Which culture would be more accepting of an African-American? Not posed to you, but I’m surprised that isn’t a consideration. I’m assuming you need to keep your appearance in the switch.
As for me, I’d go Hasidic. I love the idea of working the land and all, but eschewing education and technology just isn’t my gig. But I would not be very happy in either setting.
I wasn’t pulling your leg, I assumed that most peoples’ teeth are fairly white and straight as long as they brush and floss regularly and don’t eat too much sugar. Maybe there are some people who are born with overcrowded teeth but I assumed this is the minority. (And in any case, correction of this issue wouldn’t be purely cosmetic and so the Amish shouldn’t be opposed to it, right?)
I don’t know what monstro thinks about Hasidic women, but they can certainly be leaders and have jobs. The only ones I know are Chabad, so this is a little skewed, but the women aren’t as ‘restricted’ as you think. And I have several modern Orthodox/Orthodox female friends (not Hasidic to me) that have degrees, jobs, whatever. Bigger families, yes, modest clothing, yes, but they aren’t hidden from society.
That’s…not how it goes.
:o
Yes, though traditionally they’re Polish or Eastern European.
There’s ignorance and blatant racism on both sides of the isle. Luckily this is a hypothetical question and no one has to move to Brooklyn. 
They’re not purely cosmetic, no. But it’s mostly cosmetic. Crooked teeth and misalignment are not, by and large, a medical issue in and of themselves. If your teeth are bad enough it’s causing jaw problems or such, they’d fix it. But my teeth (mild underbite, serious overcrowding/buckling on the lower arcade) don’t cause any real medical issues so they wouldn’t bother fixing them.
Sign me up for bacon and self sufficiency.
Could I trade my pork and shellfish for a computer?
This.
I’d miss me some pork chops, but I’d still have the interwebs.
I don’t want to live in a community where education is viewed as a waste of time and money, let alone something friviolous. I have two young daughters. The eldest very much wants to be a vet. She loves animals and has very high grades in math and reading. I can’t bear the thought of denying her that dream.
To be blunt but I find the Amish way of life not only utterly unappealing but on some level horrifying. Who the hell wants to live in a community where almost no one is allowed to get an appropriate education? The deliberate denial of academic opportunity makes me cringe.
FYI, I am Jewish and attended a very orthodox Hebrew school where we frequently intermingled with Hasids from other schools. The Hasidim at least allow their kids of all sexes the chance to graduate from high school. Many also allow them the opportunity to go on to get additional education. I’m not overly fond of the Hasidim because of their religious conservatism and far too stratified gender roles so obviously I’d rather not be one. But the Amish don’t even allow their kids to attend high school let alone graduate from it. I find that viscerally disturbing.
I’m a Christian, so Amish.
I chose Amish because the lifestyle intrigues me. I love to garden and cook from scratch and I don’t mind hard work. But I’d miss recreational reading big time.
I lived with Hasidic and Lubavitch neighbors and found them all to be wonderful and way, way intelligent. But I don’t want to keep kosher. It’s hard enough being gluten-intolerant.
I think I would rather just be Central, or Eastern European, Germanic or Slavic. The distinctions might be useful to some, but they are just cultic and reactionary views in my life, and work against reality, and history./. Don’t feel any particular attachment to zion or being born again in the trafition of John the Baptist. They are both orthodoxy that has gone far afoul.
Arguably, they are both reactionary German religous Movements in American Terms. I guess I’ll be a German Pagan, if I must choose.
Hey, that’s an interesting analysis of the question. (Quibble, the shtetl culture that Hasidism arose in was in southeast Poland and western Ukraine, not Germany. But you’re right in the sense that they spoke German, a.k.a. Yiddish.)
Being Italian Pagan, I seriously don’t fit in, but I played along for fun. Tired of patriarchal cultures being treated as normative in this day and age, I’d like to restate the OP question back at Argent Towers, but with the choices being Gardnerian Wicca or Reclaiming Witchcraft. (The two are approximately as different as Judaism and Christianity.)
Hasidic, because I’m more familiar with it, and I get to keep my house (There’s a huge Hasidic population in my community). I’ve known a few gay men who were Hasidic and managed to live openly in their community. I’ve also known a group of gay Mennonites, but I don’t think they were out.
