JewFem Blog

There have been some moments on my book tour when I felt like I’m on a journey revisiting my own life. Part observer, part social commentator, and part Jewish traveler, I seem to be making stops that connect in significant ways to voyages past.

The first striking moment was the discovery that Prof. Jon Levisohn of Brandeis University would moderate at my official book launch. Jon and I were very close friends when we were 14, and the truth is that even though we have only seen each other a few times over the past 20 years, he has a very special place in my heart. During that awkward period of adolescence when it’s easy to think that nobody sees you or understands you, Jon was a patient and kind listener, and a thoughtful, intelligent conversationalist. Actually, it seems to me that he still is all those things. His friendship was healing then, and his presence at my first ever book launch was incredibly comforting. It made me feel whole. As if to say, I have been on this journey for thirty years, taking me to this place, and I stll am this same person. And by the way, the fact that we both ended up with doctorates in education makes me wonder what we were talking about during those late night conversations all those years ago.

My tour has also taken me back to the Barnard/Columbia Hillel, some 21 years after I graduated from Barnard. I spent a lot of time at the Hillel back then, when it was in what now seems like a small office in Earl Hall. I was particularly active in Columbia Students for Israel, with my friend Josh Leibowitz, z”l, and I remember many hours spent preparing all kinds of flyers and events. We used to sometimes take over the desk of then program coordinator Helise Leiberman who was nice enough to pretend not to mind. (Helise now works with Jewish students in Poland, and we recently reconnected, and are now Facebook friends of course.) We were really happy then, I think – although seeing what HIllel has become, a multi-story building of its own, the Kraft Center for Jewish Life, with an Indian-themed kosher cafeteria, alarge synagogue that does not alternate as a mosque, and lots of spacious rooms and offices for every possible occasion including four different types of prayer services, just blows my mind. The building today is used by a thousand students on campus. That’s just amazing. Still, I should say that the moment that really blew me away was when I mentioned during my session that partnership synagogues have “only” been around for ten years, realizing that for some of the students in the room, that was more than half their lives! Their reality forced me to adjust my thinking and reconsider my narrative of social change.

At one of these events, I had a very special audience member: Susan "Sooz" Goodman, my first cousin once removed, whom I had never met in person! She's a fabulous musician, and just came out with a new disk called "Live out loud". Her music is a form of activism, and she's particularly interested in promoting awarness about anti-LGBT bullying. I've been enjoying her music for many years, but we only recently started talking via email and Skype. But this week, she drove several hours to come see me, and after my talk, I went to dinner with her and her son Miles, (who is graduating next month from Tisch as an actor). It was incredible. She is just an awesome person and it was great to connect with her.

I also had an evening at Drisha, the women’s learning institution on the Upper West Side. I spent a lot of time at Drisha when I was a Barnard student, and I particularly loved the bible classes with Rabbi David Silber. I cannot read the book of Genesis or the book of Samuel without his voice of commentary running through my mind. “Everything comes back to Breishit”, he would say, and that remains true. After I graduated college, I also spent some months learning in the full-time program – and in fact last week I had lunch with one of my Drisha “chevrutas”, or study partners, Miriam Goldberg. I think I can admit today that I don’t really love learning Talmud the way the other women there did. The truth is, I think I annoyed Rabbi Silber at the time because my questions about the Talmud were always sociological. I was always looking at the stories behind the texts, the ways in which the texts reflected societal realities. I can’t help but wonder how many kids in school studying Talmud have similar experiences. Anyway, I think that those encounters may have prepared me a little bit for my path towards sociological research.

Finally, the weekend in Baltimore, staying with my friends Aaron Frank and Laura Shaw, brought me in many ways full circle. Laura was a year ahead of me at Barnard, but light years ahead of me in feminist thought and activism. I was not a feminist when I was at Barnard, despite my feminist surroundings. It took me years of experiencing life, motherhood, adulthood, for the feminist pin to drop. But I have memories of going to a “Women of the Wall” meeting at Barnard that Laura ran with passion and expertise, and I also remembered a sign she had on her wall that read, “Women are a nation.” These things stayed in my consciousness until the time was right for them to emerge. Meanwhile, Aaron had a pivotal role in the writing of this book. He was the first person to interview Orthodox men, he shared his research with me, and he taught me a lot of things about what men are experiencing. As a couple, Aaron and Laura are true leaders. Their community is lucky to have them as members, and I am lucky to have them as friends.

