The latest fight in Israel is not over where women sit on the bus or walk on the street, but about where they can immerse. Some Israeli women are petitioning the country’s Supreme Court, asking it to reverse official directives that restrict ritual bath usage to married women, and bar women who are single, divorced…
The Israeli Moshav Mevo Modi’im, founded by Shlomo Carlebach in 1976, has a major artist population, including painters, writers and musicians. Among them, originally hailing from Claremont, Calif., lives poet Chaim Rosenblum with his wife and seven children. We’re featuring three of his works on The Arty Semite today. The first piece is more than…
Given that rabbinic laws of family purity alternately repel and fascinate me, I recently decided to confront my prejudice and attended a panel discussion on “Exploring Contemporary Understandings of Niddah” at last week’s Mayyim Hayyim conference on all things mikveh. While I’m offended by the idea of clean and dirty or pure and impure when…
It seems that sex is on everyone’s minds this week. (“Just this week?” The cynic replied.) It’s not just on The Sisterhood that sexuality in Jewish life became a focus, but also elsewhere on the Jewish Web. Asimon, “Israel’s Women’s Site,” for example, announced that in honor of “May is Masturbation Month,” they are holding…
At last Sunday’s conference of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance there was an interesting session titled “Rediscovering Mikvah: Creating a New Construct in Thinking about Mikvah.” Given my increasingly ambivalent relationship to my own mikveh practice, I slipped away from all the sessions on Orthodox women and leadership that I needed to attend to for…
Just when I thought nothing more from the haredi world could shock me, after all that has transpired in the last year or so (women in a Jerusalem neighborhood being forced to walk on the opposite side of the street from men, rabbis issuing a new edict that women in Israel are supposed to ride…
