Jewfem Blog

Goel Ratzon, a 60-year-old man with long white hair and penetrating eyes, has at least 17 wives and 28 children, though the precise figure remains elusive. Ratzon, who apparently believes himself to be something of a messiah, or the modern embodiment of King Solomon, was arrested last week in Tel Aviv, as were some of the wives, following an eightmonth undercover operation that included some daring work of a female detective who presented herself as a willing conquest. The details emerging over the past few days about life in his cult/commune/harem form a disturbing and mysterious portrait, in part because of how zealously many of the women have come to his defense.

"When I see a women wearing a tallit, it burns my eyes," an Orthodox man told me during the course of my research on Judaism and masculinity. "It makes the synagogue seem Reform or Conservative, where women are trying to me like men." The statement was and remains jarring for so many reasons. I wonder how a man, who presumably walks into synagogue to pray, can be so disturbed by the sight of a woman cloaked and engaged in prayer all the way on the other side of the mehitza. I wonder why a woman in a tallit has the potential to disrupt a man's entire Jewish identity, challenging his own self-definition as "Orthodox." The statement, though, about a woman "trying to be like a man," which has repeated itself in countless discussions -- in person and virtual -- is perhaps the most troubling and the most telling. The entire discussion of tallit is ultimately about men's perceptions of women, and of themselves, and a need to maintain a gender status quo.

We need to recognize that the ultra-Orthodox obsession with removing women from public spaces is in fact an act of systemic violence that is often accompanied by pointed violence (cursing, spitting, pushing, beating up, throwing acid and stealing babies, to name a few incidences from the past 2–3 years). This communal compulsion is a threat to women’s physical and emotional well-being, and goes against the basic tenets of democracy, humanity, and even Torah. Yes, the Torah tells us that all human beings (men AND women) were created in His Divine image and deserve dignity and respect. MORE AT THE FORWARD SISTERHOOD

This fall, Publishers Weekly named the top 100 books of 2009. How many female writers were in the top 10? Zero. How many on the entire list? Twenty-nine.A must read by Julianna Baggott at the Washington Post.

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!

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 asprostitutes 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 the rest in the Forward Sisterhood.

The Center for Women's Justice, under the leadership of Susan Weiss, has released a series of YouTube videos that tell shocking stories of agunot, women struggling to attain independence from controlling husbands and find themselves stuck in the intransigent rabbinical courts. Click here to watch Savta Bikorta.

Ever since Att. Gitit Nachliel’s legal precedent in which the parents of a recalcitrant husband were forced to pay child support as grandparents, Mavoi Satum has been inundated with requests for similar lawsuits. Mavoi Satum, and mesorevet get “L”, have been celebrating a major victory following the ruling of the Jerusalem Family Court (Judge P. Marcus) in which the parents of the recalcitrant husband were forced to pay for child support of their grandchildren. Mavoi Satum Legal Aid Director Att. Gitit Nachliel won this victory based on information that became available about the parents conspiring to hide the whereabouts of their son andfacilitate his recalcitrance. “L” has been an agunah for four years, and her husband left the country when she was pregnant with their youngest child. For more information about this and other Mavoi Satum’s legal precedents, contact Gitit Nachliel.

I knew I would regret it as soon as I started typing, but I did it anyway. As much as I try to avoid getting into virtual arguments in talkback-land, this week I found myself unable to restrain myself. The language, it seems to me, is at the root of the problem, and that’s where the fight needs to take place. At issue is the latest chapter in the saga of ultra-Orthodox pressure to send women to the back of the bus. Last week, a 60-year-old woman, perhaps inspired by Rosa Parks, sat down in the front and refused to move. When an 18-year old male yeshiva student tried to force her to move by yelling, cursing and threatening her, she eventually responded by showering him with pepper spray. I kind of wish she hadn’t done that. Maybe this is my Barnard education speaking, where I, like most every other political science major at Columbia University, had Professor Dennis Dalton’s “Introduction to Political Theory” course indelibly etched in my consciousness, where non-violence was espoused as the Goddess of Democracy. Or maybe it’s because I deeply believe that the act of one person hurting another human being is at the root of evil (see Nel Noddings, “Women and Evil,” a must-read for anyone interested in these issues). Or maybe because I know, in practical terms, that the woman’s act does not advance the cause of fighting gender segregation. Nevertheless, despite these sentiments, I completely defend the woman’s right to do what she did (sorry, Professor Dalton). Moreover, I believe the story raises critical points about dynamics of violence — especially gender-based violence — in our society that are worth exploring. Victims of violence have so few options at their disposal. Advocates often speak of the “fright, flight or fight” responses — either freeze (endure the violence), flight (run away and scream for help), or fight back. None of us can know what our response would be until we are faced with an attack. What is certain, however, is that none of the responses leaves the victim unscathed. “Fright” is so counter-intuitive that it makes later discussions embarrassing, if not harrowing. “If you knew he was raping you, why didn’t you run away?” is a common refrain. But becoming frozen is a well-documented human response. “Flight”, when possible, may save one victim, but leaves the attacker free to continue to pursue other victims, and often leaves the almost-victim perpetually terrified. And “fight” — what happened in this story — is where the victim becomes the attacker and the attacker becomes the victim, and then everyone is confused and the whole story is muddled and observers often lose their ability to tell right from wrong. This is the great catch-22 of victims of violence. As soon as you fight back, you may save yourself temporarily, but you end up losing legitimacy as observers confuse you with a violent offender. (Perhaps this is why the Gandhis, Martin Luther Kings, and Professor Daltons of the world...

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. This is hardly the first time that the female body has been recruited to fight the rhetorical battle for survival of the Jewish people. Prof. Nitza Berkovitch of Ben Gurion University, in a chapter in “Women’s Studies International Forum” entitled, “Motherhood as a national mission: The construction of womanhood in the legal discourse in Israel” (Vol 20 No 5/6, pp. 605-619, 1997), wrote that, as far back as 1949, Israeli society — secular and religious alike — viewed motherhood as the key to the Arab-Israeli conflict. “The motherly role is underscored,” wrote Berkovitch, “through the definition of the Israeli political conflict vis-à-vis the Palestinians in terms of the Jewish-Arab ‘demographic balance.’…In this context, child bearing is celebrated as having a major national significance. Motherhood of non-Jewish women….also has a national meaning, but that of a threat to the ideological foundations of the Zionist State.” That Berkovitch, a leading Israeli feminist scholar, takes issue with this rhetoric is not surprising. But this time around, dissent has come from a surprising source: religious women. Miriam Adler, a religious mother of six who was forcibly evacuated in 2005 from the Sha-Nur settlement in northern Samaria and was later violently arrested at her parents’ home in the Gush Etzion settlement of Neve Daniel and very publicly put on trial, has come out strongly against Melamed’s statements. “Don’t get me wrong,” she wrote in a provocative Ynet column this week. “I don’t disagree with Rabbi Melamed about the importance of the settlements.” Rather, she said, she takes issue with his “use of the woman’s womb” as a political tool. “From my experience as a mother of six,” she wrote in her column, tellingly entitled, “Rabbi...