Jewfem Blog

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. Read more

Former Jerusalem City Councilwoman and current Executive Director of IRAC Anat Hoffman was detained last week for her suspected involvement in the crime of Wearing a Tallit. According to Ynet: The police reported that Hoffman was investigated at the Merhav David Station after the events at the Western Wall on the grounds that she disrupted the status quo at the site. Hoffman was questioned about her role in organizing the prayer service and the clashes that ensued. She was reportedly asked to give her finger prints. At the end of the investigation, she was released to go home. Hoffman, who was surprised by the police involvement in the issue, told Ynet, "An officer sat there who asked me if I initiated the minyan, how many women came, whether they wore tallitot (prayer shawls customarily worn by men during Jewish prayers) and donned kippot, and whether we held the Torah scrolls and held a procession to Robinson's Arch. This is, after all, what have been doing every first of the (Hebrew) month for 21 years already." Joel Katz at Religion and State in Israel brings an array of items relating to this story, including video coverage of the incident, blogs, and a horrifying list of questions that she was asked in her interrogation, such as: * Were women wearing tallitot? * What is a tallit? * Did the women wear kippot? * Did you hold a Torah scroll? * Did you hold a Torah scroll with intent to read it?

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. “This is a revolutionary law,” Zuaretz said, “because it punishes the clients — consumers of prostitution — as criminals and forces them to take responsibility for their behavior.” Zuaretz argues that “this is the only way to protect women being trafficked as prostitutes, and not by proposals for organizing prostitution as a supposed profession — because it is not a profession, and is not done by free choice.” Knesset member Zevulun Orlev agrees. “It’s not enough to punish the pimps and the traffickers but in order to dry up the swamp and to reduce demand, we have to hit the clients themselves.” The bill was introduced during a special session of the Committee on the Trafficking of Women. According to the findings of a 2005 Knesset Inquiry, some 3000–5000 women are smuggled into Israel annually and sold into prostitution, and many live in sub-human conditions. Traffickers take away the women’s passports before selling them on to pimps, and sometimes women are subjected to human auctions, where they are stripped, examined and sold for $8,000-$10,000.The United Nations named Israel as one of the main destinations in the world for trafficked women. The U.S. State Department also lists Israel as a Tier 2 offender in the Trafficking in Persons report. According to Vered Lee writing in Haaretz: Criminalizing the consumption of commercialized sex seems such an obvious step that it’s not clear why it has not long been part of our law. In other criminal areas such as gambling and drugs, the law has seen the purchasers as offenders from the start, even if not the main culprits. … Still, [consumers of prostitution] have avoided prosecution, and it’s the victims who are frequently arrested in brothel raids. … The double standards are nicely illustrated linguistically, with the pejoratives ‘prostitute’ or ‘whore’ used for the women, while the men are called ‘customers’ or ‘clients.’ The new bill would put an end to this kind of sanitization of language; the purchasers would be tagged as criminals, not clients. The bodies of human beings, be...

A little poetic justice for those of you who have been following my ditherings on birthdays, bodies and beauty.... The four beautifullittle creatures who I love calling my children got together and gave me a birthday present that they thought I could really use: apedicure and a massage! I'm really going to enjoy my pampering! Thanks guys....

I’m turning forty next week, and I want to celebrate. I’m not talking about a Madonna-style birthday celebration of pretending I’m still 22, or an Oprah-style event involving giving away cars (although perhaps if I could actually do either, I might consider it). I’m thinking more along the lines of a celebration of life, of joy, of the freedom that comes with a certain stage of adulthood. Forty is a big deal. Every major biblical transition was represented by forty – forty years in the desert, forty days on the mountain, forty days of the flood, forty years of peace when Deborah became judge (after Yael took out Sisera). In short, forty is birth, transition, or transformation. Forty weeks of gestation. According to the Kabala, forty steps in the creation of the world – ten utterances of God, and four steps of creation each time. Forty. According to the late Aryeh Kaplan, forty is the “mem”, the letter of “mayim”, waters, which represents the fluidity of life. Forty, or “mayim”, is about my own rebirth. I can’t wait. Forty is freedom. It’s about relinquishing all kinds of anxieties and fears and a nagging need to please. It’s about letting myself dance and sing and run and leap, about allowing myself to be who I am, to speak freely and write freely and not be too afraid that someone won’t like what I have to say. I’ve learned that someone will always disagree or disapprove, so I might as well be true to myself, so at least one person will always be satisfied. Forty is about owning myself. Like the way the amazing George Michael defines it: “I don’t belong to you and you don’t belong to me. Yeah, yeah!” It’s about letting go of other people’s voices in my head and listening closely to my own. I believe that quiet inner voice that we all have to be the voice of God that we were all granted as part of our tzelem elokim. It’s so often encumbered by external prattle, the way the poet Mary Oliver writes in her glorious poem, “The Journey”: “’ "Mend my life!"/ each voice cried/ But you didn't stop/ You knew what you had to do.”..... So, to mark my newfound freedom of forty and all its accompanying Zen-Torah wisdom, I invite you to help me celebrate my birthday by helping other women who have not yet achieved freedom. I am talking of course about agunot and mesoravot get, women inextricably chained in unwanted marriages who want nothing else than the freedom I described here. If you want to help me celebrate, please give a gift of $40 to Mavoi Satum helping agunot and mesoravot get. Together, we’ll spread the joy, and strive to bring about freedom for all. And thanks for celebrating with me! Read the rest on the Forward Sisterhood

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 ofseparate 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 LINKTO SIGN THE PETITION

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. “Women to the back of the bus” has been a growing trend over the past 10–15 years in Israel. I experienced being sent to the back of a bus back at Bar-Ilan University (coming from Bnei Brak) back in 1995, as I boarded the bus with a toddler asleep on my shoulder. One man started getting up for me but the man next to him pulled him by the sleeve and implored him not to. As the bus pulled onto the highway, I was still on my feet, making my way towards the crowded women’s section while trying to hold my child and maintain my balance. A nice (secular) woman eventually got up for me. Many women, myself included, have been writing about this issue for some time already. Author Naomi Ragen declared, “I am not sitting on the back of the bus,” joined a suit with the Centre for Jewish Pluralism against Dan and Egged bus lines that is at the heart of the current debate, and recently shared some horror stories in Jewish Ideas: Miriam Shear, a Canadian grandmother who took the number 2 bus to the kotel to pray every day (a bus not designated mehadrin by the way) who took a front seat and refused to move, was spat upon, had her head covering torn off, and was thrown to the ground and beaten by men in ultra-Orthodox clothing who apparently had fewer scruples about negiah…A pregnant woman got on the 318 midnight bus from B’nai Brak to Rehovot. She sat in the front because of motion sickness, explaining this to the other passengers. One Hareidi man stopped the bus by standing with one foot outside and one on the step up so the driver couldn’t close the door. The woman finally fled into the street in the middle of the night…A young woman on the midnight bus from Safed to Afula boarded wearing pants, and had to fight with the driver and other passengers who insisted that she be thrown off the bus in...

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

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

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!"