Elana Sztokman

There was an exciting energy at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance conference. Speakers in both the plenary and individual sessions, such as emerging star Lisa Schlaff, made far-reaching statements and bold suggestions about issues ranging from marriage and sexuality to halachic ingenuity. Participants responded in kind with creativity and courage, revealing what seems to be a powerful consensus that Orthodoxy is in the midst of a major overhaul from the ground up. The fact that conference participants expressed full and enthusiastic support for Orthodox women rabbis offers some sense of the disconnect between this grassroots community and the formal leadership of Modern Orthodoxy. 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 →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Leah Berkenwald at Jewish Women's Archives gives us a fabulous rundown of the decade that was for Jewish women. Keep up the great work at the JWA! Read the rest of this entry →

My dear friend Jennifer Brody Martin is not likely to tell you what a trailblazer she is. But in fact she is the first Orthodox Jewish woman funeral director in America. Most people don't appreciate the importance of the funeral home in their lives, because it is a topic that only becomes important at certain painful moments which we tend not to think about too much. But the fact is, the funeral and the cemetery are the location of some of our most emotional and dramatic life events. Yet in the religious Jewish world, these sites often remain off limits to women -- emotionally and physically. (See entry from earlier this year on the subject.) Below is an article by Chana Pinchasi about her vision of women and funerals. It appeared in last week's Ynet. I dedicate this column to Jennifer, with love and admiration for doing God's work. The Last Act of Kindness By Chana Pinchasi 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 →

The current issue of the JOFA Journal offers a smorgasbord of thoughtful articles about clothing in Orthodoxy, aka "tznius". President Carol Kaufman Newman writes about how different today's Orthodoxy is compared to when she was growing up and freely wore cheerleader outfits. "I would be less than honest if I did not confess that all this covering up gives me pause." Dvora Zlochower offers a halakhic analysis and says that rabbinic opinions cannot be divorced from social norms. The issue of women’s pants “go beyond a narrower question of whether women’s pants are begged ish to their cultural and social significance as roles for women begin changing and expanding,” she writes. Raquel M. Ukeles continues the cultural theme by offering a riveting comparison of contemporary Judaism and Islam in conversation with Western society Read the rest of this entry →

Kolech, in cooperation with Pelech, Yedidya, and Ne'emanei Torah Ba'Avoda, are pleased to invite you to "Identity Beit Midrash", a place where young men and women can study, explore and reflect upon existential questions of religious, Israeli identity and belonging. Read the rest of this entry →