JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Like every member of the female species, I read Tuvia Tenenbaum’s interview with Racheli Ibenboim, an up-and-coming female Hasidic politician, with great excitement. This is the interview in which Ms. Ibenboim answers deeply personal questions, thereby revealing everything Tuvia ever wanted to know about Hasidic sex. When I read his highly apologetic, I’d-be-equally-voyeuristic-when-interviewing-a-man response to…
Thank you, commentators, talkbackers, bloggers, and writers, for so passionately sharing your thoughts with me following the publication in the Forward of my interview with Racheli Ibenboim. Honestly, I was not prepared for such a reaction. A couple of you were on my side (thank you!), but many hundreds of you were against me. And…
Racheli Ibenboim chats with writer Tuvia Tenenbom./Photo by Isi Tenenbaum For those who haven’t read much of the work of Tuvia Tenenbom, his most recent column has understandably raised some eyebrows and not a few tempers. Asking a Haredi politician, or any public figure, about her personal life (and her wedding night) would seem to…
Racheli Ibenboim chats with writer Tuvia Tenenbom./Photo by Isi Tenenbaum I may not be a dyed-in-the-wool feminist by any stretch of the imagination. But I have a strong sense of the rights of women to take agency in their own lives and a repulsion for the oppressive nature of men who harass women for their…
Racheli Ibenboim is a Haredi lady of the Gur dynasty, one of the most fundamentalist branches in the hasidic world. The Gur people, for one reason or another, are ever busy with ever more rules forbidding more and more “sexual temptations” of whatever kind. For example, not long ago a new prohibition was announced: A…