Anyway, I have four more events over the next week, and although I must admit that I am physically exhausted, I am also spiritually and emotionally invigorated. This has been an incredible journey. And it’s not over yet!

The strangest part of Monday night’s panel discussion of my new book, “The Men’s Section,” about partnership synagogues, wasn’t that the four-person panel was made up of all men.

All-male panels are so common — to wit, I passed by a poster at Harvard this week announcing an economic conference with no female speakers at all — that Joanna Samuels of Advancing Women Professionals has been asking Jewish men to take a pledge not to sit on all-male panels. (Several of the men on my book panel said that they had taken the pledge and actually felt odd sitting on this all-male dais at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute.)

The really unusual part for me was that, although all the speakers are accomplished men with very impressive resumes and professional and communal achievements, their speeches had nothing to do with their expertise. Rather, they each talked about their feelings about partnership synagogues and the discussion centered on their own journeys in Jewish communal and religious life. In fact, Marc Baker, of Minyan Kol Rinah in Brookline, Mass. opened by saying, “I’m not used to talking about myself in this kind of forum.”

The men were used to talking about ideas; they were not used to talking about themselves.

This is what I want to happen from the publication of my book. I want men to start exploring their journeys and experiences, and to start examining Jewish life — not from the perspective of halachic and cold, cerebral, detached analysis of rules and facts. I want to give men the language and framework to ask themselves what they feel, what they see, what they really want.

Ido Plazental, a history and civics teacher at Ziv High School in Jerusalem, has an innovative way of raising gender awareness among his students: He addresses them all as female.

Native English speakers who are not familiar with Hebrew may miss the inventiveness of this form of speech. In Hebrew, as in many European languages, there is no such thing as a gender-neutral way of speaking. In Hebrew, you can’t say, “I’m playing with my friend” without revealing whether your friend is male (haver) or female (havera). All objects, people, pronouns and verbs must be in either male or female. This means that in order to address a group of people, “you” has to be either the male “atem,” or the female “aten,” which generally leaves one part of the group excluded.

Although some people play with the generally awkward he/she combinations, the predominant custom among most Hebrew speakers is to use the male form to address mixed groups. And while we may like to believe that when Israelis use the all-male form, they really mean to address men and women, in practice that is not always the case.

Many radio announcements will use female verbs to let you know that they are specifically addressing women. This is especially pronounced in the road safety advertisements. The Transport Ministry actually has different texts aimed at getting women’s attention versus getting men’s attention. I would like to offer some kind of intelligent analysis of the two versions, but I am so irritated by the fact that the only time people remember the women is when they want to suggest that we are are bad drivers, that I can barely even listen to the spot.

Claims that the male is by default just gender-neutral are dubious at best. This is just another example of women made invisible to make life more convenient for men

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/154070/hebrew-needs-you-to-be-gender-neutral/#ixzz1rnsSreAz

Facebook is forbidden among Chabad teenage girls, as The Sisterhood told you — and as the Forward reports here. This reflects a blatant double standard, the report points out, because the movement has widely embraced technology to spread its message, but refuses to allow its own youth to use these tools.

But Chabad’s double standard in its relationship to secular society is only one part of the problem. It seems to me that the story of girls being forbidden from using Facebook and other internet tools is less about Chabad’s missionary stance and more about their view of women and girls. After all, it is only girls whose school is handing out $100 fines and having mothers’ monitor their computer use.

Moreover, the practice of banning girls from the computer largely revolves around one concept: modesty. The Facebook ban is just the latest in a long string of insidious practices in the Orthodox community — not just Chabad, to be sure — aimed at restricting women’s and girls’ freedom. These practices are promoted under the term tzniut, or “modesty,” but really are nothing more than classic misogyny.

Pesach is one of my favorite holidays. I love the educational, creative possibilities of the Seder, the opportunity to debate, discuss and dramatize our collective history. Over the years, my family has done some wonderfully imaginative things at the Seder table — plays, original songs, games, colored dips, hand-made pillows, and even a puppet show about the exodus in which all the characters were variants of felt penguins. One year, we made our own Haggadah, using the kids’ drawings and writings connected to select parts of the book. For me, Pesach preparation is about creative education. It is the only holiday in the Jewish calendar where the whole point is to bring history to life in any and every possible way.

