Elana Sztokman

Unpious.com, A blog site for Chassidic refugees -- that is, people who grew up chassidic and left -- explores some of the darker sides of Jewish life. This week, a woman writes about her husband's rape and bondage sex fettish, and recalls the way her kallah teacher encouraged her to take it. Sure, he can stick a cucumber in her until it hurts, but make sure you don't mispronounce the bracha on the chanuka candles... Shocking, shocking post. Even for me, and I thought I had heard it all.... Read the rest of this entry →

Gabrielle Birkner, web-editor of The Forward, and creator of the Sisterhood, interviewed me before the JOFA conference to hear about some of the issues. I talked about "Torah Im Shivyon", a vision for equality in Orthodox day school education, and about my forthcoming book about Orthodox men, to be published by Hadassah Brandeis in early 2011, entitled, "On the cusp: Jewish men in transition." Listen here. Let me know what you think! Read the rest of this entry →

Homosexuality is currently a hot topic in the religious Zionist community. Consider this: the popular “Srugim” drama about religious single life in Jerusalem, has a central figure who is gay; the Israel educational channel recently ran a documentary series on homosexuality in Orthodoxy that featured a panel of rabbis with a range of opinions; “Eyes Wide Open”, a look at gays in the ultra-Orthodox community, premiered at the recent New York Jewish Film Festival; and a group of rabbis recently signed a letter calling for better treatment of gays in the community. Now that homosexuality is “in,” the religious community has quickly turned its attention in the sexual abuse affair of Rabbi Mordechai Elon from talking about sexual abuse to talking about homosexuality. Put differently, focus has shifted from sympathy for the alleged victims to sympathy for the alleged perpetrator. If this discourse continues, it will add travesty to tragedy, miss a vital opportunity to root out evil from the community, and reinstate same old boys’ network that is Orthodox Judaism, only this time in the place that was meant to promote change. Read the rest of this entry →

Sex sells. This marketing approach has become so commonplace that it is not only used to sell cars, beer, and football, but also to sell seemingly innocuous items like yogurt, laundry detergent, toothpaste, potato chips and lawn mowers. It is even used to target female consumers, for products such as facial cleanser, diet soda, perfume, tampons, and salads at McDonald’s. The marketplace has become so immersed in sexed-up images of women that, apparently, many people do not even realize anymore how hurtful these ads can be to the female gender. To remind people that using women as sex objects in order to sell products is hurtful and distorted, WIZO has launched a campaign for the second year in a row to highlight “Israel’s Most Sexist Commercials of the Year.” No, not “sexiest” but most “sexist.” Their criteria for “sexist” is frighteningly simple. Sexist ads are ones that chop up women’s bodies into parts or depict women’s bodies without the faces, that depict women’s bodies as edible replacements for food or meat, that offer women’s bodies as objects for sale or consumption, that reinforce stereotypes and stigmas about women, that infantilize women or portray women as stupid, that promote women as sexual servants, that encourage violence or sexual violence against women, and that legitimize rape. Read the rest and watch the ads at the Forward Sisterhood. Read the rest of this entry →

The gap between women’s wages and men’s wages in Israel is getting wider. According to the latest annual survey conducted by Oketz Systems, men in senior management positions in Israel are making on average 29% more than women in identical positions. The survey results show a distinct widening of the gender gap in salaries. Last year, the gap was 26%; in 2007 the gap was 25%; in 2005, the gap stood at 23%. It exists in all levels of employment, but increases in senior management positions. The gap is 24% among CEOs, 26% among those second in command, and 41% among product managers. The widest gap of 49% is noted among marketing managers, in which men earn on average 29,480 NIS ($7,833) per month and women earn on average 19,730 NIS ($5,243) per month. Only in administrative positions does the gap all but disappear — with monthly wages of 5,270 NIS ($1,400) for men and 5,260 NIS ($1,397) for women. Read the rest at the Forward Sisterhood. Read the rest of this entry →

I'm heading off to New York next week for the bi-annual JOFA conference, where I'll be joining many distinguished speakers in what will surely be a stimulating, push-the-envelope kind of event. I'll be giving two talks, one about a vision of feminism in Orthodox education and one about about boys, men and masculinity based on my post-doc research on the subject. The conference schedule looks fantastic, a delectable smorgasbord of issues in Judaism and gender, and I'll be sure to report back. Here is more exciting info from JOFA: Read the rest of this entry →

This is one of my favorite seasons of all time: Olympic figure-skating season. For me, every other sport, in or out of the Olympics, holds a very distant second place, if at all, on my scale of interest. When I read in Gia Kourlas’ New York Times piece that she is always met with laughter when she tells people that she is a former figure skater, I was incredulous. After all, if I were to meet a professional figure skater, my response would undoubtedly be, “That’s so cool!” while inside I would be thinking, “I’m so jealous….” I cannot imagine anyone laughing. Figure skating is among the many professions that seem like they will never be open to an Orthodox Jewish girl. It’s not just the outfits that reveal far more thigh and shoulder action than the average day school dress code. Although, interestingly, the lovely Israeli pairs’ team, Alexandra and Roman Zaretsky, tried hard to transform Orthodox attire into an ethnically intriguing skating costume; they did not quite pull it off, in part because all the above-the-knee skin made it a bit inauthentic and in part because it’s hard for me to idealize so-called “modest” women’s attire as something quaint, like a an Indian sari or Sioux headdress. Mostly, though, it’s simply hard to imagine an Orthodox Jewish couple dancing with such ardor. It’s of like trying to imagine President Obama knitting, or Rabbi Ovadia Yosef doing yoga. Read the rest of this entry →