For those of you who (like me) hate Hasidic politics . . . How well do you know Amish politics? They were the deciding factor in this state’s ban on same-sex marriage.
Orthodox, or Hasidic (a subset of Orthodox)? It’s not really different answers, but Hasidic men aren’t technically required to grow beards; they just have a communal proscription against shaving. You’ll sometimes see Hasidic men, generally younger, with really scratchy, pubescent-looking beards. I generally feel bad for them. Within the wider Orthodox community (which covers a much larger range), many groups consider shaving (with certain types of electric shavers, razors being prohibited) a personal choice, and the vast majority of men in my Orthodox synagogue are not bearded. There are a couple of national mourning periods, one in late spring and one in late summer, during which shaving is strongly frowned upon for men, and then the proportion of bearded guys goes way up.
Nawth Chucka: Alessan, who is Israeli, posited that Hasidic Jews don’t work for a living, and implied that they’re largely dependent on state support. (Citizen Pained agrees, and cmkeller disagrees.) I think that the source of the disagreement stems from differences between the Hasidic communities in Israel vs. those in the rest of the world, especially America. In Israel, all Jewish citizens are expected to serve in the army, although young women can opt for a period of national service instead. There’s an exemption for full-time yeshiva students, created back in 1948, right after Israel’s independence, when there were only a few hundred of them, and political leaders expected that such people wouldn’t exist in a short time. To maintain this exemption, one must stay a full-time yeshiva student until (IIRC) the age of 40, meaning that one can’t work at all. The Hasidic community in Israel, which is even more strict and isolationist than the one in America, is very opposed to the intergroup mixing, lack of gender segregation, exposure to outside ideas, etc. that happen when one is in the army, and prohibits its young men from serving. Many groups are also opposed to the existence of the secular State of Israel, although those that are really vehemently opposed also don’t take any state money. (Nobody within their community will marry them, or their children if they managed to marry before serving, or their siblings, if they do enlist. If the only way you can meet potential spouses is via prescreened arranged matches, matchmaking becomes a major tool for social control.) The young men are then stuck - they can’t work, because they’re forbidden to serve in the army, but they’re communally required to marry young and have large families. As such, Hasidic families in Israel are usually very poor and mostly dependent on state subsidies, along with the small earnings that the very overburdened wives and mothers are able to bring in from outside work.
In contrast, in America, there are no such constraints, although the Hasidic opposition (Lubavitch/Chabad excepted) to most secular and almost all higher education means that career opportunities are more limited, and the large families do tend to be poor. Nearly all American Hasidic men work after the first few years of marriage, but their families still tend to receive government money intended for poor families such as food stamps, section 8 housing assistance, Medicaid, etc. (Interestingly, the non-Hasidic ultra-Orthodox groups in America are the ones who push long-term full-time yeshiva study for men.)
panache45, you’ve known openly gay Hasidic men? Seriously? Out to their communities? I would have thought that flatly impossible.
A side point - people do seem to be conflating Lubavitch/Chabad with other Hasidic groups. While Chabad is definitely a Hasidic movement, it’s quite different from other Hasidic sects in terms of its openness to the outside world and somewhat different in terms of women’s roles and gender separation.
As for myself, I could see myself passing for Chabad (not as the sort that views their deceased Rebbe as the messiah) without really believing in certain aspects of their theology, but I’d suffocate as a woman in any other Hasidic group. And I already live according to Jewish law, dress pretty modestly (although not according to their rules), am reasonably learned in the Jewish subjects women are expected to focus on, and speak/write Hebrew.
Thanks, GilaB! Great explanation.
You are very welcome! Things aren’t quite as black-and-white as I’ve made them out to be; some Israeli Chabad serve in the army, and there’s been an effort to make an all-ultra-Orthodox, all-male division of the army that might be acceptable to some Hasidic leaders. But I gave the broad outlines, I think.
You likely wouldn’t miss recreational reading at all. Most Amish and other plain groups in the area where I grew up were avid readers. I was the beneficiary of several well stocked public libraries in very small towns as the result.
Where I grew up, a lot of Amish / plain people worked off the farm, mostly in light manufacturing. When you punch a clock and don’t have acreage, you have more free time, free time without TV, recorded music, video games and the internet. Reading and eating out becomes the entertainment of choice for a lot of them.
No you wouldn’t.