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Author Archives: admin
November 12, 2007 by admin
Rabbinic Rally For Agunot and Modern-Orthodoxy
A very interesting development in the fight for agunots’ rights occurred this past Sunday. A group of Orthodox rabbis rallied, along with lay people, outside the home of another Orthodox rabbi, to protest his alleged enabling of men who refuse to grant their wives a get [religious divorce].
Such a show of support on the part of Orthodox rabbis for the cause of women’s/agunot rights, and against a fellow Orthodox rabbi, is rather unusual. The notion of rabbis rallying brings to mind causes like freeing Soviet Jewry or supporting the State of Israel, not women’s rights. Particularly regarding the cause of agunot, Orthodox rabbis, at least in Israel, have been rather hostile of late. So this could be a sign, as the Forward notes, “that the movement on behalf of agunot is gaining mainstream acceptance in the Orthodox world.” That would certainly be welcome news.
However, we should note that there’s more going on here than just the cause for agunots’ rights. This protest was also about rabbinic power.
The protesters claim that Rabbi Shlomo Blumenkrantz, the rabbi whose actions elicited the protest, has pressured “agunot to accede to their husbands’ terms, presenting decrees that allow recalcitrant husbands to remarry without granting a get,” according to the Forward. And that he’s doing so, The Jewish Press notes, “in ways that run counter to halacha.” In one particular case noted in The Jewish Press, Blumenkrantz granted a man a heter meah rabbanim [permission to marry a second wife] when that man had a seruv [document indicating he is recalcitrant and not cooperating with divorce proceedings] from the Rabbinical Court of Kollel Horabonim in Monsey, NY.
Rabbi Blumenkrantz, however, denies these charges, insisting that he’s acting in accordance with halacha and suggesting that, in fact, the rabbis accusing him are the ones handling divorces inappropriately, “because they are trying to be politically correct, and because they get pressured from feminist groups,” writes The Jewish Press. “I back what I say with documents,” he said, “these other rabbis don’t.”
So what we have here is a battle over interpretations of Jewish law and over rabbinic authority.
It is telling that Rabbi Jacob Rabinowitz, a former dean at Yeshiva University, told the Forward, “I’d like to see [Blumenkrantz] stay away from the whole area in issuing halachic rulings. He should leave it to organized bodies.”
Blumenkrantz has refused to bow to the will of Orthodox rabbinic bodies — the dispute with Rabbinical Court of Kollel Horabonim in Monsey mentioned above is a case in point — and the Orthodox establishment is not having it.
But it should be noted that the rabbinic spearheaders of the rally were modern Orthodox, largely Rabbi Hershel Schachter, a rosh yeshiva at YU and “a respected Talmudic scholar known for his strict interpretation of Jewish law,” notes the Forward, “sent a letter to the members of the Rabbinical Council of America, the largest union of [mostly modern-]Orthodox rabbis, and the [modern-Orthodox] National Council of Young Israel, urging the organizations to attend the rally.” These modern-Orthodox rabbis were taking a stand not just against Blumenkrantz the individual but against the right-wing, fundamentalist approach to halacha.
Because, in a sense, Blumenkrantaz is probably right: the rabbinic courts whose decrees he’s ignoring are trying to be politically correct, and are bending to the pressure of feminist groups — but that’s a good thing. They’re not just being politically correct for the sake of it; rather, they’re acknowledging that being more equitable in the way they wield halacha is right, because, as Rabbi Rabinowitz told the Forward, “Too many people have been hurt.”
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
- 5 Comments
November 7, 2007 by admin
Home for the Holidays
I’m flying home to Chicago for Thanksgiving, and bringing…my boyfriend. On the face of things, it’s no big deal, right? People bring their partners home all the time – and he’s already met my parents several times to rave reviews.
So why am I so nervous?
For one, it’s intimidating to bring your partner into your parents’ home – the place that holds the ghosts of your teenaged angst, not to mention photographic proof that you were once an awkward, braces-faced junior high kid.
