It seems this week is going to be my week of denouncing ultra-Orthodox Jewish misogyny—there have just been too many stories recently that get my activist blood going. And anyway, I’ve been accused of being both anti-Christian and anti-Catholic by commenters, so I should make sure to attack misogynist asshats of my own religion, right?
So…it’s been a busy month of misogynist asshattery for the ultra-Orthodox, also known as Hasids and Haredim (I use the terms interchangeably). They’re Jewish and I’m Jewish, but honestly, that’s about where the similarity ends. In the big international Jewish family—which has way more ethnic and cultural diversity than most people realize—the Haredim are the angry, rant-y cousins who constantly embarrass me with their backwardness. I really don’t want to invite them over for the holidays and I go out of my way to tell people “Yeah, they’re technically relatives, but I’m NOT like them.” But before we discuss the issues, I know some of y’all don’t know much about Jews or Hasidic Judaism, so for you, a little primer.
The Hasidic movement sprang up in 18th century Eastern Europe and is theologically very fervent, charismatic and messianic, emphasizing the personal mystical relationship between God and the individual. It’s a bit like evangelical Christianity that way. But although they have a rich theological tradition, Hasids are best known today for being extremely culturally conservative, which is why the men tend to dress in 19th-century European styles and why they choose to live mostly separate from mainstream society. Its religious fanaticism and contempt for modern culture make ultra-Orthodoxy very different even from mainstream Orthodoxy. A popular description of the difference between the two is this: “The Orthodox don’t wear bikinis. The ultra-Orthodox don’t want anyone to wear bikinis, so they close the beach.”
Some Hasidim emigrated before World War II but the vast majority in the US are descended from a very small group of Eastern Europeans who survived the Holocaust and resettled here and in Israel (and to a lesser extent in Canada, the UK, and Australia). They’re actually a fairly small percentage of Jews overall; Hasidim comprise less than 10% of the American Jewish population and about 10% of the Israeli Jewish population, although their very high birth rate means their population is growing significantly faster than non-Hasidic Jews’. They speak Yiddish as a common language, but the different Haredi sects trace their origins to distinct rabbinic dynasties in different parts of Europe, so there’s a lot of cultural and theological variety among them. Some Haredim are Zionist, some are not; one of the largest sects, the Satmars, are actively anti-Israel, and will occasionally show up to protest at the Israeli embassy alongside pro-Palestinian groups, which can be highly entertaining to watch. Another big sect, the Lubavitchers, believe that their rebbe, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, was the Messiah and will return shortly to bring about the Messianic Age. (He died in 1994 and has not been seen since, so…draw your own conclusions).
Where I live in Brooklyn is surrounded by the largest Hasidic communities in the world: Williamsburg, Crown Heights, Flatbush, and Borough Park (the individual neighborhoods tend to be associated with different sects.) Brooklyn’s Hasidic neighborhoods have become so crowded that some sects resettled a large number of families upstate, founding the towns of Kiryas Joel and New Square and overrunning the once sleepy rural town of Monsey (in 1950, Monsey had one synagogue. It now has 112.) Except for business dealings, they rarely interact with non-Hasidic Jews or gentiles, so although I’m geographically close by, and see members of the community on a daily basis, we don’t mingle. I have been to the nearby Hasidic shopping district on the very rare occasions I buy kosher food, but frankly, the people were so unwelcoming that now if I buy kosher, I go out of my way to shop in a more distant neighborhood whose stores are run by modern Orthodox Jews.
