Hasidic actor walks off Portman movie:
First he couldn’t hold Natalie Portman’s hand – and now a Williamsburg Hasidic Jew-turned-actor has to give up his chance to hit it big in a Hollywood movie.
….
“I am backing out of the movie,” said Karpen, a kitchen cabinet salesman. “It’s not acceptable in my community. It’s a lot of pressure I am getting. They [the rabbis] didn’t like the idea of a Hasidic guy playing in Hollywood.
Sounds kind of meshugana to me. But there’s more:
Then came the howls of protest about his unorthodox job.
“This is when I woke up and saw that I made a big mistake. My kids mean everything to me and my community where I live means everything to me,” said Karpen, who comes from a prominent Williamsburg, Brooklyn, family.
His longtime friend Levi Okunov said the Karpens had to flee the city for the weekend. “The community wants to kill him,” he said.
I’m assuming “kill” in the figurative sense, but it is an interesting window into the mores of the Hasidic community and how it varies from that of most Americans, including most Orthodox Jews. The Hasidic communities came in large numbers to the United States during and after World War II. Prior to this period some of their rebbes worried that American culture would corrupt their youth; American Jews of the period were often the children and grandchildren of religiously observant European Jews who had shifted toward the Reform movement. In the United States the Hasidic Jews have maintained themselves as a community apart, and in some ways resemble the Amish in the distinctiveness of their normative framework (attitudes toward sex, maintaining a German dialect as a primary means of communication amongst themselves, etc.).
Finally, more ominous:
“She’s [Portman] the only one I was willing to work with,” Karpen said. “I was shocked that she’s a Hollywood big shot. We talked in Hebrew. … She wants to become more religious.”
Via Accidental Blogger.
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