Book Review
Careful, Beauties Ahead 
5/5 stars
"A 555-page slow, gentle roast of Israeli Haredim." 
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Verdict: Recommended! I see why the price is so high. 
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Whatever this guy is, he is not stupid. He seems to speak/write multiple languages. Hebrew and Yiddish natively. And then German--not that far from Yiddish-- well enough to write books in that language (for some number of years he lived there); and finally, English, well enough to write plays and books.

He writes perceptive gonzo journalism-- in his third language--in a very folksy style ("That's life, and so it goes on, and ain't nobody going to change the course it takes.") He is most certainly a glutton (He eats so much that my A1c went up by full point just reading the book). He also seems to be an aesthete (He is generous with his observations about how nice looking somebody is / is not. Such as the ugly non-binary Progressives of America).

There are a total of 92 short stories / vignettes here over 555 pages. That works out to about 6.03 pages each, and the whole thing takes on a certain ineffable quality. (I really did try to find the word, but just can't.)

It ends abruptly right at October the 7th.

It seems that the author used to be a Hasid many decades ago in his life, and he returned to see how the neighborhood had changed. 

It's not that he dislikes the people (I would say that he is actually fond of them), and he skewers them ever so gently in his folksy style. 

It is wondrous to this reader that under Jewish sovereignty (and the absence of a foreign sovereign) that the first thing Jews set about doing is torturing one another; dealing with Iran / Hamas/ Arabs is small potatoes compared to dealing with 1 million Haredim--at least if you read between the lines of this book.

In fact, the former may be easier than the latter.

I have chosen about 50-some-odd quotes from the book to give you a flavor of it because: 

1. It's probably easier to show what (I think) are the Greatest Hits of the book than to try to tell he reader of this review about the feel of it.

2. The events described in this are so bizarre that any reader might believe only direct quotes.

Read as many (or all) of the quotes as you like.

Other books by the same author: 

1. I Sleep in H*****'s Room
2. Catch the Jew!
3.  The Lies They Tell
4. Hello, Refugees! 
5. The Taming of the Jew
6. Careful, Beauties Ahead!

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Quotes

(30, in a Haredi neighborhood) Passage for dogs and Zionists is totally forbidden.

(30) Legend has it that there are more opposing groups in Mea Shearim than people.... since the destruction of the Second Temple, there have been more Jewish leaders in the land of Israel than cats.

(35) Litvacks... Love to study, dress simpler than the Hasidim, sing for up to 4 minutes, and collect prohibitions of all kinds because the more that is forbidden, the better it is for their psyche. Sephardim love everything mystical, whatever mysticism means, and dream of catching a Litvak for a spouse, even if that Litvak is sick, ugly, fat, old, or has slight brain damage.

(222) Bottom line, and as strange as it sounds: the very people who have made an oath to dedicate their lives to the Torah, be they Litvacks or Hasids, have no clue what the Torah says. 

(219) Do angels get married to one another? Do angels have matchmakers? Does an angel wear white socks or black socks? Do angels serve their beds? Do they do it in the dark? Can I sneak into their bedrooms to see how they do it? Is the average angel a Hasidic or a Litvak? 

(217) Moses the Lawgiver, in case you wonder, also wore a shtreimel. 

(213) The history of Jews in the diaspora is soaked in blood, Jewish blood, be it York or Rome, Warsaw or Berlin, Bucharest or Kiev. There, the Jews were slaughtered and raped, and yet they celebrate those very lands, cities, towns, and villages as if those places were paradise on Earth, as if Satmar and Belz were holy names. 

(210) I hope The Tikvah Fund pays him a heavy salary, because, for the life of me, I couldn't come up with such a set of sentences as he did if you put a gun to my face. Rabbi Pfeffer is a nice guy otherwise; he's just a Litvak. 

(208) You've got to be a Litvak to talk like this, let me tell you. 

(205) A Rebbe, in other words, is like health insurance, only much cheaper.

(180) It's incredible to watch the proceedings here: these Hasidim, known to be anti-Zionists, can visit the grave of their Rebbe only because the Zionist police, otherwise known as the "Nazi police," risk their lives for them. 

(167) She doesn't want that everybody will know that her soon to be daughter-in-law is a Sephardic. Yes, her son is divorced, and who but a Sephardi, or maybe a convert's daughter, would marry him, but why advertise all over the world that her daughter-in-law is a Sephardi? 