But you would never know it from the traditional lead-up to Pesach. When Jews meet one another on the street these days, conversations about “preparations” generally refer to how much cleaning has been accomplished. Even Shlomo Artzi, the Israeli pop star who can well afford to hire cleaning help, revealed in his column last week that memories of his mother handing him a vacuum cleaner before Pesach have remained indelibly etched on his Jewish soul. Today, he finds vacuuming to be a source of comfort, in the same category as chicken soup, the kind of activity that makes some people miss their mothers.

I have found myself trying to avoid talking to people this week because I really don’t want to hear some variety of this question: “So what are you up to in your house?” Meaning, how many rooms or shelves or chandeliers have you managed to scrub clean already. It’s so tired and predictable that I would rather run and climb up a few dozen stairs to reach the other side of the neighborhood in order to find a way not to enter into another one of the cleaning competition conversations.

It really is a competition. These conversations are not really about the holiday as much as they are women’s attempts to find approval from an invisible “they.” This is women looking to other women to grade our own okayness as Jewish women.

The list of top earners in Israel’s publicly traded companies was published last week by Yediot Aharanot’s Mamon magazine. There is only one woman on the list: Stella Handler.

She’s the director of the cable network Hot, and Handler stands out for her gender, with a salary of 14.82 million NIS annually (approximately $4 million). That’s a lot of money, to be sure, but it’s also 30% less than the top guy on the list, mall-magnate David Azrieli, who makes the equivalent of $5.7 million a year.

According to the World Economic Forum’s Gender Gap Index, on which Israel ranks 55th in the world, Israel has a ratio of 88:100 women to men in the economy.

Today Israeli women are getting undergraduate educations at rates on par with their male counterparts. Yet they are not making it to the top of the economy. The question is what is happening inside companies and organizations? Why are women failing to thrive?

There are two ways to address this question. One places the onus on women, and one places onus on surrounding cultures.

Many programs for women’s economic empowerment focus on what women need to do thingsdifferently in order to get ahead. Like Sheryl Sandberg, for example, in her now famous TED talk, in which she encouraged women to speak up, “take a seat at the table,”and stay focused on their ambitions, regardless of where life or motherhood takes them. All of this is good advice, for sure. But there is also a second approach which examines surrounding organizational cultures and explores ways to create thriving environments for people with different needs, family demands and personalities.

Tzipi Livni, the incumbent Kadima chair who lost Tuesday’s party primary to former Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz, is not your typical Israeli politician. She’s just not slimy enough. When she speaks, she seems to be telling you what she actually believes. In a profile of her in Yediot Aharonot last year, the worst thing people said about her was that she wasn’t friendly enough and sometimes closed her door so as not to be interrupted. So either she is too aloof or too protective of her privacy. Either way, she didn’t play the game right. Actually, that’s probably why she lost. She does not have the callousness required to win in Israeli politics.

Shaul Mofaz, on the other hand, we have a glut of guys like him in Israeli politics — men who think that they have everything coming to them because they know how to lead troops to war. What this has to do with actually running an actual country eludes me, unless you count the demands for an inflated ego and a big car, which seem to be common to both jobs.

The overabundance of generals leading our fragile nation explains a lot about the situation we are in vis à vis our neighbors as well as vis à vis ourselves: Everything is viewed as a war.

Whether talking about security, environmental issues or social justice, the general — or former general — always sees the other person as an adversary to be out-maneuvered, out-manipulated and ultimately beaten. It explains why despite months of intense and broadly supported social justice protests, little has changed. In fact, electricity prices went up 26% in the past 12 months.

What is Jewish feminism to me?

It’s a mission. A calling. An identity. A life purpose. To borrow a French term, it’s myraison d’etre. Or to borrow a Buddhist term, it’s my swadharma, the ideal that connects the work that I do in this world with my divine spark. It is the key that fires the engine in my soul. It is the spiritual ideal that wraps up my entire being reminds me that I am here on this earth because God decided that I need to be here, in this person, in this identity. Jewish woman. That is everything to me. It is all that I am.

It wasn’t always this way. This is an identity in two parts, two parts that sometimes coexist, sometimes fight, sometimes mutually empower and sometimes mutually deflect. One part, the Jewish part, I was born into, without a say in the matter, while the other part, the feminist part, I chose as an adult, following a journey that included pain, struggle and discovery. One part is ancient but the other is relatively recent — in definition, at least, though not as an ideal. One part has definitive, authoritative texts and rules while the other has a different kind of textual heritage, the writings of women creating ideas out of their own lives.

