My neighbour the sculptor shows up at the corner cafe every morning at about the same time with his two mutts, Precious and Strawberry. He orders a machiatto for himself and a chocolate cookie for each of the dogs, greets all the "regulars", downs his coffee in a couple of gulps and continues on his way. The other day I was sitting at my usual place on the bar, drinking a double espresso and reading the newspaper, when I saw the following incident take place.

As my neighbour exited the cafe, with his two very old and very harmless dogs skittering (from the sugar high, no doubt) ahead of him, three Belzer boys, aged about 10, approached from the opposite direction, on their way to school. As soon as they saw the dogs they pulled back, expressions of stark terror on their faces. The only way to circumvent Precious and Strawberry was to step off the narrow sidewalk and into the path of oncoming insane Israeli drivers. And that is what the boys did - without looking first.

Screeching brakes, tooting horns, etc. Children unharmed. Sculptor enraged!

He started to yell at the children: "Does it really seem logical," he asked, "to step in front of an oncoming car in order to avoid walking past two dogs? Does it? Well, does it?

The poor kids were white-faced and silent. They were scared of the dogs, they were scared of the alien secular (and unkosher) Jew and they were still in shock from their near-death experience. Eventually the sculptor, realizing he wasn't going to get any kind of a response, gave a disgusted snort and waved his hands dismissively in the children's direction. They made a dash for the gate to the schoolyard.

It's a strange thing, this fear the ultra-Orthodox have for dogs. At the corner grocery store I once saw a teenage ultra-Orthodox girl flinch and leap aside when old Mrs. Goldberg's little white poodle sniffed gently at her ankle. At a recent performance of the Batsheva Dance Company, one of the dances was actually called, "Why are religious children afraid of dogs?"

It's also strange that there is a Belzer community in the middle of my heterogeneous neighbourhood of actors, musicians, artists, students, yuppies, and octogenarian Holocaust survivors. Why do they live here, instead of in Bnei Brak (and what is this service doing in a town that's nearly 100% ultra-Orthodox??) or Jerusalem?

A casual observer might conclude that the lack of tension between the religious and secular residents is the product of tolerance bred by the liberalism of Tel Aviv - the gay-friendly, party-loving city that never sleeps. In Jerusalem they're at each other's throats, but in Tel Aviv we all get along.

Ah, but is the status quo really a result of tolerance? Or is it the result of majority rules? There are more synagogues and kosher restaurants in Manhattan than there are in Tel Aviv. This is secular turf, and secular Israelis can be just as intolerant of religious Jews as the reverse. So the few ultra-Orthodox Jews live among, but apart from, the rest of the population.

They don't look at the damp, bikini-clad girls and their bare-chested boyfriends returning from the beach on Saturday morning when they're on their way home from morning prayers at the synagogue. They don't complain when my neighbour blasts a track from Infected Mushroom's latest CD while they're eating their Saturday afternoon cholent. They don't respond when I greet them on the street - even though we see each other practically every day. They simply ignore us. They live in their own little bubble.

And I think the complete lack of any kind of mutual understanding is well-illustrated by the incident of the sculptor, his dogs and the Belzer kids. He was angry and hurt that anyone could shy away from his beloved mutts, didn't know that they are taught to fear them, and the kids were so afraid of the "other" (ie, bad) kind of Jew that they couldn't even work up the courage to answer him back.

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Graffitti seen today on Nachlat Binyamin: "The lesson of the Holocaust: to wage war against the extreme right."

Sticker seen today above the deep fat fryer at a felafel stand: "Only love brings love."

Music I am loving: the Algerian female singer, Souad Massi; specifically, the album called Raoui. A knowledge of Arabic is not necessary for understanding the emotions conveyed by Massi's astonishing voice.

Pet peeve of the day: The enormous pop-up advert for the South Beach Diet on the homepage of the New York Times.