(161) We are Litvaks, not Hasidim, and we don't eat kugels. 

(160) They don't have a clue about singing. They try, but they fail miserably. This family, I quickly learn, is Litvak, not Hasidic. 

(151) An older Sephardi Man looks at me, a man of white skin and suspenders, an item he doesn't encounter often. "Are you,"  he asks me, an Ashkenazi or a Jew?" To him, white-skinned Jews don't exist. At maximum, people like me are Germans, like creatures walking the streets of Prenzlauer Berg. 

(144) God, how strange, even likes converts. Perhaps, I'm not sure, we should get the Modesty Guard involved and teach God a lesson once and for all.

(143) An ordinary Haredi Man will never marry a Sephardi woman unless he has cancer and his days are numbered, but a dead Sephardi's book [Shulchan Aruch] is held in such high esteem. 

(138) The Sephardim, Jews who came to Israel from Arab countries, usually cannot marry any Ashkenazi either, unless the Ashkenazi is sick, ugly, very old, or an Ashkenazi who comes from parents who are converts. 

(136) Yes, 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. 

(105) To Reb Israel Meir--I see a pattern--everything is somewhere high up beyond the clouds, in the ether, except for the Zionists, who are always here. 

(75) The Jewish agency people offered to smuggle him and others of his community out of Romania in 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 Nazis finally arrived at the gate 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 Râut 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. 

(75) Makes sense? No. Man's reality is rarely logic's best friend. 

(42) For the most part, the "Taliban" Jewish are newly religious women who, in their past, slept with everybody and walked in bikinis on the streets. Now that they are religious, they cover their bodies as much as possible, believing that this new dress code will purify their sinful bodies. 

(313) I'm seated at the [Reform, female] rabbi's sukkah, which in this case is a bit of a depressing place, and the food at the table, may I say, is fit for flies and rats. It has very little taste, if at all, though it's healthy.... Do you want gefilte fish? They have little bites of it, but it tastes like a reformed gefilte fish, nothing any Jew from Mea Shearim would even recognize.

(310) The clock on the wall shows 1 hour earlier than it is. "This is Jordanian time," one Hasid explains to me, "because We don't use Zionist time." These Jews, don't you know, are Jordanians. I checked the time in Amman on my iPhone, and it's the same as in Jerusalem. But who cares? It sounds good, creative, and a bit anti Zionist. 

(301) The Rebbe gives a sermon. His manner of speaking is monotonic; This man doesn't get easily excited in life, I think. The ideas he presents in his sermon are almost none. It seems that he doesn't have much to say, and this is not lost on the Hasidim, about half of whom start yawning..... To them, it seems, the Rebbe can do no wrong, even if he's boring them to death.

(286, Ger Hasidim) The Rebbe said that having intimate relations is an ugly part of life, but nature is not perfect, and this is the only way to get children. "I can sleep with my wife twice a month, at a maximum," he said, " and I should never call her by name." 

(267-book is set in Jerusalem) When the prayer service is done, Yom Kippur is over. Gone. Done. When this happens, everybody sings "Next year, in Jerusalem," as if we were in Singapore right now.

(249) If you give a donation to an organization called Vaad Harabbonim, the Board of Rabbis, you will have a good year ahead, I read on a big poster hanging there Sabbath Square, signed by Rabbi Chaim Kanievsky. I was under the impression that God decided life and death issues, but perhaps I was wrong. If this poster is correct, the one deciding these issues is Chaim Kanievsky, not God.

(239) What do I see? A prayer called Tikkun Keri, repairing or rectifying the soul from the damage spilled by seed. Lots of men in the area, it seems, are extra busy spilling their seed. Mea Shearim, let me tell you, is packed with stallions.

(325) Rabbi Berland said "The Tzaddik is not a person at all. He is the Holy One Blessed Be He Himself who descends in the form of a man." 

(328) David Batsri is a man I've met more than once, and I know him to be a crook who squeezes thousands of shekels from the poorest of people, promising them to "repair their souls" ....... He tells them that unless they pay him and his son [sic] exuberant sums of money, they will burn for eternity in boiling excrement in hell.

(335) -"When you give a Rebbe money, it gives him the power to help you. 
-How? 
-"How? This I don't know.