Yet both are divinely inspired. And the place where the two pieces overlap is, in my opinion, the place where the shechina rests.

The Bible’s Ruth epitomizes that place for me, the place where the core of Judaism and the core of feminism overlap and melt into each other.

Dr. Hanna Kehat’s mother did not ride her local bus for three years. The 78-year-old lifelong resident of the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood Mea Shearim lost her bus because Haredi extremists would stone the bus every time it rode down her street. So Egged simply stopped the route, forcing her and many of her car-less neighbors to walk distances to find a different bus.

“Women in her community are being completely neglected – they are at the mercy of the sikrikim,” Kehat told The Sisterhood, referring to one of Israel’s the most extreme ultra-Orthodox sects.

Today, however, the bus has returned to its route, thanks to one change: Police intervention.

The question about what role the government plays in protecting Israeli citizens from Haredi violence came to the fore last week, when the Interministerial Committee to Prevent the Exclusion of Women, headed by Minister of Sport and Culture Limor Livnat, released its findings. Among the most controversial conclusions of its three-month long investigation is the committee’s recommendation to support a 2011 High Court ruling that deems gender segregation on public transport a matter of “choice.”

Although the committee also recommended a hotline for complaints, writing clear guidelines for bus drivers and putting immovable signs on buses reminding passengers that they have the right to sit wherever they want, many anticipated that the committee would find a way to declare segregation in buses illegal.

Kehat, the founder of the Orthodox women’s group Kolech points out that the issue of Haredi women’s choice remains dubious. “Kolech receives all the complaints of Haredi women who cannot complain in public,” she said that women who speak out risk being ostracized from their communities.

“To talk about the community choosing means the men are choosing,” Kehat said, who said she was saddened that Livnat adopted this language.

Purim is a holiday that is about women’s power, in its different forms.

Thinking about the roles of Queen Vashti and her successor Queen Esther in the Purim story highlights some of the dilemmas that women have faced throughout history. I therefore think it’s particularly apt that Ta’anit Esther is International Agunah Day, the day the marks the harrowing struggle of “chained women,” or women denied divorce.

Vashti and Esther were both married to a man, the same man, for whom women were objects to be adorned and used. This was arguably the prevailing culture at the time, but there are also gradations in the exploitation of women. (To wit, someone visiting the planet for the first time who puts on MTV would believe that our culture is no better today than it was then.) Moreover, King Ahasverus was particularly adamant in his use of women’s bodies to claim his own power. He summoned Vashti specifically “to show the peoples and the princes her beauty; for she was fair to look on,” he chose his next queen based on a beauty contest, and declared that peace in his entire kingdom was a function of women’s submission, that “all the wives will give to their husbands honor, both to great and small… that every man should bear rule in his own house, and speak according to the language of his people.”

Interestingly, Vashti and Esther dealt with the king differently. Vashti was defiant.

She refused to be put on display like cattle — and paid for it with her throne, with her status, and according to the midrash, with her life. Esther, on the other hand, played the game. She was silent for the first four chapters of the book, quiet, docile and pretty as the other dominating male in her life, Mordechai, called the shots and gained political standing. When Esther finally acted, it was by using her feminine charm, her sexuality, to woo the king into pleasing her and killing Haman. To save the Jewish people, she played the seductress. She may have stayed alive and kept her throne – but that’s not necessarily a blessing. She remained in her gilded cage, married to the megalomaniacal wife-killer, for the rest of her life. By being the “insider” in the system, she sacrificed her own freedom. Vashti, the quintessential fighter, may have lost her life, but she may have also kept her dignity.

Women face the insider/outsider dilemma all the time. Should we work hard and sacrifice our integrity (and money) to meet social expectations of female beauty in order to reap the significant social rewards of beauty and sexuality, or should we challenge the system, refuse to turn ourselves into seductresses, and force the world to deal with “real women,” as we are? For example.

In Judaism the insider/outsider dilemma is faced in the most harrowing way by agunot, women who cannot get a Jewish divorce because the system relies on male volition. To stay in the Jewish legal system, agunot give up right to live independently, or to give birth to a Jew, or to be free. They can be free at any moment, but that would entail giving up their status within the Jewish legal system.

Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/152658/#ixzz1oWeYew3n