January 26, 2021 by admin

Women’s Voices in Yiddish Folksongs

A new project analyzing the Yiddish folksong tradition takes advantage of major collections that are now a click away online. Itzik Gottesman, one of the project’s creators, is a grandson of Lifshe Schaechter-Widman and son of the poet and artist Beyle Schaechter-Gottesman. He says, “Not only can much about Jewish life in Eastern Europe and immigrant life be learned from these singers, but the women’s voice, so suppressed in traditional Jewish life, takes front and center when it comes to the Yiddish folksong.”

yiddishfolksong.com

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January 26, 2021 by admin

How to Really Achieve Equal Pay?

As Americans were obsessing over the results of the presidential election, a New Zealand law aimed at eliminating pay discrimination against women in female-dominated occupations went into effect. The bill, which takes an approach known as “pay equity,” provides a road map for
addressing the seemingly intractable gender pay gap.

Unlike “equal pay”—the concept most often used to address gender pay disparities in the United States—the concept of “pay equity” doesn’t just demand equal pay for women doing the same work as men, in the same positions. Such efforts, while worthwhile, ignore the role of occupational segregation in keeping women’s pay down: There are some jobs done mostly by women and others that are still largely the province of men. The latter are typically better paid.

But if the coronavirus has taught us anything, it is that what has traditionally been women’s work—caring, cleaning, the provision of food—can no longer be taken for granted. “It’s not the bankers and the hedge fund managers and the highest paid people” upon whose services we’ve come to rely, said Amy Ross, former national organizer for New Zealand’s
Public Service Association union. “It’s our supermarket workers, it’s our cleaners, it’s
our nurses—and they’re all women!”

It has also taught us how poorly these jobs are compensated. Over half of workers
designated essential in the United States are women; their jobs are typically paid well below the median hourly wage of a little over $19 an hour. (Median hourly pay for cashiers is just $11.37; for child care workers it’s $11.65; health support workers such as home health aides and orderlies make $12.68.)

Instead of “equal pay for equal work,” supporters of pay equity call for “equal pay for work of equal value,” or “comparable worth.” They ask us to consider whether a female-dominated occupation such as a nursing home aide, for instance, is really so different from a male-dominated one, such as corrections officer, when both are physically exhausting, emotionally demanding, and stressful—and if not, why is the nursing home aide paid so much less? In the words of New Zealand’s law, the pay scale for women should be “determined by reference to what men would be paid to do the same work abstracting from skills, responsibility, conditions and degrees of effort.”

What is at stake is not just a simple pay raise but a society-wide reckoning with the value of “women’s work.” How much do we really think this work is worth? But also: How do we decide?

—
ANNA LOUISE SUSSMAN, “Women’s Work’ Can No Longer Be Taken for Granted,” The New York Times, November, 2020.

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January 26, 2021 by admin

This Holiday Celebrates Girls!

The 7th Night of Chanukah, on Rosh Chodesh Tevet, we celebrate Chag haBanot (Eid al-Banat in Arabic), a North African Jewish Festival of the Daughters. This holiday elevates women’s power— the strength, wisdom and resilience of women throughout the ages. Women, young and elderly, would gather for a celebration together to delight in sweets, sing prayers, dance, and give gifts to each other, particularly gold coins
and jewelry.

The holiday is associated with bold, wise, courageous and determined women.

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January 25, 2021 by Sarah M. Seltzer

QAnon and its Dangerous Appeal to Women

After Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, I joined so many others in allowing myself to feel relief, and, yes, joy. The violence we feared coming on Election Day did not materialize, and it appears that  American democracy, so far, survived Trump. But we’re in no way out of the woods: As of publication time, Trump refuses to concede, and is threatening to run again in 2024. After four weary years of threats to just about everything that defines civil society, we will be left facing many evil genies these years have uncorked. 

Among the most malignant is QAnon. 

Here, in part, is how Wikipedia defines this loose coalition in Fall 2020: QAnon is a far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against US President  Donald Trump, who is fighting the cabal.  QAnon also commonly asserts that Trump is planning a day of reckoning known as the “Storm”, when thousands of members of the cabal will be arrested. No part of the conspiracy claim is based in fact. 

You heard a lot about QAnon during the last crazy months leading up to the election. It became a bigger story after a QAnon supporter, Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican, won a Congressional seat in a deep-red section of Georgia. Trump tweeted his congratulations to her, calling her a “future Republican star.” Around this time, we began reading about QAnon all over the media, and seeing photos of people at rallies sporting Q hats and other paraphernalia. 