Where I have a real problem with Haredi community is their constant and flagrant misogyny. Hasidic women are required by theology and custom to be submissive. They have few legal rights. Women’s testimony is seen as inferior to men’s in a rabbinical court. They cannot divorce their husbands, but if their husbands divorce them, they still require his permission to remarry. They are educated separately from men, and their education focuses on making them good, obediant wives and mothers, not academic achievers. They do not study Torah or Talmud as the men do and cannot serve as clergy. Some women do work outside the home, especially in family businesses, but most do not, especially as the average Haredi wife will have at least six children and is entirely responsible for the home. They must adhere to strict modesty laws requiring long sleeves, high necks and long skirts at all times. Most married women either cover their hair or wear sheitls, a wig usually cut in straight, chin-length bob. You see some of the same traits in modern Orthodox communities, but the Hasidic community is a closed one that demands complete conformity. If you aspire to higher education or a more secular life, if you don’t want to have children or are gay or if you in any way fall outside the traditional feminine heteronorms, your life will be hard, if not downright miserable. Socially, there is almost no interaction between men and women except in carefully controlled circumstances (which is very unlike modern Orthodoxy). Some ultra-Orthodox communities take this separation to such an extreme that they will actually disappear women entirely from their local press, deleting them from photos and altering gender pronouns in news stories so as not to discuss women at all…even when the news stories are about women.
As a woman in the Hasidic world you’ll be restricted in big ways, but you’ll also endure an endless stream of little slights that remind you of your second-class citizen status. A story about one such appeared a couple weeks ago on the blog FailedMessiah.com, an incisive and influential watchdog site that frequently reports on the ultra-Orthodox community (its editor, Shmarya Rosenberg, is a former member of the Lubavitcher sect).
In the Hasidic section of Williamsburg signs were bolted to a tree that read in Yiddish: Precious Jewish Daughter: Please move to the side when a man approaches!
One of FailedMessiah’s snarkier commenters thoughtfully translated the sign’s true meaning for the rest of us: Step aside, bitch. You’re in the presence of a PENIS. The Sacred Bobbed Dick makes its owner the Crown of Creation, Adonai’s Vicar on Earth.
The mainstream media soon picked up the story of the step-aside signs. In a response on Ynet, the Israeli news website, Orthodox Rabbi Levi Brachman wrote:
The New York Daily News quoted 18-year-old Abraham Klein as saying, “The signs don’t bother anybody,” explaining that in his community “men and ladies don’t go together. It’s just our religion.”
Many newspapers and blogs used this quote, thus, giving the reader the impression that the reason woman are asked to step aside for men in Hasidic communities has to do with Hasidic laws regarding modesty.
The Talmud indicates that the reason a man should not walk between two women has to do with the superstition that it may impair the man’s ability to remember the Torah he learned.
It’s like a couple of magnets and a floppy disk! Poof! Memory erased! He is powerless before those sexy women clad modestly in several yards of fabric and some wigs! All will be lost!!
Seriously, people? This is some embarrassing bullshit. And Rabbi Brachman knows it:
Asking all Jewish women, whether they keep to this tradition or not, to move to one side when men approach on a public street in New York City has nothing to do with Jewish law or modesty. Sadly, it rather has to do with a basic lack of Menschlichkeit (Yiddish for common decency) and Derech Eretz (loosely translated as polite and considerate behavior).
Still, a sign is a sign and can be ignored (or easily removed). There was an even bigger story in New York this week about the ultra-Orthodox trying to enforce gender segregation on public transportation. A Columbia University newspaper reported that a (non-Hasidic) woman had been ordered to move to the back of a public bus in Brooklyn. The bus line is mostly used by members of the Hasidic community, and in keeping with their rules about gender segregation, Hasidic women ride at the back and men at the front (presumably so that the men can’t see the women and thereby risk losing all the Torah that they’d learned that day). When the rider objected and asked why she was being told to move, the answer was: “If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule?’”
The New York Times also ran an article, noting:
On Wednesday afternoon, the custom of women’s sitting at the back of the bus was evident, both in practice and in writing.
Guidelines, posted in the front and the back, said that “when boarding a crowded bus with standing passengers in the front, women should board the back door after paying the driver in the front” and that “when the bus is crowded, passengers should stand in their designated areas.”