More than that, though, I’m nervous about the food. I grew up in a non-kosher, crab and cheeseburger-loving household. He grew up in a strictly kosher home, and continues to keep kosher today. I’ve spent many holidays at his parents’ home, tucking in happily to the cornucopia of kosher dishes his mom and siblings prepare. This time around, however, my mother’s turkey paired with buttery mashed potatoes clearly isn’t going to cut it.
To her great credit – my mom has offered to bend over nearly backwards to accommodate my boyfriend’s food needs (kosher turkey, no pumpkin pie with condensed milk, etc.) and my brother agreed to make his delicious Thanksgiving green beans with almond milk instead of cream. Likewise, my boyfriend is grateful for their gestures of accommodation, and looking forward to spending the holiday with my family. Still, despite everyone’s best intentions, I’m freaked out. Over the years, my family has come to terms with my insistence that there be sufficient vegetarian options at the Thanksgiving table. But how will they fare with a kosher/dairy-free holiday? Will they feel resentful – like their home isn’t good enough? Will they feel deprived of their yearly food traditions? On the other hand, will my boyfriend feel fully comfortable at the table? And – the question I can’t get out of my head – will I calm down, or am I destined to spend the entire meal worried about everyone else’s happiness?
–Leah Koenig
- 9 Comments
November 5, 2007 by admin
Feminist Awakenings
What struck me most upon reading Deborah Siegel’s engaging history of the modern feminist movement, Sisterhood: Interrupted, was the sense of absolute awakening that the feminist revolution of the 1960s and 70s gave to so many women. As a woman born into a world where the basic feminist tenet of equality between the sexes has always been taken for granted, at least in theory if not in practice, it had never occurred to me how profoundly the feminist “revolution” was a revolution, how profound a change it provoked in the basic attitudes of women and men about each other and themselves. The power that feminism wrought for so many women is precisely what Siegel tries to convey in her book, so that we women of the “post-feminist” era will get it. Because it’s the lack of such an inciting and inspiring spirit that has made feminism into such a bore, or a non-issue, or the F-word, for so many younger women today.
While it’s often assumed that Jewish feminism is decades behind the secular brand, and thus hasn’t reached the point where younger women can take its advancements for granted, that’s not necessarily the case, as this post by Shira Salamone of the blog On The Fringe-Al Tzitzit points out. Salamone links to two different posts about “the F-word” — one in which an Orthodox woman proudly declares herself a feminist though she has always believed she is not supposed to be one; and another in which a young Orthodox woman, Chana, declares she is decidedly not a feminist though everyone assumes she would be, since she is extremely bright, independent and loves to study Talmud.
The ideas at the root of the Jewish feminist generation gap, and the adamantly non-angry-feminist stance of Chana, are well illustrated by a feature in the current issue of Lilith, the mother-daughter companion pieces collectively titled “First Frissons of Feminism.” But the piece suggests that plenty more feminist awakenings are already stirring in our mother’s daughters, even if they don’t know it yet.
Anne Lapidus Lerner (the mother) and Rahel Lerner (the daughter) each share their respective moments of feminist awakening. The younger Lerner hits the particular post-feminist nerve. She recalls having taken part, as a teenager, in the photo shoot that would result in Frederic Brenner’s now-iconic photograph of women wearing tallit and tefillin, originally published in Brenner’s book Jews/America/A Representation, and reprinted in several prominent publications, including Lilith. Lerner, a woman who was raised taking for granted that praying in tallit and tefillin was how she should pray and never thinking that she was being defiant or revolutionary in doing so, remembers the horror she felt upon seeing that picture for the first time:
…I felt used. I didn’t see myself in it, nor my mother, nor the other women I knew. Instead I saw the photographer’s projection of what women in tefillin must be like: angry. … I saw angry women in the traditional, very “masculine” tallit–women grasping at male ritual symbols, where I had never thought of taleisim as gendered before.
Because of the decisions her mother had made years before to wear a tallit and tefillin, Lerner writes, she believed that Jewish ritual could be gender-blind. She was not an angry feminist because she had no reason to be.
