Dr. Elana Maryles Sztokman is an award-winning author, anthropologist, educator, and activist, and the founder of The Jewish Feminist Academy and Lioness Books. Her forthcoming book, “When Rabbis Abuse: On Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture,” is due out on June 14.
Eleven women’s groups got together last week to challenge gender discrimination that is written into Israeli law. As it stands, the Law for Appointing Judges bans women from applying for the position of Executive Director of the Rabbinical Court. Although such a law would have no doubt have been thrown out long ago from the…
Finally, some small change for women in Israel, so to speak. Four women have been appointed to the New Currency Committee, the Bank of Israel announced last week. The four women, veteran reporter Sherry Raz-Biron, sculptor Ilana Gur, Tel Aviv University professor Adina Myer, and design expert Gila Shakin, will not only create a female…
The exclusion of women’s voices, a phenomenon present in far too many educational, economic and political settings, has perhaps the most far-reaching consequences when it comes to issues of war and peace. Women, whose cultural heritage revolves around care, relationships, nurturing and interpersonal responsibility, have a vital perspective on armed conflict. Whereas men in power…
Fearing for her life at the hands of her ex-husband, Almo Masarat, a 20-year-old Petach Tikva resident, went to the police last week. She waited around watching clerks shuffle her around like a paper clip on a desk. Eventually she gave up, telling family members that the police were not helping her. Half an hour…
“Shrek the Final Chapter” caused a bit of a dispute in my house. Don’t get me wrong – I love the “Shrek” movies. The messages about beauty, gender, acceptance and love fly in the face of mainstream Hollywood with the size-zero Photoshopped girly-girls who, even if they are detectives or fighters or professionals are still…
The recent legal victory of Hana Kehat, founder of the Orthodox feminist Israeli organization Kolech, has implications for working women in Israel and for feminists worldwide: The courts ruled that she was fired illegally from the Orot Teachers’ College in 2005, and that she must be immediately reinstated. Kehat, who was described by her employers…
When I was an 18-year old yeshiva student, my friends and I would ask every teacher we had to give us a talk on our favorite topic. And it wasn’t sex. It was head-covering. Considering that the prevalent issue on our minds was marriage, we were desperate to get some expert advice on how to…
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…
צוליב דעם וואָס ס׳רובֿ פּאַריזער אַשכּנזים שטאַמען פֿון פּוילן, קומט די ליטוויש־ייִדישע קולטור נישט אָפֿט צו רייד
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