Here is more exciting info from JOFA:

WORLD RENOWNED ACTIVISTS, SCHOLARS, AND RABBIS TO “JOIN THE CONVERSATION” TO FIND MEANING AND EXPLORE SOCIAL VALUES WITHIN ORTHODOX JUDAISM

JOFA Conference Kicks Off with First-Ever Film Festival; Two U.S. Premieres

Middle School Students to Participate in “Day of Empowerment”

The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) 2010 Film Festival and Conference will take place on March 13^th from 8 p.m. to Midnight and March 14^th, from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., at Columbia University’s Alfred Lerner Hall, 2920 Broadway, New York City.

The JOFA Conference is the country’s largest, most diverse and vibrant gathering of Modern Orthodox Jews. Featured speakers include, Yeshiva University President Richard Joel, Tamar Ross, Rabbi Daniel Sperber and 2009 National Jewish Book Award winner Judy Klitsner. It also brings together new female Orthodox Rabbinic leaders such as Rabba Sara Hurwitz with original trailblazers such as Blu Greenberg and Reb Mimi Feigelson. JOFA invites participants to “‘Join the Conversation” and ask difficult, but essential, questions in order to find new meaning and explore social values within Orthodoxy.

“Not only will traditional feminist issues such as women’s leadership and ritual inclusion of women be highlighted but Jewish themes of social justice and spirituality will also be explored. It is a conference for everyone that cares about the direction of Orthodoxy” says JOFA President Carol Kaufman Newman.

Exhibitions and text study will be interspersed among the sessions along with hands-on workshops including Jewish Yoga, Torah-scroll lettering, quilting and creative writing. Meals and childcare will be included.

In addition, this year, middle school students in grades 6-8 will have their own full day of sessions to talk about issues that pertain to them, including the people who influence their lives, social action and social justice, being their own bosses and tzniut – the Jewish concept of modesty. Students will be challenged to find their voices and to use them to make changes in their communities and in the world as a whole.

To view the conference schedule, visit www.jofa.com.

Two films will make their U.S. debut at the JOFA Film Festival. The first, “Persian Lullaby,” directed by Keren Hakkak, tells the story of Dafna, a 40-year-old single mother who arrives at her parents’ home a few days before her son’s brit and is snubbed by her father, an elderly Persian Jew. The second, “Shira,” directed by Miryam Adler, focuses on the film’s namesake, a young woman with five small children who struggles with issues of family planning against the backdrop of halakhic (Jewish legal) imperatives. The JOFA Film Festival addresses the challenge of maintaining and even celebrating traditional Jewish values while embracing the modern world. The festival will include screenings of 13 dramas, comedies, documentaries and shorts from the U.S. and Israel, and discussions with select directors and producers. A complete list of the films and the trailers can be viewed at www.jofa.org.

Conference tickets, including breakfast and lunch: $75 (adult); $50 (educator or under 30); $36 (student). Film Festival tickets: $36 (adult); $25 (educator or under 30); $20 (student). Discounts are available when combined with the JOFA Conference. To register, visit www.jofa.org or contact Karen Sponder at 212-679-7814 or karen.sponder@jofa.org.

Please Contact Wendy Hirschhorn at 212-826-8790 or wendyhi@nyc.rr.com to arrange interviews with JOFA members and Conference attendees in your readership.

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.

There are certain aspirations that are pretty much unacceptable for Orthodox girls: Broadway actress. Astronaut. Cellist with the philharmonic. President of the United States. University president. Surgeon general. Bus driver. Sanitation worker. Police woman. Pilot. Mohel. Shochet. Rabbi (though that may be changing). Sure, there are lots of seemingly reasonable excuses given: Some professions demand working on Friday night, some demand “indecent” clothing, some are too “physical”, and some are just, well , pas nisht, or not done.

There are moments in my life, though, when I get that pang. That sort of “what if” melody rising through my chest.

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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. The confluence of attacks — in-person attacks, in which she and the women with whom she was with were called “ ‘men,’ ‘lesbians,’ ‘devils,’ [and] ‘Christians,’” followed by talkback attacks questioning her entire life, her family, her integrity, and whether or not she actually wrote the article — made for some particularly creepy moments. One memorable talk-backer called my daughter a “provocateur in victim’s clothing,” evoking some very dark imagery, and making me doubt the wisdom of sending my daughter out alone into the dark and treacherous alleyways of the Internet.

Although virtual vitriol abounds, I think it is worth conducting some narrative analysis of talkback texts in these locations, which I believe shed important light on the rhetorical dynamics endemic to contemporary Orthodox culture.

For one thing, language of absolutes — with unbending black lines demarking absolute “in” and absolute “out” — condemn to illegitimacy ideas of equality and, of course, feminism. In a recent debate about gender in the “Jewish Professionals” group on LinkedIn — one that, by Internet standards, was entirely civil — a man named “Reuven” commented that:

It is not proper for women to have leadership roles in Judaism. … There are those who wish to rebel against the old-fashioned gender roles assigned by the Torah, and that is their choice, but please don’t call your feminist views Judaism. It’s simply not true.

According to this view, there is absolute Torah, and absolute truth, and any change to “old-fashioned” gender hierarchies is by definition outside of those truths and therefore not Judaism.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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