The stance of the young Rahel Lerner, who her adult self has come to think of as naive, is reminiscent of Chana, who though she insists she has no desire to wear a tallit and doesn’t understand women who do, admits that she loves Talmud and is grateful that she lives in an age when women are allowed to do so. But as many of the commenters to the post (many of them male) point out, Chana ignores all the things that should make her angry. She is satisfied with her current lot as a Jewish woman, but she’s not paying attention to the things that perhaps fall outside of her immediate experience that would, or should, dissatisfy her.
Which is precisely what Rahel Lerner concludes about her young and naive self. Sadly, she recounts how over the ensuing years since that photograph first came out, she has observed how much women still struggle for equality, that “there was much more left to be done that I realized when I was entering college,” and she says, “I am far angrier about the treatment of women than I ever thought I would have cause to be.”
My hope for Chana is that she never does find cause to be that angry but that she also is awake enough to realize that sometimes anger is the appropriate response to injustice, and that a little can go a long way as a motivator for change.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
- 4 Comments
October 29, 2007 by admin
Ode to Ann Coulter
Here’s something to lift Melanie’s spirits. Or perhaps anger her further.
Though I “defended” Ann Coulter two posts ago from the big whoop about her statements regarding Jews on CNBC’s “The Big Idea,” I had to share this video which does a great job of critiquing Coulter in general, for all of her offensive, hateful views, and asserting Jewish pride. It’s catchy, too:
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
- 1 Comment
October 26, 2007 by admin
Feeling Goaty
The back to the land movement – when city folks packed up and moved to rural places to try out their country legs – enjoyed its heyday in the 1960s and 70s. Margaret Hathaway’s new book, The Year of the Goat, tells the story of two sincere “back to the landers” born slightly out of time.
The book follows the 40,000 miles Hathaway and her (now husband) Karl Schatz took in search for the perfect goat cheese. Okay, maybe they were actually searching for a little bit more than cheese.
Hathaway was a freelance writer who managed Magnolia – a bakery in New York that has a reputation (and line out the door) for butter cream-frosted cup cakes. Schatz was a photo editor for Time Magazine. Together they shopped at the green markets, lived in their Brooklyn apartment, and generally enjoyed city life. But they wanted something more than the five boroughs could offer, and set off on a year-long journey to discover if working with goats would dominate their next chapter of their lives.
Along the way, Hathaway and Schatz meet what the website calls, a “vivid cast of characters-including farmers, breeders, cheese makers, and world-class chefs,” including a Texas-born Muslim living in Maine and helping the local Somali community in Lewiston acquire fitting goats for their religious festivals, and a Messianic Jew who keeps Shabbat as well as a herd of goats.
Delightfully, Hathaway’s honest, whimsical prose and Schatz’s photography make The Year of the Goat just as captivating as the couple’s story. Although their tale is nothing new (many people before them have found themselves drawn to the land, or simply yearning for a new story), it’s told with such earnest passion and curiosity, that it’s impossible not to root for these two as they wind their way around the country.
Find out more about The Year of the Goat at www.yearofthegoat.net. And if you’re in New York on November 8th, be sure to check out the Goatstravaganza – a celebration of finding one’s dream and, of course, all things goaty.
–Leah Koenig
- 1 Comment
October 19, 2007 by admin
Sweeping Out From Under the Rug: Domestic Abuse Awareness in the Jewish Community
There’s good news and there’s bad news. The bad news is, domestic abuse is a problem in the Jewish community. The good news is, as a spate of recent articles show (because October happens to be Domestic Violence Awareness Month), the community is acknowledging the problem and trying to do something about it, rather than sweeping it under the rug as has been the typical reaction to such “shandas” in the past.
