israel. But it is hard to escape the fact that so many Jews clearly are scared out of their wits, acting like the pre-war Jews in Russia and Europe who went to great lengths to "not make trouble." 

It never works.

The Taming of the Jew is as funny, entertaining, and maddening as Tenenbom's other books, and it must be read. 

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Book review: Hello, Refugees! by Tuvia Tenenbom

Did I ever tell you about my dinner with Tuvia Tenenbom?

Tuvia is a bestselling author that I've reviewed twice here. He writes in a very entertaining style. I like Tuvia!

I was invited to a dinner party about a month ago hosted by Phyllis Chesler in her apartment. The food was great and the guests were even more so. One of them was Tuvia, who is a lot like Phyllis in important ways.

Phyllis is one of the pioneers of the modern women's movement. However, she has become disillusioned with her old friends who have now become anti-Zionist and anti-Israel. Phyllis, no fool, knows first hand how dangerous Islam is to feminism and how feminism and Zionism fit together naturally.

In other words, both Phyllis and Tuvia care little about political correctness. They care about the truth. That's why I like them.

Over a delicious dinner, Tuvia asks me why I didn't review his book about his travels through America. I tell him that if he sends me a review copy, I'd be happy to! I have a weak spot for free books, just like Tuvia has a weak spot for good food and honest people no matter who they are or what they believe.

During the course of the evening, Tuvia tries to wheedle out of me my real name. My anonymity is almost a shtick now, but I refuse to tell it to him. He keeps trying. He asks the server to pour me liquor. He asks me other questions to trap me to tell it to him.

I realize fairly soon, having read his work, that he won't give up until he gets the answer. I also realize that I am giving him my address to send the book to, so he can figure out my name anyway! So I tell him my name, knowing that he would like it. He does.

After I review his book, Tuvia emails me asking me if I'll review his brand new book, Hello Refugees!, about his travels throughout Germany to dig up information about the huge wave of Muslim refugees that were admitted there. I am skeptical about whether this fits into the general theme of the blog, but he writes back to me and says:

 It’s about a people who not long ago were very busy cremating Jews and are now quite busy trying  to impress the world that they the best human beings world-wide, so that can stand tall and tell the Jews what they really think of them. Is this not an Elder's cup of tea?

I agree it is my cup of tea and in no time the book arrives at my doorstep.

Tuvia writes in an entertaining way, first person and present tense. His style, both in writing and interviewing, is knowingly naive. But Tuvia is quite smart and he a skilled interviewer who can almost always get past the soundbites to find out what his subject really thinks. Sometimes he employs subterfuge to get there.

We are traveling along with him as he takes his rental car from city to city in Germany, speaking to any refugees he can find and sneaking in to their refugee camps/housing. In general, these places are guarded by good German guards who will not let in any Westerners or any reporters. Tuvia knows Arabic, and he convinces the refugees he meets to let him in so they can tell him their stories.

Tuvia genuinely likes his Arab friends, and he is genuinely horrified at the conditions of most of the places they are staying. The Germans are happy to allow these refugees into their country but didn't plan very well how they would be housed. So groups that have hated each other for centuries are thrown together, where in at least one place they spend the evenings knifing each other.

Nice!

Tenenbom also speaks to German officials, from the left and the right.

One question he asks every German he meets is, why are the Germans so much more welcoming of these refugees than any other European country? The answer, no matter whom he asks, is the same: Because of Adolf. The Germans do not want anyone to think that they are still Nazis and they want to show the world how progressive and open-minded and open-hearted they are so everyone will love them.

There is another fairly consistent pattern among the German leftists he meets. They like to bring up, often unprompted, how evil Israel is. They'll throw the word "Gaza" in the conversation even if they don't know Tenenbom is Jewish. They want the world to know not only that they are progressive and welcoming, but also that they are better than those Israeli Jews whose grandparents they gassed to death.

Another surprising bit comes when Tuvia interviews the most hated right-wing Germans, who are reviled as today's Nazis. Every single one says that they support giving asylum to people who are genuinely fleeing persecution and war, for example in Syria. They want to allow entry to people who would be killed in an instant if they returned to their homes.