Gawker ran their link to the story with a photo of Rosa Parks, and frankly, the Rosa Parks comparison is a fairly accurate one. Women are told to sit at the back of the bus by Hasidic men because Hasidim see women as inferior, just as black people were seen as inferior in the Jim Crow South. Problem is, this isn’t the Jim Crow South, where local law permitted that kind of discrimination and the law itself had to be overturned. The law in this case forbids discrimination because the B110 bus is operated by a company that contracts with New York City Department of Transportation. It’s a public service, and the DOT issued a statement saying that because the bus was available for public use, bus owners could not discriminate based on gender. Even Mayor Michael Bloomberg said such discrimination was “obviously not permitted” on public buses. “Private people: you can have a private bus,” he said at a news conference, “Go rent a bus, and do what you want on it.”
I may abhor the misogyny of the Hasidic community, but I don’t oppose their right to practice their religion or culture in their own private spaces. I do, however, get extremely angry when they try to force women to submit to gender segregation on public transportation funded by my taxpayer dollars. I think the city should yank the contract from that company, and in a strongly worded letter sent this week, it seems they’re investigating their options and confronting the bus operator itself.
Some members of the Hasidic community have asked for a religious exception, but have been reminded that freedom of religion only allows them to control their private spaces, not public ones. In Israel, similar gender segregation in the ultra-Orthodox Jerusalem neighborhood of Mea Shearim was held to be illegal by the High Court earlier this month. A city councilwoman there also invoked Rosa Parks’s example: “If Rosa Parks succeeded in racist US of the 1950s, we in democratic Israel of 2011 must succeed too.” It should also be pointed out that what the ultra-Orthodox are doing in Brooklyn actually goes against the millenia-old Jewish law of dina de-malkhuta dina, which says that that the law of the country where Jews reside is binding (the name translates as “the law of the land is the law.”) . Legally, the Haredim are bound by Jewish law to accept US law in this regard.
But the line in the Times story that most stoked my anger was this:
One father who sat in the front with his son and daughter and declined to give his name said men and women “need to be separated.” He looked down at his daughter dressed in a bright red raincoat, with her blue eyes frozen in amazement, and said: “She’s small. When she’s big, she will sit in the back.”
When she’s big, she’ll be told to step aside when a man walks down the street. She won’t have much autonomy or be able to hold any position of authority in her community. She’ll told to cover up so that her body, which is for her husband only, won’t tempt or distract any other men. What a promising future for Brooklyn’s “precious Jewish daughters.”
It is so glaringly obvious that these men are the problem. They would have a lot more time to study Torah if they’d stop seeing every single woman on the planet as a walking vagina. The sad part-well, one sad part-is that Judaism is traditionally a sex-positive practice. The rabbis acknowledged and honored women’s sexual desire; their husbands are required to satisfy them. A pregnant woman’s life is supposed to be prioritized over that of a fetus until the fetus’s head crowns (I think; it might even be when the head is out). Traditional Jewish husbands recite “Eyshet Chayil” (Woman of Valor) to their wives every Friday night. And yet…
This remark ““If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule” is so profoundly unJewish that I don’t even know what to say. We are called Israel, God-wrestlers, and we challenge and question and argue with God precisely because we are engaged and it matters to us what God says. The entire rabbinic tradition is a close reading of our texts to try to understand what God wants of us.
These woman-haters have the right to practice Judaism the way they choose to. But they sure as hell don’t have the right to make the taxpayers pay for it. Don’t use my tax money to run political campaigns from the pulpit. Don’t turn public resources into extensions of your bigoted world view. Don’t tell the rest of the world how to dress and behave in public so that your delicate sensibilities won’t be shocked. You are free to practice your religion-as long as it’s free of cost to everyone else.
Great post, Becky. Thanks!
Thank you for this post, Becky. I knew very little about the different types of Jewish practices, so your primer was incredibly helpful.
