Life

Podcast: How Orthodox Day Schools Can Embrace Feminism

By Gabrielle Birkner March 12, 2010

It’s a story of a Sisterhood post done good.

Last month, Elana Sztokman, a regular contributor to this blog, proposed a model for infusing Orthodox day schools with the kind of feminist values that have informed partnership synagogues and have advanced women’s leadership roles within Orthodoxy.

The buzz that her blog post generated secured her a spot as a featured speaker at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) conference, taking place this weekend in New York. (Sisterhood contributor Rebecca Honig Friedman previewed the conference here.)

Elana spoke with me today in the Forward studio about her vision for Orthodox day school education and the often-troubling messages that Orthodoxy sends to boys and men — topics on which she’ll be presenting this weekend.

Listen to the podcast:

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO