Elana Sztokman

Feminism has no doubt transformed Orthodoxy over the past three decades. Women have gone from begging to hold a Torah on Simchat Torah to holding their own services, to creating partnership synagogues in which women take active roles alongside men in running the service. It’s not only about women learning Talmud, but also about being acknowledged with proper titles for the roles — from religious pleaders who argue cases in the rabbinical courts to the most recent breakthrough of calling women (almost) rabbis. Gender roles in Orthodoxy are rapidly being redefined in homes, communities and synagogues, where men and women share the tasks of preparing for Shabbat and educating children, leading prayer and giving a D’var Torah. The list of changes goes on, and it’s all quite exciting. Yet, remarkably, these changes have failed to find parallel expression in the Orthodox school system. Notwithstanding tremendous efforts by the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) and other groups to address these issues, the fact remains that from preschool on, schools continue to send the message that women are predominantly charged with the home, and men are in charge of prayer and ritual. School books show men as active and women as passive — a message compounded by school decors that have walls plastered with pictures of men/rabbis and women’s pictures few and far between, if at all. The issues surrounding how teachers relate to gender in the classroom, how girls are treated in math and sciences and how boys are treated in art and literature — issues that blasted open in America with the 1992 AAUW report “How Schools Shortchange Girls” and have since contributed to a complete evolution of gender in education in America — have barely been noted in the Orthodox day school system. READ MORE AT THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD Read the rest of this entry →

Women can solve the world’s problems by just being a little quieter. That is the message emerging from the resolution of a little fracas in the Religious Zionist world recently. The conflict revolved around the traditional IDF event memorializing the “Lamed-Heh,” the 35 men from the Haganah convoy who gave their lives to protect Gush Etzion in 1948. Bnei Akiva announced their withdrawal from the event because there are to be women singing in the choir. After some hemming and hawing and a few angry responses even from within the Bnei Akiva constituency — including condemnation of the boycott from Bnei Akiva World head Daniel Goldman, as well as Kibbutz Hadati youth, Kolech, and others —the groups reached a “compromise” in which women would not sing at the event, but would sing after the event (once all of the Bnei Akiva kids have left).

Terrible news for women: The government ruled today that it is legal for the public buses in Israel to send women to the back of the bus. The Hebrew report is here. I'm preparing a proper blog post in response, in the coming days. Anyone want to share thoughts and ideas? Read the rest of this entry →

Women, looking around at other women, are often so sensitive to being judged — whether or not the sentiment is justified. Working women feel judged as bad mothers, and stay-at-home mothers feel judged as inferior members of society at large, a society in which career often equals social status and identity. I think that much of the recent Sisterhood debate on this topic reflects this general insecurity. Mothers are so heavily judged and blamed for a whole host of societal ills. From Sigmund Freud to Robert Goren, mothers who don’t do their jobs properly are credited with smothering and emasculating young men and for causing psychosis and sociopathic behavior. No wonder women are always so insecure.

My colleague Debra Nussbaum Cohen, a wonderful writer who has been dedicated to the issue of advancing women in Judaism for 15 years, responded to my post on the Sisterhood about women and work. Read it here. What do you think? Where do you stand in this discussion? Weigh in, here or at the Forward. Read the rest of this entry →

In Friday's Jerusalem Post. If all the people whose biographies appear in Jewish Sages of Today: Profiles of Extraordinary People were in the same room, it would be quite an impressive gathering, a venerable "who's who" of today's American Jewish and Israeli world. But fame and renown are not what editor Aryeh Rubin was looking at in the people whom he chose to profile. Rubin, a successful businessman, philanthropist and scholar, was not looking for "stars" but "sages." Read the rest of this entry →

As I was driving my daughter to school for an afternoon exam, I received a work call about a knotty issue that left me with a lot of explaining to do about power, money and some complexities of office politics. This is my life, I thought. Though I’ve long since abandoned any hope of being free to do only one thing at a time, and I’m not sure I would have chosen to expose my child to all that she heard on the speakerphone, nevertheless, after 17 years at this parenting stuff, I am happy to report that I am no longer self-flagellating about doing it all at once. Read the rest of this entry →

The purpose of this treatise is to examine the practice of gender segregated transport in the Ultra Orthodox communities of Jerusalem.... [T]his is not a study of multiculturalism, rather an assessment of a specific religious cultural practice and its impact on gender equality in an advanced state purporting to be a secular democracy. We explore the way in which knowledge is imparted differently to men and women and support Tamar El-Or’s argument that Ultra Orthodox women are educated to maintain their ignorance, which has a profound impact on the way Ultra Orthodox men and women have come to understand their respective roles in a patriarchal society. The treatise also sets out to test some of the core assumptions inherent in feminist curiosity by suggesting that the Ultra Orthodoxy’s pathological curiosity and hypervigilance of the female body underpins some of the more discriminatory practices that disempower women.

Goel Ratzon, a 60-year-old man with long white hair and penetrating eyes, has at least 17 wives and 28 children, though the precise figure remains elusive. Ratzon, who apparently believes himself to be something of a messiah, or the modern embodiment of King Solomon, was arrested last week in Tel Aviv, as were some of the wives, following an eight-month undercover operation that included some daring work of a female detective who presented herself as a willing conquest. The details emerging over the past few days about life in his cult/commune/harem form a disturbing and mysterious portrait, in part because of how zealously many of the women have come to his defense. Read the rest of this entry →

"When I see a women wearing a tallit, it burns my eyes," an Orthodox man told me during the course of my research on Judaism and masculinity. "It makes the synagogue seem Reform or Conservative, where women are trying to me like men." The statement was and remains jarring for so many reasons. I wonder how a man, who presumably walks into synagogue to pray, can be so disturbed by the sight of a woman cloaked and engaged in prayer all the way on the other side of the mehitza. I wonder why a woman in a tallit has the potential to disrupt a man's entire Jewish identity, challenging his own self-definition as "Orthodox." The statement, though, about a woman "trying to be like a man," which has repeated itself in countless discussions -- in person and virtual -- is perhaps the most troubling and the most telling. The entire discussion of tallit is ultimately about men's perceptions of women, and of themselves, and a need to maintain a gender status quo. Read the rest of this entry →