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The disastrous government-enabled situation of the haredim can rightly be called scandalous. Their children are growing up under a suffocating 18th-century cultural bell jar. They are play-deprived — in the West, gross-motor activity is now considered a child’s right as a matter of health and physical literacy — and so culturally stunted by being deprived of such subjects as languages, art, literature, music and world history that they have no hope of appreciating, or fully integrating into, contemporary society.

Even those haredim who are considered the likeliest to succeed — that is, those who have self-selected for secular academic studies and graduate from university — don’t do particularly well in competition with other Israelis. Only about 1,000 haredi men and 5,000 haredi women (who don’t study Talmud and are expected to be the family breadwinners, in addition to mothering large broods so their husbands can study indefinitely) have high-tech jobs, but they are mostly at the low end of the pay scale. Ben-Gurion surely did not anticipate his politically expedient indulgence of Haredi demands to transmogrify into the social monster it is today.

It isn’t as if the haredim are in any way “authentic” guardians of Judaism. As I opined in a previous column, “The Modern Orthodox, who hold that distinction, are rational, civically integrated and pluralistic in outlook. Haredi Judaism is a fossilized historical aberration from Orthodoxy. It began as an anti-establishment spiritual movement, but petrified into a constellation of self-contained planets, each orb cultishly gripped in its own charismatic-leader worship, all dependent on, but resisting contact with authentic evolutionary Judaism.” Their embrace of a life bounded by endless (unproductive) study, and a dependence on welfare as a way of life, is unhealthy for them and for the nation.