Allison Kaplan Sommer is a journalist at Haaretz, host of Haaretz Weekend podcast and co-host of The Promised Podcast.
Allison Kaplan Sommer
By Allison Kaplan Sommer
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Life Israeli Women Get Naked To Support Egyptian Blogger
In a naked display of solidarity, 40 Israeli women recently took off their clothes to support an embattled young Egyptian woman who is under fire for posting a nude photograph of herself online. The Egyptian woman, Aliaa Magda Elmahdy, 20, posted the picture and allowed it to be put on Twitter in order to protest…
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Life Defacing Women’s Images is Now Hitting Home
True confession time. Even as I have been writing here at The Sisterhood regularly about the struggles of women in places like Jerusalem and Beit Shemesh, with their issues of gender segregation and the disappearance of their images from public space, personally I have felt pretty far removed from the situation. The town where I…
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Life Rabbi: Choose Death Over Hearing Women Sing
Listen to a woman soldier sing in a military ceremony or face a firing squad? Tough decision, eh? One Orthodox rabbi has declared that male religious soldiers who are true to their faith should choose the latter. In a radio interview quoted in Ha’aretz, Rabbi Elyakim Levanon, rabbi of the West Bank settlement of Elon…
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Music Israel’s Gender Wars: A Week of Changes
It was small, low-key and the participants numbered in the hundreds, not the thousands. But a crowd of Israeli women took to the streets to speak out — or, more accurately, sing out — against the continuing attacks by religious extremists on women’s right to be seen and heard freely in the public square. The…
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Life Israeli HMO Puts Only Boys on Kids’ Stickers
Any parent will tell you that there is no easier way to motivate young children than rewarding them with a sticker for good behavior. The sticker can have anything on it — puppies, kittens, smiley faces, hearts, flowers — as long as it is colorful and cheerful, kids will work to earn it. The Israeli…
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Life Egyptian ‘Virginity Check’ Victim Sues Military
There’s a new female heroine in the Arab world. A brave 25-year-old Egyptian marketing manager named Samira Ibrahim is suing the Egyptian military for the trauma she experienced during their so-called ‘virginity tests’ she suffered while being held in a military detainment center. Ibrahim was part of the group of 17 women arrested in Tahrir…
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Life Rabbinical Court Declares Woman a Witch
If only this could be billed as a spooky Halloween story or something from a medieval archive or from American colonial history. But no, it’s a real news story in modern-day Israel: A state court punished a woman for practicing witchcraft. The alleged hocus-pocus cost her a cool $25,000 in alimony when the value of…
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Music Singing Across Israel for Women’s Dignity
Good news — Israeli women are fighting back against those who would hide and silence them. Recent developments for women in Israel have been worrisome and depressing, as readers of this blog are well aware. There has been increasing gender separation on buses and on public streets, harassment of young Beit Shemesh girls whose only…
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