Here in the U.S., the Jewish Alliance to End Domestic Abuse [JAEDA] is taking part in a multi-faith effort to end domestic violence, using religion — which has sometimes been a factor in keeping women in abusive marriages — as a means to address the issue. “Domestic abuse,” [JAEDA] chairwoman Ellen Woll told the St. Petersburg Times, “is just as prevalent in the Jewish community as in any other, but women tend to stay longer and don’t necessarily go to agencies for help.” Her group aims “to raise awareness of domestic violence in the Jewish community and to strengthen Shalom Bayit (peace in the home) through education and advocacy programs.” JAEDA is also focused, along with the multi-faith effort based in Florida, on training clergy — who are often the first advisers religious women seek out — to deal with issues of domestic abuse. It’s tricky territory because religion can be a double-edged sword when it comes to these matters:
Faith for many women is “what keeps them alive in the darkest hours. It’s also what may keep them in a relationship that might kill them,” said Linda Osmundson, executive director of Community Action Stops Abuse, or CASA, founded by a Roman Catholic nun, the late Sister Margaret Freeman.
The same could certainly be said of Jewish women.
But the tide seems to be turning in that regard. There has been a major rise in reporting of domestic violence among the ultra-Orthodox community in Israel, which, being more insular than more left-leaning sectors of the Jewish community, has perhaps been worst about suppressing such matters in the past. Ynet News has the details:
The number of calls made to hotlines for victims of domestic violence in the Orthodox community has increased three-fold over the past few years, Yedioth Ahronoth reported Thursday.
The number of haredi women who called the hotlines jumped from 477 in 2004 to 1,402 in 2007, while the number of women who were housed in shelters for battered women each month nearly doubled, from 24 to 40 on average.
The increase is seen as the result of more rabbis taking a firm stance against wife-beating and encouraging women to seek help and report abuse, and of women’s increased awareness about the dangers of domestic violence. There is also a network of shelters designed specifically for haredi women.
The problem is also being acknowledged, but not adequately addressed, in a different segment of the Israeli population — Ethiopian immigrants. There have been a disproportionate number of spousal murders by Ethiopian men, the result, reports the JTA, of various social conditions that make life in Israel particularly difficult for Ethiopian men, who’ve had a hard time adapting:
In Ethiopia, men were the undisputed heads of their families. In Israel, however, they often are slower than their wives and children to adapt and learn Hebrew, and in turn they have trouble finding work. Often they find themselves adrift in a modern society they find alien and in which their own families begin to see them as weak and unimportant.
“We never heard of women being murdered like this in Ethiopia,” says Negist Mengesha, director general of the Ethiopian National Project. “In Ethiopia there were traditional tools for dealing with conflicts.”
In Israel, many Ethiopian immigrants say, there aren’t enough social workers who speak Amharic or enough social services to adequately address the needs of the community.
Interestingly, while the Ethiopian and haredi communities seem very different, and while spousal murder has not been as much of an issue in the haredi community, the patriarchal structure of Orthodox life has been one of the factors in keeping domestic abuse in the closet for the ultra-Orthodox. What has made things better are the changing attitudes of their leaders and the increase in services to help women in need. Perhaps that kind of change from within the Ethiopian community, along with increased social services from the Israeli government, is what is needed.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
- 2 Comments
October 17, 2007 by admin
Eat Food, Not Too Much, Mostly Plants
A few weeks ago, I shared a Shabbat meal with mostly strangers – a last minute invitation, friend-of-a-friend sort of thing. Like so many other Shabbat dinners I’ve attended, the beautiful food on the table inspired conversation as, “Mmm, this is so good,” turned into a larger discussion about foods we eat and don’t eat. I waxed poetic about kale (as I tend to do), and other people around the table compared their own food-preference notes.
Then, one woman from “out of town” (meaning Manhattan to my borough of Brooklyn) mentioned that she and her fiancé were on a diet and had joined Jenny Craig to shed weight before their wedding. “I love it,” she gushed. “They deliver all my meals, and I can just pop them in the microwave and there’s dinner. I don’t even have to clean up afterwards – I just throw away the container.”
Gulp. As she spoke, the progressive-foodie Brooklyn bubble in which I exist deflated with an audible hiss. Was it really possible that someone preferred shrink-wrapped, disposable, industrial food to delicious, lovingly prepared real food? I focused on the meal in front of me and didn’t say anything. Honestly, I didn’t even know where to start.
