Awesome: Hipsters and Hassids blog

A (by her picture and first name; though she can't be too frum if she uses the Internet to blog and even posts a picture of herself, even if her hair's covered) frum female freelancer from Brooklyn has started a blog to help her with her research for a book she's writing on the Hasids [primarily Satmar if I'm not mistaken] and hipsters duking it out in Williamsburg.

One of the interesting things Mrs. Sudin might want to consider is how many of the hipsters (particularly the Jewish ones) had great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents who lived in Jewish Williamsburg while Hasidim were all in Eastern Europe and disdainful of the goldeneh medina and Zionist settlement in Eretz Yisrael.

I've been told by some people that I could, with the right clothes, pass for a member of either group in Williamsburg. As it so happens, my family did used to live in Williamsburg.

Of course, when I say used to, I'm talking about as much as 100 years ago. My great-great-grandfather (mother's father's father's father) and his family lived at 273 South 1st Street back in 1910; he later moved the family to Forest Avenue in the Bronx where he was the rabbi of a shul. Other family members lived elsewhere in Brooklyn at various times (and my second cousin lives there now, I believe in Park Slope). My mother's father's mother's family lived in the southwest of East New York (just a few blocks east of the Brownsville border) at 660 Williams Avenue.

But it's all good.