The German Right is more liberal than many centrist Americans.

But this doesn't stop them from being spit upon, hounded, and regarded as evil incarnate by the good Germans who are so proud of how they have transcended the nastiness of the past and now treat their Muslims  better than they treated their Jews. Sure they are still in camps, with inadequate medicine and plumbing and beds, but they aren't dead! And besides, the Jews are acting horribly in Israel now, so the Germans can feel good about themselves.

In fact, many of the refugees that Tuvia interviews are economic "refugees," looking for a better life in Europe. They aren't in danger. They want to marry blonde German women.

The good German liberals aren't so liberal as they are self-righteous. They don't really care about the condition of their Muslim guests, but they want everyone to know that they are really good people today, and not like their own ancestors. (East Germans don't have the same complex, Tuvia notes.)

Hello, Refugees! is an entertaining read. While it isn't about Jews and Israel, in many ways it explains a great deal about how Jews and Israelis are treated today. But most of all, as always, Tenenbom shows in his deceptively simple style that the truth is far more complex than any of the intellectuals can understand.

(If you didn't notice, I tried to mimic Tenenbom's writing style here. With mixed results.)

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Book Review: Tuvia Tenenbom's "The Lies They Tell"

As I read "The Lies They Tell," Tuvia Tenenbom's account of his visiting some 28 of the 50 United States over the course of about a year, I found myself thinking of two disparate classics of pop culture..

The first is Simon and Garfunkel's classic "America", a song about a road trip to find the real America.

The other is Columbo, the character played by the late Peter Falk, whose rumpled, seemingly distracted and always underestimated detective always gets to the bottom of the crime.

Tenenbom is Columbo, and he unearths a much more cynical take on Americans than Paul Simon's summary of them being "empty and aching."

As he did in his book "Catch the Jew" Tenenbom travels through a country - this time, the United States - and talks to everyone who catches his fancy to better understand what America is all about.

The results aren't pretty.

Tenenbom visits the "Red Zone" of Detroit, a neighborhood where black people shoot each other for little reason. Tenenbom notes, "There are countless Western humanitarian organizations, funded to the tune of billions, that send activists all over the world to improve the lot of the downtrodden. why aren't they here?" It turns out that Detroit has dozens of similar hopeless crime-riddled neighborhoods.

In a similar vein, Tenenbom visits the equally dismal Englewood district of Chicago that Barack Obama claims to have helped out so much while he was organizing communities. It is a hellhole where gangs rule and people are afraid. No one can name a single thing that improved since Obama claims he helped them so much. Police, heavily armed and armored, are aghast that Tenenbom is there, strongly urging him  to leave as soon as possible.

But Tenenbom also visits vapid  liberal intellectuals in Fargo, gun collectors and prisoners in Wisconsin, cowboys (or echoes of cowboys) in Montana, Seattle yuppies who pretend to care about the downtrodden but who ignore the huge number of homeless people on their streets, Native American reservations where no one knows anything about their own history as they spend their days in a drunken stupor, the Henry Ford Museum where even the helpful databases have been purged of the word "Jew" to whitewash his antisemitism, black churches where Tenenbom is transported by the music and beauty as he contrasts it to the black gangs who kill each other when they don't like how they are looked at.

Tuvia is, many times, taken by the beauty of the land even as he is frustrated, amused and angry at its citizens. He has poetic descriptions of glaciers in Alaska, canyons and mountains and geysers in the West and the prairie in Kansas.

Tenenbom also finds a lot of people with strong opinions on Jews and Israel, views that are not always in concert. A "Jewish Voice for Peace" member in Washington, DC calls him a "fucking filthy Jew" but won't repeat it on camera, claiming only to be pro-Palestinian. A Somalian in Seattle admires Hitler because he killed Jews. A Jewish mayor in Alaska admits, under Tenenbom's probing questions, that there is right-wing antisemitism in his state. Lots of people who say in the same breath that they care about climate change and Palestine. Very few who know the first thing about Palestine; complaining about "Jewish settlers in Gaza" or how "the State of Israel replaced the State of Palestine." American Jewish liberal synagogues more interested in demonizing Israel than supporting the Jewish state. Christian leaders who support Israel but say Jews will all go to hell.