Some call QAnon a “conspiracy theory,” but that’s too simple a definition.  QAnon is more like a collective delusion. The Global Network on Extremism and Technology, a think tank studying how terrorists use technology, based at  Department of War Studies at King’s College London, defines QAnon as “a  militant and anti-establishment ideology rooted in a quasi-apocalyptic desire to destroy the existing, corrupt world order and usher in a promised golden age.” 

Up until the election, Q-followers shared one core belief: That Donald Trump will lead a holy war against Satan, aka “the deep state.” In other words, people and institutions associated with liberals: the Clintons and the rest of the Democratic establishment, Hollywood figures (a favorite target is Tom Hanks), mainstream media, and, yes, George Soros. 

All of these people, Q-ers believe, are really a gigantic pedophile ring that kidnaps children and harvests their blood. Sound familiar? There’s an obvious subtext of anti-Semitism in these tropes. The  Jew as devourer of Christian children, who controls the banks and the world. These images date from the Middle Ages. In the 20th century, they got incorporated into the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”  and then the Nazi propaganda machine. 

It started at the fringes of the web early in Donald Trump’s malignant presidency, when the anonymous Q began posting cryptic messages—“drops.” From there Q content migrated into mainstream social media. Followers create deliberately misleading hashtags, such as the innocuous sounding #Savethechildren, thereby drawing in people who might think they’re on a UNICEF-sponsored site, but instead find themselves reading posts like “Better be careful all these kids disappearing and burgers costing next to nothing at all the $2 burger etc. Human meat, you may be  eating kids, Say no to fast food burgers.” 

Q also hooks in people via their  “drops;” searching for and decoding drops for some becomes an addiction. People who’ve fallen down this rabbit hole liken it to getting trapped in a cult. 

With so many arms and no clear hierarchy, QAnon is a protean monster, mutating and multiplying like cancer cells, and it is precisely its adaptability to today’s climate that makes it so scary. QAnon, like a sewer flowing through the Internet, collects and absorbs every piece of noxious substance that passes into it from the waste pipes of our culture.

QAnon is not just online. In 2019, the FBI was labeling it a domestic terrorism threat. On the night of Election Day in November, the police in Philadelphia arrested two men at a polling site in a Hummer filled with guns and QAnon literature. Some journalists who wrote about QAnon have gotten death threats. Social media giants Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram keep telling us that they are clamping down on Q content, but this is way easier said than done because of its very protean nature. 

But the election is over, Trump was defeated, and QAnon has lost the anointed leader. Need we still worry about the phenomenon and its paranoia? Won’t it just now shrivel up and crawl under a rock?  Not so fast. During the fraught week after the election, “Q” went missing. But then he—she?—reemerged, and Q-followers threw out new conspiracy theories onto the Internet. One in particular caught  Trump’s attention: Dominion, a manufacturer of voting machines, deleted millions of Trump votes. Trump promptly retweeted it (in all-caps.) 

We shouldn’t expect QAnon to go away, but to continue mutating and multiplying. Especially now, in the midst of the pandemic: Catastrophic times are when conspiracy theories thrive (think the Middle Ages, when people blamed the Black Death on the Jews). To that add the fact that for the last ten months, people are isolated at home, glued to their Facebook and Instagram accounts. 

As people try to make sense of it all,  they pick up the QAnon content hiding behind benign-seeming hashtags and posts. Last summer, Instagram followers, as they scrolled through the site’s panoply of images showing candy-sweet home and-child-oriented consumer products, were also reading that the web-based furniture company Wayfair was really a child trafficking ring. The crazy rumor soon was ripping through social media like a bat out of hell. The Q craze has spread all over the globe, according to Marc André Argentino, a doctoral student at Concordia University who researches QAnon. According to Argentino, QAnon has migrated via social media into more than 70 countries. It has been particularly embraced by the far right fringe in Germany, the New York Times reported in October. Moreover, here in the States, even with Trump gone, QAnon remains in the mainstream. In November, more than a dozen QAnon supporters, all Republicans, ran for Congress. Two— both of them women—won: Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, from Colorado. 

In fact, it turns out that QAnon especially appeals to women. 

And this is why, in addition to being a Jewish issue, QAnon is an unrecognized feminist one as well. 

