Careful, Beauties Ahead! Quotes

“Man’s reality is rarely logic’s best friend.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!

“Haredi leaders were afraid that if Jews were to free themselves from their anti-Semitic enemies in various European countries, the rank and file of European Jewry would turn their backs on Jewish religion, and the Haredi world would cease to exist. This did not happen. Haredi Jews never had it so good as they now have it in Israel, where their numbers reach well above one million.

During World War II, my maternal grandfather was given the opportunity, by members of the Jewish Agency, to save himself and the community he led from the approaching Romanian Fascists, aided and guided by the Nazis, who were about to catch up with the Jews of his town. The Jewish Agency people offered to smuggle him and others of his community out of Romania and into the soon-to-be-formed State of Israel. He refused. ”I would rather be with the Nazis," he said to them, "than with the Zionists." When the Fascists and the Nazis finally arrived at the gates of his town, he welcomed them with bread and salt, the way kings were once welcomed when entering a city. In response, they emptied their bullets on his head, took those of his children who were in town to the nearby Rut River, threw them into the water, making sure they drowned to death, then shot his wife, the mother of the drowned children. His daughter, my mother, never forgave the Zionists for the Nazis' crimes. Makes sense? No. Man's reality is rarely logic's best friend.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!

“Breslev, luckily, has a Seed Spillage account with The Name, and He pays all expenses.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!

“There are those who believe what they read in Sabbath bulletins, and those who believe what they read in the secular media. These two are a perfect match, I think, and they should marry one another.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!

“Shimon speaks unto me. “When you give a Jewish beggar a shekel, he is upset. When you give a goy twenty cents, he’s happy. Why? Because a Jewish beggar thinks what he would be giving a poor man if he were rich – at least NIS 10, and that’s why he’s not happy with the one shekel. A goy also thinks what he would be giving if he were a rich man approached by a beggar: zilch, and that’s why he’s thrilled with the twenty cents.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!

“The issue most impacted by the harsh change, at least for the people around me, was the most intimate, the sexual: who may sleep with whom and who may not, who can touch whom and who cannot, what may one do with the other, if anything, and what exactly are humans supposed to do with their sexual organs, if anything. That’s on the left side of politics, where the Puritans are more commonly known as Progressives. On the right side of politics, an equally senseless phenomenon soon came into view. Many of the anti-vaxxers, for example, were to be found on the right side of American politics, and they claimed that more people were dying from taking COVID vaccines than from the coronavirus itself. If people who followed them ended up in the cemetery, so be it; they didn’t care. It was bizarre, totally ridiculous, dangerous, and poisonous. They had not one iota of sense or science to prove what they were saying, but they were viewed as righteous, truth tellers, and world savers. They lived in a bubble of lies, and no force in the world could stop them.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!

“When I first came to New York, I could, if I wanted, read conservative and liberal views on the opinion pages of leading mainstream newspapers, but then the conservatives left, and slowly the liberals disappeared as well, and both were replaced by Puritan extremists.”
― Tuvia Tenenbom, Careful, Beauties Ahead!