Elana Sztokman

A man goes to a prostitute, and then blames her for making him sin. No, this is not the beginning of a joke. Rather, it’s the argument currently being made by Knesset members from the (all male) Shas party in a current round of deliberations about the legality of prostitution.

At issue is a bill recently introduced by Kadima Knesset member Orit Zuaretz, seen at right, outlawing the solicitation of a prostitute. Actually, the Zuaretz bill makes solicitation punishable with six months in prison only after the second arrest. First time offenders will be sent to a form of rehab that includes mandatory attendance at seminars on public health and human dignity, as well as lectures given from former prostitutes about the harrowing conditions of their lives. The bill is based on the Sweden model, where a 1999 law punished those soliciting and not those being solicited — and resulted in the number of women working as prostitutes shrinking by two-thirds....

Unfortunately, not everyone is in favor. According to Shas legislators, the main opponents of this groundbreaking bill, men are the victims and women are the criminals. “The women are the guilty ones in the prostitution industry, and men are just the victims, because women tempt them,” according to Knesset member Nissim Zeev, speaking at the hearing of the Committee on the Trafficking of Women last week.

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While the Israeli cabinet has been grappling with some of the most harrowing decisions it has ever faced — from the deliberations over the release of Gilad Shalit, to some particularly stringent conditions imposed by President Obama — the religious right wing community in Israel has been engaged in its own disputations about nothing other than the role of the women’s body in contemporary Israeli politics.

Rabbi Eliezer Melamed, rabbi of Har Bracha Yeshiva who is at the center of the current storm about religious troops refusing orders to evacuate Jewish homes, apparently believes that the real power of the religious right wing comes from women’s wombs. Two weeks ago, he wrote a column in the newspaper “Besheva” about the appropriate response to the settlement freeze: “By establishing large families, blessed with many sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters like the dust of the earth, inheriting the land.”

He went on to say that in order to have more children, people have to be willing to live “modesty” and to “give up permissiveness.” Finally, he suggested that if families in the West Bank would be willing to “crowd in the way they do in Meah Shearim, we could fit into our homes 900,000 people.”

Now there’s a vision to behold — imagine an entire landscape that looks like Meah Shearim.

READ MORE AT THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD

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In Japan, it seems, there are some women-only buses. They were established, according to journalist Chani Luz, to protect women from “groping men.” Luz, who writes for the Orthodox publications Makor Rishon and Hatzofe, supports women-only buses in Israel because, as she recalled in a recent Ynet column, she was once molested on a bus when she was in 12th grade. “An older man sat next to me on the bus from Rehovot to Ramle and did not stop putting his hand on me and making indecent proposals,” she wrote. “I wanted to get up but I froze in my seat until the end of the ride.” Luz thus concludes that feminists should be in favor of separate buses. Gender-segregated buses, with men in the front and women in the back, are currently a burning issue in Israel, as Transport Minister Israel Katz has until December 27 to rule on whether or not gender-segregated buses in Israel are, in his opinion, legal. READ THE REST AT THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD BLOG -- AND DON'T FORGET TO CLICK ON THE LINK TO SIGN THE PETITION Read the rest of this entry →

I was so excited to see a woman on the cover of Friday’s financial section of Yediot Ahronot that I nearly spilled my nail polish all over the newspaper. The full-page headshot of Sharon Chen-Konofny — gorgeous, fully made up, and biting on a nail-polish bottle — seemed like such a welcome change from the usual face of business in Israel. Monday’s issue of Mamon (“money”) is much more typical: There are three photos of men on the cover, 11 photos of men inside and not a single photo of a woman anywhere. Of course, of the 19 families in Israel who own the equivalent of 88% of the national budget, only one is a woman: Shari Arinson. Moreover, according to a Knesset survey, men are four times more likely to be a CEO than are women, and a significant number of businesses in Israel don’t have any women on their boards or in their top leadership. So the absence of women in newspapers’ financial sections reflects a very sobering reality. I therefore read with great earnestness the story about Chen-Konofny, entrepreneurial founder of “Laka”, a chain of inexpensive manicure stands in malls that enable women to get their nails done even in an economic downturn. “Women will always want a manicure,” she said. “We have a basic need to do this. Whether we have money or not, we like to feel that we invested in ourselves.” Hmm … When it comes to “investing in myself,” a manicure is not at the top of my list. Read the rest at the Forward Sisterhood Read the rest of this entry →

The fact that a woman was arrested for wearing a tallit at the kotel should give us all pause. We should be ashamed that a woman can be so humiliated for her ritual practice, horrified that this takes place in the State of Israel in the very spot where the shechina is supposed to rest,and absolutely aghast that it is the Jewish police in the Jewish state making tallit-wearing a crime. Nofrat Frenkel, the fifth year medical student whose prayer practice is at the root of these events, told her story in the Hebrew press and then in the Forward. Her sincerity and candor in her spiritual quest are admirable. I would like to say she was courageous, but my sense is that she had no idea that her actions would require courage. She was simply trying to reach God.

The atmosphere at the Kotel, the feeling that all those women praying around me were also turning to God and pouring out their hearts to Him, inspires me with the joy of Jewish fraternity. Here is one place in which, shoulder to shoulder, all the hearts are calling to God. Prayer at the Kotel is so different from private prayer at home, or from communal prayer at the synagogue. It is a mixed creation: I am in a communal place, with many worshippers, but not even one voice can be heard. Just soft murmurings, choked crying, mute requests.

Poignant, earnest, and spiritual. That's how I see Nofrat Frenkel's quest. But the responses of some the talkbackers at the Forward see it differently. Verna M. Black wrote, "What a pity that this woman does not truly comprehend the mitzvot that women have in Judaism, and the mitzvot that men have. There are laws, better known as Halacha which overides the ego of women acting like men." Paulette takes a similar attack and says, "I would love to understand what Miss Frenkel's great insecurities are that she feels the need to wear a tallis so 'she can be like a man'. Grow up!" 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 →

In today's YNETToday I usually feel pretty lucky. On Nov 25 each year, International Day against Violence against Women, supportive media will show us statistics about rape, wife-murder, and domestic violence. Usually, I can come back home and take a deep breath. Thank God, I think, I've never been beaten by my spouse under my own roof or raped, so I have always counted my blessings. But this year, something has changed. Read the rest of this entry →

The sight of a Jewish champion, standing in that emotionally sweaty pose raising victorious fists in front of the Israeli flag, is enough to bring tears into the eyes of Jews everywhere. But Yuri Foreman, who three-time world champion Daniel Santos for the WBA Super Welterweight title, has become a phenomenon for the other aspect of his life: he's also an ultra-Orthodox rabbinical student. The excitement with which his personality and lifestyle have been greeted is understandable though a bit bizarre. I mean, I get the ethnic pride. You know, Jewish guys everywhere, including in my own house, have gotten a huge boost here. It's cute, actually. But really, at the risk of stating the obvious, I would like to ask the following: Doesn't the idea of kicking the wind out of someone until he's knocked unconscious go against some mitzvah somewhere? 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 →