Many of today’s far-right movements are testosterone-driven—think  Proud Boys and Oath Keepers—replete with muscular imagery. QAnon, on the other hand, attracts women—especially mothers—associated with Trump’s “base”: White, Christian, and not college educated. Likely what happened is that women seized on those aspects of QAnon content that fed preexisting fears—pedophilia, for example—and made it their own. Within the broad anti-trafficking movement, there has always been a moralistic streak, and this movement seizes on that. Women are organizing anti-child trafficking rallies, and posting like mad using #Savethechildren and its countless hashtag variants (#childtrafficking,  #DefundHollywood, etc.), where they rant about how Joe Biden is a pedophile, and claiming that the Etsy site sells child porn.  

QAnon content has also been creeping into yoga and wellness sites, where you can now find posts in girly fonts about Covid 19 being fake news, and how vaccinations are really a government-led attempt to kill your children—all against backgrounds of pale soothing colors. Argentino, the  Concordia University researcher, calls this  phenomenon “pastel QAnon.” 

“These influencers provide an aesthetic and branding to their entire pages, and they in turn apply this to QAnon content, softening the messages, videos and traditional imagery that would be associated with QAnon narratives,” Argentino wrote on Twitter in September. “This branding is the polar opposite of ‘raw’ QAnon.” 

In 1930s Germany, women went crazy for Hitler, and the Nazi Party specifically targeted them through their propaganda machine. Six weeks after Hitler took power in 1933, an exhibit entitled “Die Frauen” opened in Berlin, and Hitler’s propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels gave a speech. “This is the beginning of a new  German womanhood,” Goebbels said. “If the nation once again has mothers who proudly and freely choose motherhood, it cannot perish. If the woman is healthy, the people will be healthy. Woe to the nation that neglects its women and mothers. It condemns itself.” At this time of extreme anxiety throughout the world, when misinformation gets transmitted via social media in one second, it bears repeating that the Nazis used whatever media they had at the time to broadcast their vile message. They used children’s books, posters, movies, board games. How primitive such media seem today! Yet they managed to  convince Germans of the necessity of a Final Solution to the Jewish “problem.” 

Is there a parallel between the Nazi ideation and tactics then and QAnon today? 

One big difference between the Nazis and QAnon is just how organized and sharply focused the Nazis were, and how they drew on the systemic anti-Semitism in Europe that dated back to late antiquity. QAnon, in contrast, is much murkier. But QAnon’s goals—a world violently purged of “Satan,” code for liberals, Jews, Hollywood and elites, bears resemblance to the Nazis, who started a war and designed death camps for Jews and other “undesirables” as part of their plan to establish a 1000-year Aryan Reich.  

Is it too much of a stretch to make this comparison? We don’t know yet. What we do know is that QAnon has capitalized on how easily misinformation floods the Internet, available to anybody who clicks on a link, and on the other hand attached itself to a resurgent right wing with an anti Semitic flair. 

How scared should we be?  

Alice Sparberg Alexiou, journalist and author of three books, is a contributing editor at Lilith.

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The Lilith Blog

October 12, 2020 by Rishe Groner

The Struggle of Finding Shelter as an Orthodox Woman

Sukkot is supposed to be the holiday of rejoicing.

And yet for me, a particularly difficult time, as a single woman.

Usually, it’s the week before Sukkot that I put a call out to ask the internet to help me build a sukkah or find one – and then, sometime during the actual week of the holiday I spill my guts and explain why the week brings about so much heartbreak.

I even wrote a poem about it once. 

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July 27, 2020 by admin

Working from Home

In interviews with more than a dozen women who work as lawyers, writers, architects, teachers, nurses and nonprofit administrators, many said that they were grateful to have some child care help pre-quarantine, and that they could work from home. But they have been slightly stunned to learn that they are expected to organize and manage every domestic need for their family, while maintaining a full-time professional career as part of a dual-career couple.

A few of these women are having a difficult time juggling both jobs and their sleeping habits are disturbed. Modafinil and caffeine are the go-to fast solutions to maintaining the focus on work. Being productive means more time to do the other chores and thus a few of them getting their smart drugs on BuyModafinilOnline.

JENNIFER MEDINA and LISA LERER, “When Mom’s Zoom Meeting Is the One That Has to Wait,” The New York Times, April 24, 2020.

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July 27, 2020 by admin

First Woman Chancellor At JTS!