It wasn’t until later that I was able to unpack why her comments bothered me so much, aside from my own initial knee-jerk food snobbery.
Part of the problem was that she was on a diet in the first place. This girl was beautiful – neither gauntly skinny nor overweight. Jenny Craig has undoubtedly been successful for many people struggling with obesity, but in a society (American) and culture (Jewish) that are both obsessed with being thin to the point of sickness, it saddened me that she felt unnecessary pressure to mold herself to some unrealistic svelte ideal for her wedding.
Another distressing aspect was her reliance on the Jenny Craig system. What happens after her wedding if she stops Jenny Craig and does not have the resources to create her own healthy food? Of course, cooking does not bring joy to everyone. Just as I glibly say I “hate math,” there are people who “hate to cook,” which this woman freely admitted during dinner. But I can’t help but think that part of people’s aversion to cooking is simply due to never being taught how to do it.
Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, offers these guidelines to healthy (in all senses of the word) eating: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” The second two pieces of this mantra make immediate sense – don’t overstuff yourself, and eat more vegetables, beans, and grains than meat, eggs, and dairy.
“Eat food” is a little less straightforward. Doesn’t everybody eat food? That depends on whether you consider convenience products like “Gogurt” and Pizza Hut Pizza Bites food.
Pollan suggests that we should focus on eating “real,” whole foods as opposed to the pre-made, shrink-wrapped stuff that often comes loaded with preservatives and salt.
Understandably, this woman is a busy law student with an equally busy lawyer fiancé. But learn how to make delicious, nourishing foods like basic grains (wild rice, quinoa, cous cous, millet etc), greens (kale, spinach, broccoli, collards, etc.), and proteins (tofu, salmon, chicken, beans etc.), is neither difficult, time consuming, nor expensive. And once one starts eating these satisfying foods, the pre-packaged stuff quickly becomes less appetizing. In the long run, I think the money my dinner mate and her fiancé spend on Jenny Craig would be better spent on a trip to a nutritionist or a short series of weekend cooking classes to teach her healthy, sustainable eating for life.
–Leah Koenig
- 6 Comments
October 15, 2007 by admin
In Defense of Ann Coulter. Well, Sort of.
I feel bad for Ann Coulter. It’s not that she isn’t, as comedian Kathy Griffin put in the comedy special I saw on TV last night, “a crazy @&#@%,” but the current anti-Coulter campaign, led by the National Jewish Democratic Council, is unfair.
In response to comments Coulter made about Jews in an interview on CNBC’s “The Big Idea,” The NJDC is calling for the media to stop inviting her to do interviews:
Today, the National Jewish Democratic Council (NJDC) called on mainstream media outlets to stop inviting Ann Coulter as a guest commentator/pundit and strongly condemned recent comments that Jews should be “perfected” by accepting the New Testament and that America would be better off if Judaism were “thrown away” and all Americans were Christian.
“While Ann Coulter has freedom of speech, news outlets should exercise their freedom to use better judgment,” said NJDC Executive Director Ira N. Forman. “Just as media outlets don’t invite those who believe that Martians walk the earth to frequently comment on science stories, it’s time they stop inviting Ann Coulter to comment on politics.”
First, Coulter, a lawyer and journalist, commenting on politics is not quite the same thing as a martian-believer commenting on science stories. Bad analogy.
Second, the shocking thing about her comments is not that she holds those views but that she had the audacity to proclaim them on national television. She was not calling for Jews to be wiped off the face of the Earth, merely honestly expressing her Fundamentalist Christian views, the same views held widely by many Christian Fundamentalists — that Christianity is a perfected extension of Judaism, in that Jesus died for their sins and absolved them of having to keep the Jewish laws, and that, ultimately, all Jews (and other heathens) should, and will, become Christians. If you watch the video, you can see that Coulter really was trying to explain herself and convince host Donny Deutsch that she was not trying to be offensive. But she was also not willing to take it back.
Third, the reason the media has kept on bringing the always-offensive, often hate-mongering Coulter back is because of her provocative views and her lack of inhibition in expressing them — she’s good for ratings! Even The Jewish Press, the most conservative, religious Jewish newspaper of them all, has interviewed Coulter — twice! — and the second time they admitted to inviting her back because her first interview was “the most viewed article on our website for 2006.”
