Jewfem Blog

The recent arrest of a woman carrying a Torah at the Western Wall is testing already tense relations between the ultra-Orthodox and other Jewish groups over issues of religious pluralism in Israel. It has also prompted accusations that Israel’s national police force is attempting to reinterpret a Supreme Court ruling on women’s prayer at Judaism’s holiest site.

Anat Hoffman, chairwoman of the women’s prayer group Women of the Wall, was detained July 12, as she was leading about 150 worshippers from the Western Wall plaza to Robinson’s Arch, the portion of the Wall where the group is permitted to read from the Torah.

Hoffman, executive director of the lsrael Religious Action Center, was interrogated for five hours, fined the equivalent of $1,300 and placed under a restraining order that bars her from visiting the Western Wall for 30 days. She contends that she was acting within the law, under which women are not permitted to read from the Torah or to wear a prayer shawl as an outer garment within the Kotel plaza.

The recent arrest of a woman carrying a Torah at the Western Wall is testing already tense relations between the ultra-Orthodox and other Jewish groups over issues of religious pluralism in Israel. It has also prompted accusations that Israel’s national police force is attempting to reinterpret a Supreme Court ruling on women’s prayer at Judaism’s holiest site.

Anat Hoffman, chairwoman of the women’s prayer group Women of the Wall, was detained July 12, as she was leading about 150 worshippers from the Western Wall plaza to Robinson’s Arch, the portion of the Wall where the group is permitted to read from the Torah.

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Find a Jewish man. Get married in your early 20s. Give birth soon after. Ultimately become a grandmother. That’s the ideal that many young Jewish girls are raised with. But moms today are ditching old stereotypesand creating new traditions. They are becoming mothers their own way — having kids later in life, without partners, with same-sex partners and with the help of science — using options that weren’t given to us a century or, in many cases, even a generation ago. This Mother’s Day, May 9, the Forward is celebrating all moms — modern and traditional — and we asked several Jewish women to share their stories of motherhood. Here are five of our favorites. Share your story of Jewish motherhood in the comments section at http://www.forward.com. — Devra Ferst READ THE REST AT THE FORWARD

Every year at the end of Passover, my mother takes a box of matzoh and puts it aside for a few weeks. Then, on the 14th day of Iyar, exactly a month after Passover eve, she takes it out and eats it — as do many other Jews around the world — to remember the holiday of Pesach Sheni, the Second Passover. This practice reflects the biblical story in which a group of Jews came to Moses very upset that they missed out on the first Passover in the desert because they had been in a state of impurity and were thus excluded from this seminal national event. Moses, baffled, approached God, who replied by creating the Pesach Sheni ritual. Fromthen on, any Jew who was unable to take part in the Passover festival, whether for reasons of impurity or logistical/economic difficulty, celebrated Passover a month later, in a quintessential second chance. In the spirit of Pesach Sheni’s powerful message of inclusion, this year for the first time, Pesach Sheni was marked on Monday, April 26 as the “Day for Religious Tolerance.” The celebration, initiated by Bat-Kol, the organization of religious lesbians, and Kolech, an Orthodox feminist organization in Israel, was explained by Bat-Kol activists Dina Berman Maykon and Tamar Gan-Zvi Bick... READ THE REST AT THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD

The recent Rabbinical Council of America decision to exclude women from the rabbinate has given me the final push to embark on a research project I've been discussing with some friends and colleagues for a while: I am going to research and write about women leaving Orthodoxy.

The scene is riveting: The body of a murdered woman has been discovered in the middle of the city. Throngs of professional men and women — detectives, crime scene investigators, and the coroner — scurry around collecting evidence, analyzing the circumstances of the crime, and comparing theories. Then, someone discovers the victim’s handbag. “Oh, this victim is no prostitute,” announces one of the female detectives with certain authority, dressed in well-coordinated though significant cleavage-revealing clothing. “This handbag costs $3,000 at Bloomingdale’s.” She smirks as the other professional women return the knowing look, and the men merely listen silently, awed and amused by the vast stores of female knowledge. This scene, which has repeated itself in almost all the main prime time procedural dramas is the subject of Susan J. Douglas’s new nonfiction book, “Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work Is Done.” (Times Books) According to Douglas, the mixed messages about gender, in which women are at once powerful and successful and yet somehow still fashionobsessed, big-breasted and flirtatious, reflect a troubling trend about gender in popular culture. With a fine-tooth scrutiny of television, movies, commercials, music, and the media coverage of everything from petty crime to national politics, Douglas offers a sophisticated and troubling analysis of gender messages that deeply resonated with me. Read more