The Internet can be a nasty place. Whether due to the replacement of visceral human relationships with a cold, lifeless screen, or because people have learned to type faster than they think, something about Internet conversation seems to bring out the worst in human discourse. As my Forward colleague Jay Michaelson pointed out in his column last week, “the immediacy and anonymity of the Comment feature on the Internet encourages one to respond in the heat of the moment, and with as much fire as possible.” That said, there seems to be a particular fire in talkbacks relating to religious Judaism. Michaelson noticed this as well, what he called, “rage…dressed up in religious rhetoric.” In my writings on topics of gender and religious life at the Forward, in The Jerusalem Post, and elsewhere, I’ve been called a “man wannabe,” an “anti-Semite” and other names. It’s intriguing to me that essays about cultural trends often merit one or two comments while comments about gender and religion can get 20–30 comments. There is an ire around religious issues (especially gender) that begs explication. Michaelson calls for collective anger management, but I think there is something else at work here. This trend took a rather vile turn recently when my daughter Avigayil wrote a column here about her experience being attacked by haredim at the Kotel. Read the rest of this entry →

You can learn an incredible amount about different people from language. There are, for example, 27 words for “moustache” in Albanian – including a word for what English-speakers would call “no moustache.” It seems that in Albania, moustaches are pretty important. Similarly, the Inuit are famous for having 30 words for snow – clearly they see things in the snow that most of us don’t.

Unique linguistic forms abound, and provide intriguing insights into cultures. According to Adam Jacot de Boinod, author of 'The Meaning of Tingo', the Khakas people of Siberia have a word for the ring you put in the nose of a calf in order to stop it suckling its mother (“oorxax”); Indonesian has a word for flicking someone with the middle finger on the ear (“nylentik”); Hawaiian has a word for scratching your head in order to remember something forgotten (“pana po’o”); Pascuense in Easter Island has a word for a slight inflammation of the throat caused by screaming too much (“ngaobera”); Persian has a word for looking beautiful after having a disease (“mahj”); and Brazilian Portuguese has a word for the practice of putting a live cricket into a box of newly faked documents, until the insect's excrement makes the paper look convincingly old (“grigalem”).

So what’s Hebrew’s claim to fame?

I would have liked to find a word, perhaps, for that hand gesture of squeezing thumb and middle finger in order to indicate to the viewer, “wait.” But no, we Jews are not quite that lucky. Instead, what distinguishes our culture is that ours is the only language in the world that has the word “agunah.”

An agunah is a woman indefinitely stuck in an unwanted marriage, in which the husband is gone but she is still considered married. It is the word for a woman’s perpetual state of limbo, in which she is chained to a man who has complete freedom to move, marry, produce offspring and live a normal life. The cruelty reflected in a society that enables even one agunah to exist — and accepts this situation as a reality to such an extent that it gives her a name — should bring us all enormous shame.

International Agunah Day is marked on Ta’anit Esther, which this year falls on Thursday February 25. I think it’s fitting but tragic to combine the Esther story with the agunah story. After all, according to the traditional story, Esther was trapped in an unwanted marriage as well, to King Ahasverosh, a man known for murdering disobedient wives and around whom Esther had to completely disguise her identity. In this marriage, Esther sacrificed her own freedom, her own dreams, and her own life, presumably for the sake of the Jewish people — although it takes several chapters of the book and an indeterminate number of years for a threat to surface. I hate to say this but in a way, it’s a good thing Haman came along and gave her enslavement a greater purpose. If not, her sacrifice would have been for naught.

READ THE REST ON THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD

It’s been an intense week for me as a parent. I’m torn between using this space to address my daughter’s experience of being verbally attacked by haredim, while she was praying at the Western Wall (and her writing about the experience on The Sisterhood) versus addressing Rabbi Mordechai Elon’s alleged sexual abuse of his students. Both stories fill me with dread at sending my children out there into the wide world, where evil lurks in the very places that goodness is meant to be. I’m confounded about how to provide my children with tools to distinguish good from bad and right from wrong. And I’m deeply troubled about raising young people to be part of a religious society that seems like it is drenched with iniquity at its very foundations. The story of Motti Elon is at once shocking and expected. Shocking because of his squeaky-clean public image, but expected because his alleged misdeeds make for a familiar story: Powerful religious leader, vulnerable youth, sexual assault – been there, done that. There was Zeev Kopelevich of Netiv Meir, Baruch Lanner of NCSY, Chief Rabbi of Kiryat Byalik Rabbi Aminadav Krispin, Stanley Z. Levitt of the Maimonides School, and countless more. Many cases go unreported because of a “conspiracy of silence.” I can’t even count how many friends I have who have been sexually attacked by rabbis but ended up not reporting: my college flatmate was molested by a rabbi; another friend groped by her rabbi, while she was ill; a friend’s older brother raped by his Chabad teacher; a colleague harassed by her dean at rabbinical school. And on and on. So many of the attackers are famous, with worldwide reputations, sparkling smiles and enchanting charisma, that these qualities seem to be part of the profile. As if, the more famous the man is, the more I distrust him; the more celebrity status he has, the more likely I am to assume that he’s hiding his dark side. READ MORE AT THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD Read the rest of this entry →