He also finds many Jews who are against Israel and who are very, very concerned about black and racism, especially in the aftermath of the Dylann Roof murders. He cannot find any blacks who give a damn about antisemitism, though.

In the beginning of the book, Tenenbom speaks with outgoing ADL head Abe Foxman, who says that his own surveys find only 10-12% of Americans are antisemitic, but he knows that Tenenbom will find a higher percentage than that, because Tuvia knows how to make people lose their inhibitions. Not only is Foxman exactly correct, but the entire book shows how scared Americans are to say their real opinions on anything. The America that Tenenbom discovers is walking on eggshells, celebrating "freedom" and "liberty" but afraid to express themselves or to offend anyone.

Tenenbom makes a quick detour into Mexico where he sees many people who all look like they belong to the same tribe and who are comfortable in their own skin and their own land. The American melting pot, on the other hand, puts Americans on edge. As he puts it, "Through the process of forcibly dumping its citizens into a giant boiling pot of diversity and shaming them if they are not proud of it, America’s democracy succeeded in instilling fear in the minds of its citizens and effectively created a stench of segregation that reaches the highest heavens.....A telling effect of the forced melting pot is the majority of Americans who are afraid to share their political and religious views with strangers. In the Land of the Free, the Brave are quiet."

The book is filled with biting observations that do not discriminate between right and left, black and white. For example, he describes gentrification in Dallas:

The new residents, whites, are often self-described liberals or progressive liberals who tell anybody listening that they dedicate their lives to helping the poor blacks and Spanish of America. In reality, they are the very ones who drive the blacks and the Spanish into homelessness. To blind you, and themselves, to this reality, they frequent a local bar where a black guy plays the blues, and they feel really, really good and really, really liberal. 

Or this description of American Judaism:

People who dedicate their resources to help others and to fight themselves are doomed to succeed on both fronts.

This book is well worth reading.

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Book Review: "Catch the Jew"

I mentioned recently that I was reading Tuvia Tenenbom's "Catch the Jew" and that it was great.

Tenenbom, who grew up Haredi in Bnei Brak and left Judaism and Israel, returned to Israel to write this book of his impressions as he met people around the country.. He goes where the wind (and his stomach) takes him, usually playing a German journalist, asking innocent and simple questions from people who aren't used to being questioned at all.

Arabs, upon hearing that he is German, often welcome him as a fellow antisemite. To an extent, so do some of the  never ending stream of Europeans who visit Israel and the territories to spend money against Israel. And that is exactly what they are doing - not trying to help Palestinians but to hurt Israel.

The book is amazing. It beautifully deconstructs the current culture of the Israel-hating crowd, from within and without Israel.

Every page has examples of malicious Europeans, lying Arabs and clueless (or self-hating) Israeli Jews. Here are only a tiny percentage of the many anecdotes that Tenenbom mentions - each of which would be worth an entire blog post or article.:

• An Al Quds University professor tells Tenenbom that Israel won't allow the university to paint a small spot on the ceiling, and hours later he sees that the Israel is allowing the EU to spend 2.4 million euros to refurbish a Turkish bathhouse in east Jerusalem. 
• As he walks from the Mount of Olives to Gethsemane, he sees the remains of thousands of Jewish gravestones lining the road, with Hebrew letters still visible.
• Hanan Ashrawi says that Palestinians have lived there for "hundreds of thousands of years." She also gets upset when Tenenbom asks her why the Christian population has diminished so quickly under PA control. 
• A PA spokesman, when asked for his definition of Palestinian culture, says "Tolerance and coherence." Tenenbom then asks him why he cannot smoke in public on Ramadan. "It is about respect." Tuvia then tells him that Ashrawi said that twenty years earlier, Christians could smoke on Ramadan in the daylight.
• A Palestinian woman describes how Israel oppresses her but then mentions that she got free university education in Israel.
• He relates to a Jewish liberal lady how intolerant the Arabs in Ramallah are, She insists that he is lying. He asks her how many times she's been in Ramallah and the answer is zero.
• An Israeli leftist professor says she has studied Judaism for years and years. He then asks her a basic Bible question that stumps her.
• Tenenbom sees multi-million dollar mansions in Hebron, with plaques outside saying that they are being paid for by the EU.
• Gideon Levy describes how wonderful Palestinians are and how terrible Israeli Jews are. But he admits when questioned that he does not have a single Palestinian friend.
• The Palestinian Antiquities Minister, when asked, makes it clear that she really wants all Jews to leave Israel even if she can't say it out loud.
• There is an  EU-funded trip to Yad Vashem hosted by an "ex-Jew" who tells his tourists that Israelis just as bad as the Nazis were - and that Herzl died of syphilis.
• Jibril Rajoub tells Tanenbom that the reason the EU funds "pro-Palestinian" NGOs is so that they won't get terror attacks like they did in the '70s.. (He backtracks when asked to clarify.)
• Rabbi Arik Asherman, of "Rabbis for Human Rights," is exposed as being ignorant of the basics of the Torah, lying about his organization being apolitical, and shown to simper as the Arabs he pretends to love mercilessly treat him like dirt.
• Tenenbom goes to Al Quds University to attend a "human rights competition" but finds out that it is a scam - the EU pays for competitions that are never held. (After this book was published, I saw that one was held the following year.)
• An ICRC spokeswoman gets caught in a lie when she says she saw Israeli soldiers beat up a diplomat with her own eyes, then admits she wasn't anywhere near the alleged event.(In fact, the diplomat attacked the IDF.)
• A movie house in Jenin is generously funded by Europeans, but has practically no customers.
• A highly educated Jewish couple are told by their Arab friends that soon the land will be free of Jews, one of them had been gang-raped by an Arab gang and an old Arab friend had sexually abused their granddaughter. But the husband insisted that they really wanted peace. (After prodding, the wife admitted that they were fools.)
• After much discouragement, Tenenbom visits.a run-down Bedouin shack in the Negev, and finds that while the outside is ugly, the inside is like paradise.

Tenenbom sees all of this and is amazed, and eventually angry. He exposes diplomats who behave the exact opposite of how diplomats should act, journalists who don't ask the simplest questions, and NGOs who pretend that they care about oppressed people yet would never, ever give a dime to a poor or oppressed Jew (or Egyptian or Yemeni, for that matter.)

The entire situation is quite literally theater, where everyone plays their parts and everyone denies the obvious - because the truth would destroy the illusions that so many people have invested their lives in. Tenenbom's genius is to expose the obvious to the players themselves, who react with anger or denial. Their world is surrounded with like-minded unthinking drones and they cannot abide a truth-teller, often reacting by accusing Tuvia of being a Jew. It is very clear that they would not act the way they act  or say the things they do initially if they knew he was Jewish. (At one point, a Norwegian asks him "Are you a J-" and Tenenbom lets the question hang there for a minute before saying he is German. The man, who had claimed that he is there because of a long tradition of Norwegian care about the poor and downtrodden, then admits that his country collaborated with the Nazis and deported their Jews, who were presumably not poor or downtrodden.)

The author also exposes Jewish charlatans and extremists, but his main target remains the self-delusional (or knowingly deceptive) Leftists and Arabs.

In the end, Tenenbom is pessimistic about the long-term prospects of Israel, given that he has seen so many Jews who have aligned with their enemies. However, he does not seem to realize that his methods of research - while very entertaining - are not a representative sampling of Israelis (nor Arabs.) Most Israeli Jews who are proud of their country and work to make it successful are not the ones who are hanging around in areas Tenenbom frequents. Most Israelis are normal and see quite clearly what kind of neighborhood they are in; but they are not as entertaining as the hypocrites at Haaretz or the latte-drinkers in Tel Aviv, so there was less effort to reach them.

All in all, this book is a must-read.

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