Trucker hat, schmucker hat: Williamsburg’s religious Jews want the ’hood’s arty arrivistes to go away.
By Steven I. Weiss & Zackary Sholem Berger for NYMag
On Sunday, January 4, as many Jews around the city fasted to commemorate the historical siege of Jerusalem by Babylonians, more than 100 Williamsburg Hasidim were protesting what they consider a siege of their community—by New York hipsters. Under steady rain, rabbis, laymen, and schoolboys gathered across from the newly renovated Gretsch Building at 60 Broadway, an old musical-instrument factory where rapper Busta Rhymes just bought a million-dollar-plus apartment. “We’re trying to keep this neighborhood clean and honest, and these people are destroying it,” said a protester, Hershl Grinfeld.
Hasidim have called Williamsburg home since the early part of the last century, and they have little interest in seeing their slice of Brooklyn become the next Manhattan. To their way of thinking, the only things hipsters (artist’n in Yiddish) contribute to the neighborhood are skyrocketing real-estate prices and morally suspect nightlife. And as one typical message on a Yiddish online bulletin board recently put it, the trendoids “pollute the eyes and the mind.” At the same time, some hipsters have their own complaints about the Hasidim: “When you willingly have ten-plus children based on your religious beliefs, feed most of them on food stamps, and displace everyone else in the neighborhood, there’s hardly any sympathy to be had,” says Dori Mondon, a designer who recently left Williamsburg.
The two groups have little in common besides a taste for black attire, and amicable co-habitation seems unlikely. There are even ads in Yiddish papers comparing the hipsters to the 9/11 hijackers. At the Sunday protest, Rabbi Zalman Leib Fulop declared that the growth of the local artist population was “a bitter decree from Heaven.” Those selling real estate to the hipsters, said the rabbi, would “never be able to leave hell.” Meanwhile, organizers distributed a prayer entitled “For the Protection of Our City of Williamsburg From the Plague of the Artists.” Could frogs and locusts in trucker hats be next?
Definition of a Hipster
Hipster - One who possesses tastes, social attitudes, and opinions deemed cool by the cool. (Note: it is no longer recommended that one use the term "cool"; a Hipster would instead say "deck.") The Hipster walks among the masses in daily life but is not a part of them and shuns or reduces to kitsch anything held dear by the mainstream. A Hipster ideally possesses no more than 2% body fat.
Clues that you are a Hipster
1. You graduated from a liberal arts school whose football team hasn't won a game since the Reagan administration.
2. You frequently use the term "post-modern" (or its commonly used variation "PoMo") as an adjective, noun, and verb.
3. You carry a shoulder-strap messenger bag and have at one time or another worn a pair of horn-rimmed or Elvis Costello-style glasses.
4. You have one Republican friend who you always describe as being your "one Republican friend."
5. Your hair looks best unwashed and you position your head on your pillow at night in a way that will really maximize your cowlicks.
6. You own records put out by Matador, DFA, Definitive Jux, Dischord, Warp, Thrill Jockey, Smells Like Records, and Drag City.
Hipster Work Ethics
Working is a necessary evil reserved for the masses which by definition the Hipster is not a part. Work is avoided at all costs for it is truly "bohemian" to be an artist and stay at home creating art. In fact, the goal of a true Hipster is to not work at all. Work is an antiquated notion dear to an older generation.
Similar to eskimos who have 8 different terms for the word "snow," the Hipster has many terms for receiving a check from the parents:
1. getting the cush
2. picking the berries
3. waxing Oedipal
4. parimony (sometimes daddimony)
5. changing the diaper
http://www.hipsterhandbook.com/
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