Shuly Rubin Schwartz, a groundbreaking scholar of American Jewish history, has just become the first woman to serve as chancellor of The Jewish Theological Seminary in its 134-year history. JTS is the flagship institution of Conservative Judaism. Chancellor Schwartz, who earned her Ph.D. at JTS, became one of the first women on its faculty and was instrumental in the addition of Jewish gender studies to the curriculum; her writing has brought to light previously overlooked contributions of women to the development of American Judaism.

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April 20, 2020 by admin

Prayer, Your Way •

The Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s goal is to expand spiritual, ritual, intellectual and political opportunities for women within the framework of a Modern Orthodox interpretation of Jewish law. Their resources can help you discover where women can say kaddish, join women’s prayer groups, find “partnership” minyanim (for women and men) and hear women read from the megillah on Purim.

jofa.org/prayer-compass

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April 20, 2020 by admin

Women Make History •

“Well-behaved women seldom make history,” contended historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich in 1976, and feminist discourse enthusiastically adopted this statement. From its beginnings, feminism sought to liberate itself from silence and compliance and eplace this with speech and protest. A new exhibition in Israel, “Women Make History: Feminism in the Age of Transnationalism,” centers on this question: In the wake of a lengthy feminist struggle, has a revolution in traditional gender roles indeed occurred in the political space? Can women today make alternative history and, in the future, lead a true revolution? The exhibition seeks to present the ways women artists to confront gender-based power arrangements. At the Haifa Museum of Art.

hma.org.il/eng/Exhibitions

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February 19, 2020 by Steph Black

Becoming an Abortion Doula

Earlier this year, Lilith asked me what my pro-choice New Year’s resolution was for 2020.

Without hesitating, I knew what my answer would be: I would become an abortion doula, who guides folks through the procedure. It is a very straightforward and simple goal on the surface, especially since I had already sent in my application to become a trained doula with the DC Doulas for Choice Collective (DCDC).

But there’s a lot of meaning to this choice. I’ve wanted to be an abortion doula for years, since I learned what it meant. Like a birth doula, an abortion doula is someone who is dedicated to guiding the patient through the abortion procedure. This can include answering their questions, remaining with them during the procedure even if they are under anesthesia, and remaining with them in the recovery room. It can mean acting as an advocate, getting water or snacks, praying with the patient, or just chatting about the Bachelor. Being a doula can take a lot of forms, but my primary goal is to support the patient with whatever they may need at any given moment.

Why go this extra mile in support of patients? Because I’m not only pro-choice, but I am pro-abortion and pro-access. That means going beyond supporting someone’s right to choose to terminate a pregnancy but fighting to remove the barriers that may prevent them from doing so.

I do not believe that abortion is a necessary evil, but a moral and social good. It’s what has led me to become not only a doula but a volunteer in other ways as well. I am a clinic escort with the Washington Area Clinic Defense Task Force (WACDTF) and I walk patients to and from their vehicles among anti-choice protestors who can be loud, in the way, and occasionally violent. I am also a volunteer with the DMV Practical Abortion Support Network, DAPSN, an organization that provides rides or walks to and from a patient’s hotel and the clinic and housing, all for free.

Washington, D.C. is one of the few areas in the country where someone can get an abortion throughout pregnancy, so there are hundreds of folks who travel from often very far states to access care here. Many of those folks rely on abortion funds to pay for their travels and expenses but can’t afford to bring someone with them. That’s where DAPSN and DCDC come in. Our job is to be the stand in for folks who cannot be with the patient.

This work is very different than fighting a political campaign. I am a proud volunteer with NARAL Pro-Choice America where I sit on their all-volunteer Action Council. I show up to protest whenever I can. I have even spoken out at the Supreme Court and been arrested for civil disobedience over abortion. But this year, I want to focus on the patients who make the choice to obtain abortion care. Often, lost in the noise of the political struggle to keep abortion safe and legal are the patients themselves who have to navigate complicated TRAP laws, legalese, and financial barriers to receiving care but who are human beings and moral agents like the rest of us, and who deserve a friendly face and sympathetic ear during their medical procedure.

It is easy to forget that the fight for abortion means fighting for real people, with jobs and families and social lives. They have names and faces, beyond a statistic. These are the people I am committing to supporting and getting to know.

Since my resolution was published, I successfully made it through the interviews and will begin my training in March. This year, I will not only fight for the right to abortion access, but hopefully sit with people and be their support as they exercise that right.

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