It didn’t bother the NJDC back then that Coulter bashed women, Muslims, and liberals. Now that she’s offending Jews, suddenly she needs to be banished from the media. It’s so typical.
The NJDC is not wrong in calling on the media to stop encouraging Coulter, but they could have done so in response to the myriad of other “unacceptable” views she has expressed in the past. The NJDC claims Coulter crossed a line with this most recent interview, but the truth is, she’s crossed that line many times over. The male-run NJDC just didn’t notice until it was their line she crossed.
You can watch the video or read the transcript to see exactly what the hullabaloo is about.
–Rebecca Honig Friedman
- 2 Comments
October 11, 2007 by admin
Food for Thought
Last Monday I went to an event called “Eating Local in Brooklyn,” hosted by the uber-foodie organization, Slow Food NYC. I didn’t realize, walking in to the event, that I would walk out wanting to read local in Brooklyn instead.
Sitting down to nibble the pickled, Brooklyn-grown eggplants and sip beer brewed in the borough, I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me. It started off with the normal chit-chat:
“I live in the neighborhood,” she said (me, too).
“I’m a freelance writer,” she said (cool, me too).
“I started a women’s food-focused book club in Brooklyn,” she said.
“WOAH, can I join,” I blurted out, totally serious and completely surprised by my own enthusiasm.
I’d joined book clubs before, but left after a few meetings, dissatisfied with the book selection, the group dynamic, or both. Often, the book choices felt random and scattered, leaving me craving some continuity. But this – this! – idea, seemed like a no-brainer. In the last few years, as the food movement has grown, dozens of food-related books – political,
personal, anthropological, etc. – have sprouted up (I can rattle off more than 10 of them, even without the aid of Google). It’s almost overwhelming. How could I ever read them all? Well, for one, I joined the book club.
The club focuses mostly on non-fiction food books (e.g. Fast Food Nation, Food Politics, and Omnivore’s Dilemma), with the occasional – and more rare – work of fiction (they are considering reading Like Water for Chocolate next). The women-only club meets at a different member’s Brooklyn apartment each month, usually theming the accompanying potluck around the book. For example, the last selection – Alone in the Kitchen with an Eggplant – was brought to life by the members bringing their favorite “dish to eat alone,” to share with the group.
Bringing women together around food and books – what could be better? As a new member of the group, I don’t yet feel entitled to invite new members. However, here are a few tips to inspire your own foodie book club, and a few titles to get you started (I focused even further on Jewishly-related food books).
Secrets to a starting a successful bookclub:
– LEADERS No matter how interesting the book is, conversations do not always start or focus themselves. Rotate the task of “leading” the discussion, or at least starting the group off with a question or two to make sure conversation flows.
– FOOD Always have food at the club – you can serve a larger meal or potluck before or after the meeting, but stick to easy-to-eat snacks for the discussion.
– ORGANIZE Never leave a book club meeting without designating the next book and meeting time/place. It’s too tedious to do this organizing work over email.
– BOOK LIST Before your first meeting, ask each member to research and recommend 3-5 titles the group should consider reading. Each time a new member joins, ask them to contribute.
– BLOG Start a book club blog – it’s free and easy, and a great way to keep all important info (dates, books, etc.) in one place.
Jewish-food themed book suggestions:
– Miriam’s Kitchen, Elizabeth Ehrlich
– Anything by Ruth Reichl (e.g. Comfort me with Apples)
– The Year of the Goat, Margaret Hathaway
– Down to Earth Judaism: Food, Sex, Money, and the Rest of Life, Rabbi
Arthur Waskow
– Boogaloo on 2nd Avenue: A Novel of Pastry, Guilt, and Music, Mark Kurlansky
For many more great food book ideas (not necessarily Jewishly themed, but great nonetheless), check out The Jew & The Carrot blog’s “Books we Love” section.
–Leah Koenig
- 1 Comment