The scene is riveting: The body of a murdered woman has been discovered in the middle of the city. Throngs of professional men and women — detectives, crime scene investigators, and the coroner — scurry around collecting evidence, analyzing the circumstances of the crime, and comparing theories. Then, someone discovers the victim’s handbag. “Oh, this victim is no prostitute,” announces one of the female detectives with certain authority, dressed in well-coordinated though significant cleavage-revealing clothing. “This handbag costs $3,000 at Bloomingdale’s.” She smirks as the other professional women return the knowing look, and the men merely listen silently, awed and amused by the vast stores of female knowledge. This scene, which has repeated itself in almost all the main prime time procedural dramas is the subject of Susan J. Douglas’s new nonfiction book, “Enlightened Sexism: The Seductive Message that Feminism’s Work Is Done” (Times Books). According to Douglas, the mixed messages about gender, in which women are at once powerful and successful and yet somehow still fashion-obsessed, big-breasted and flirtatious, reflect a troubling trend about gender in popular culture. With a fine-tooth scrutiny of television, movies, commercials, music, and the media coverage of everything from petty crime to national politics, Douglas offers a sophisticated and troubling analysis of gender messages that deeply resonated with me. “Since the early 1990s, much of the media have come to represent women as having made it — completely — in the professions, as having gained sexual equality with men, and having achieved a level of financial success and comfort enjoyed primarily by the Tiffany’s encrusted doyennes of Laguna Beach,” writes Douglas, citing, for example, the character of Amanda (Heather Locklear) of “Melrose Place” as well as Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) of “Grey’s Anatomy” and Det. Stella Bonasera (Melina Kanakaredes) of “CSI.” “At the same time, there has been a resurgence of retrograde dreck clogging our cultural arteries: “The Man Show,” Maxim, and “Girls Gone Wild.” But even this fare, which insists that young women should dress like strippers and have the mental capacities of a vole, was presented as empowering, because while the scantily clad or bare-breasted women may have *seemed * to be objectified, they were really on top, because now they had chosen to be sex objects and men were supposedly nothing more than their helpless, ogling, crotch-driven slaves.” What we are left with, then, according to Douglas, are “fantasies of power.” The media assures women and girls “that women’s liberation is a fait accompli and that we are stronger, more successful, more sexually in control, more fearless, and more held in awe than we actually are.” These fantasies of power are a product of what Douglas calls the “enlightened sexism” that began to spring up in the 1990s. “It insists that women have made plenty of progress because of feminism — indeed, full equality has been achieved — so now it’s okay, even amusing, to resurrect sexist stereotypes of girls and women.” In fact, while this enlightened sexism has been on...

Here is a comment that was posted on my blog at the Forward by a woman named "Aliza": I am a girl who wears skirts below my knees and sleeves up to my elbows... That being said I personally was verbally attacked by a Jewish woman in a burqa and her cult a year ago.. she came over to me in the street and behind her was a herd of charedi women who were not dressed like most and they all surrounded me.. The women came and started poking at me saying that my shirt was too low, my skirt was too short and my clothing was too tight.. It was one of the most humiliating moments of my life! They said that because of girls like me Mashiach isn't coming.. They gave me pamphlets to read and out of pure curiosity I read them. The lack of any sort of recognition of the woman's free will and of her needs was scary and the articles were extreme. Since then I have not seen other women dressed that way. We hear about the violence but I think it's the extremists. I spend a lot of time in Mea Shearim and I wear my colors and I have yet to encounter anything like what I encountered a year ago. I just wanted to share my story... What does this mean?

Two years ago, I wrote an article for the Jerusalem Post about racism in the religious school system, an article that generated some of the most venomous reactions I have ever experienced, which is saying a lot. (Jpost has since revamped its website and the link to the article no longer works). The story, about how a religious girls' school in Emmanuel has separate classes, curricula, schoolyards and staff-rooms for Ashkenazi and Sephardi students, reveals one of the most troubling practices in the ultra-Orthodox community. Now, the story is back in the news, as the school has refused to comply with court rulings for integration. Leading rabbinic figures in the community are urging followers to go to prison rather than be forced to accept Sephardic Jews into their midst. So, how deep is the racism in the religious community? The religious girls' school in Emmanuel has refused to comply with court rulings for integration. Better to maintain racist practices than abide by natural morality, not to mention state law.