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, 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.

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 →

Last week, I gave a talk at Bar Ilan University at Dr. Adam Ferziger's department seminar, where I presented my research on Orthodox masculinities. We were talking about Paul Kivel's "Be a Man Box," an incredibly useful tool for helping boys develop healthy gender identity, a tool which I have adapted to Orthodox men and have come to call the "Be an Orthodox Man Box" (the "BOMB" for short). It's a topic I've been writing and speaking about a lot recently, since completing my post-doc research on the subject, and I'm finishing up the second draft of my book on the subject, which PG will be published one day, sooner rather than later. (One of these days, I will write a longer blog post about the entire thesis....) So I was conducting a very lively discussion with MA and PhD students, mostly Orthodox, about how religious Jewish men are socialized into gender identity: Read the rest of this entry →

Kolech is offering a series of educational and empowerment programs to address the changing needs and interests women of all ages -- and sometimes even men. Take a look – you may be surprised to find out that other people are interested in exploring the same issues that you are! Read the rest of this entry →