Dragons8 and Venus193: Be thankful you've never encountered Hassidic Jews, they're in a negative class all of their own, most other Jews would consider them a cult since they tend to warp most of the teachings into something that's not really recognizable to anyone as Judaism even to those of us who are hopelessly gentile. Things that ticked the rest of us off in that area were the fact that many of the men worked in high paying jobs (bankers, jewelers, etc) but because they supposedly donated all of their money to their temple so that they were all on welfare and because they were large families (usually 3+ kids) they got a lot of money and food stamps. They insisted on having their own schools, but insisted that the state pay for them even though children from other areas weren't allowed into them, their shennanigans with the schools got them kicked up to the US Supreme Court who ruled what they were doing was unconstitutional (the schools were religious in nature and state funded...). Shortly before I moved from the area federal investigators were starting to look into that town because of a series of suspicious fires that they wouldn't let the fire department check for arson. There were also issues with their families in Brooklyn and other parts of NYC, but the only ones I remember involved voter fraud.
All in all the town these people lived in had a really bad rep, their citizens had an even worse rep and it reflected really badly on Jews in general, even though the local Jewish population were probably the most vocal against them which I don't blame them on at all.
ReneeG1957: I believe there are some yiddish terms, but I was never taught them (my mother's second ex was Jewish and his parents knew yiddish but didn't teach me that much).