(349) ..."Guide To The Perplexed," I was told that such was forbidden. Then as now, it seems, Haredi Judaism toils hard not to grasp what its faith is.

(358) 30 minutes pass before two police squads finally show up. "Nazis!"  Some of the [Haredi] kids shout at an approaching bus, obviously believing that the Egged drivers were the ones who murdered 6 million Jews during the Holocaust. Go prove otherwise.

(377) The Rebbe said "In Poland, the Ger Court didn't have classes, and we don't need them here either." 

-No classes? How are the students studying in the Ger institutions? 

-They study without classes. They recite the Talmud, page after page after page after page. No analysis of anything.

(380) If I understand this man right, at this very moment, The Rebbe is squeezing his testicles, and he tries to be less critical of the Holy Squeezer. 

(389) In an article about the wealthiest rabbis in Israel..... The Belzer Rebbe's estimated worth was 180 million shekels, the Gerer Rebbe's, 350 million shekels, and Rabbi David Abuhatzeira's, 750 million shekels. 

(399) Some of these ba'alei Teshuva are former convicts, prone to violence, and at times when they encounter a Haredi Man with a smartphone, they beat the hell out of him. 

(401) Some of the Sephardim I chatted with threw in Yiddish words here and there. But the Yiddish they tried to speak was so bad, it was painful to listen.

(411) Did Jews cover their heads with a skullcap in Talmudic times? Not really. A few individuals might have, but the rest of the Jews did not. In fact, as late as the 18th century, such a custom not exist.

(421) These lines are totally convincing when said in Yiddish. In other languages, what this Rebbe just said means the following: all the stories about the Rebbes who have performed miracles are as accurate as any of the tales in "1001 Nights."

(442) Soon enough, a rabbi shows up. He looks at me as one would look at a camel inside a brothel, wondering what a creature like me is doing in a holy place like this. 

(451) Do American or European progressors make any sense? If they believe, as they say, that everyone is entitled to their opinion, why can't they tolerate anyone who disagrees with them?

(475) I get off the bus and walk on foot; it's faster. And what do I see? Almost everywhere I walk, I see trash, be it on the streets or in the fronts of many houses, that no garbage truck will collect because it's all over. I'm ashamed for the people living in this city [Bnei Barak]. Do the inhabitants here have no sense of aesthetics? 

(500) The guard was beating Akiva in the face, very hard, boom, boom, and the Hasidim were standing around, she told me, cheering him on. They clapped and said: " Beautiful, beautiful. Finish him off!" [This is over a split within the dynasty.]

(501) If I remember correctly, Mormons believe that God was once a man. Ger Hasidim believe comment if I get this right, that a man is God.

(510) This Litvak is a kolelnik, or avreh, a married man who studies in a Yeshiva, and he seems to enjoy his involvement in this story. He has no job, so he has plenty of time on his hands...... A man like him cherishes some action in life, any action. And dealing with the issue of a non-married Yeshiva student wishing to move to another Yeshiva is godsend. He'll squeeze every drop out of it and get ever more rap eyes involved, which will keep him busy for at least a week or a month, whichever comes first.

(522) He sings a few more Hasidic tunes and tells me that their origin is in the Hungarian Gypsy csárdás [tavern] music. Yes, my pure, sacred, and holy Hasidic music comes from Hungarian pub. Yes, the roots of Jewish soul go all the way to Gypsy land.

(525) When the facade moves away, he walks backward. You never, my dear, show your behind to Der Heilige [The Rebbe].

(532) The term "anusim," is now used in Israel for Jews born in the Haredi world who a part of it but no longer believe in God. They still practice the religion, not out of faith but out of fear. 

(534) My Ger marriage guide told me before I got married that when I have intimate relations with my husband, I should imagine the Rebbe. 

(540) Hundreds of hoseidon start chasing followers of Rabbi Shaul.... They do much more than Chase. They beat them so severely that some of the injured require immediate medical care, even a hospital.

(547) God is more like an afterthought, while the rabbis are supreme, the first in line of holiness.

(548) If you have the right pedigree, if you come from a rabbinical family, your life will be full of honey. Otherwise, may God help you. Oy to you, my dear, if you are Sephardi, oy to you if you are a convert, and oy to you if you are severely wounded Secular Jew lying down on the street in urgent need a medical care on the Sabbath.