I think a key point in this, too, is the idea of the inability to leave. What if you hit 13, 16, 21 years old, and decide you don’t want to live in this misogynistic environment anymore? Is it easy to leave an ultra-Orthodox community? (And even if it is, it doesn’t mean suddenly being solo is easy.)
Why is it that all fundies have misogyny in common?
I still regret the day that I suggested you were anti-Catholic, Becky! It was said in a moment of frustration, when in actuality what you said was entirely reasonable and accurate.
Anyway, onto the current post, have you read Foreskin’s Lament by Shalom Auslander? I don’t remember which group he belonged to, or if he was Hasidic, but he was raised in an Orthodox community. He has a pretty funny take on how the Orthodox mentality can really screw with your mind and leave you scarred for life. I’d be curious, though, to read more about a woman’s experience growing up in that environment.
What struck me the most is that last comment quoted, about the father regarding his daughter. Apparently, as a child you have more rights than as a grow woman! How sad to witness the loss of rights as (I’m assuming) you hit puberty.
This remark ““If God makes a rule, you don’t ask ‘Why make the rule” is so profoundly unJewish that I don’t even know what to say. We are called Israel, God-wrestlers, and we challenge and question and argue with God precisely because we are engaged and it matters to us what God says. The entire rabbinic tradition is a close reading of our texts to try to understand what God wants of us.
THIS. I didn’t know about the “God-wrestlers” thing, but one of the things I’ve always admired about Jewish culture/faith is their scholarly attitude to their sacred texts. It’s devout to go and argue about these things. The idea that YOU JUST SHUT UP AND SWALLOW IT really stood out to this shiksa as counter to almost everything I’ve learned about Judaism. But fundies be fundie-in’, no matter the flavor.
Also, I didn’t know Satmars were anti-Israel. I lived in W’burg for years and thought I’d learned quite a bit about the Orthodox, but I missed that rather important point. Great post.
@Skada: People do leave Hasidic communities, but it’s not easy. Obviously, if you grow up in such an insular community, you don’t have any real knowledge of the outside world, so simple things like getting a job or an apartment or a student loan would be daunting. It doesn’t help that most Haredim, especially Haredi women, have not received the kind of education required for a GED, let alone a BA. And emotionally, it’s extremely difficult and isolating, as you can imagine. I think some of it depends on the family—if your family outright shuns you, it’s terrible. But I do know people who left Haredi communities whose parents, while extremely disapproving, didn’t cut them off entirely, and they were able to find their way. FailedMessiah.com actually has a link on their homepage to an organization called Footsteps that helps people who want to leave the Hasidic community.
@Feminizzle: I love Shalom Auslander! Foreskin’s Lament is one of my favorite memoirs of all time! He grew up in Monsey—not sure which sect. I think he does a really good job of descrbing how miserable EVERYONE is in that life. Even his abusive father was clearly a victim of the Hasidic Patriarchy too, in his own way.
To your point about the daughter…yes, that always strikes me as sad. When she hits puberty and becomes OMG SEXXXY, her whole life changes. If you confront the Haredim about their treatment of women, they’ll go on and on about how they idolize women for being a beautiful light unto mankind and pillars of the family, etc, but the truth is, women have no autonomy and are barred from holding any position of authority, so all the flowery praise for women is just a feeble attempt to sugar-coat chauvinist domination.
@PhDork: fundies be fundie-in’ should be a new tag. It’s so true. All conservative religion is inevitably bad news for women.
I am struck by how quickly the general public condemns this practice of using public tax dollars to promote misogyny (and I totally agree with you, Becky), yet how far the let-a-woman-die-if-she-needs-an-abortion-to-live bill has gotten in congress. It’s exactly the same issue. Using government tax dollars to promote misogynist practice. Ugh.
And I do NOT mean to turn this into a thread about anti-abortion, or the right wing’s war on women. I just don’t understand how someone could accept that as okay, and still condemn the obvious appropriation of bus line B110 for similarly narrow, discriminatory religious practice.
Anyway, wonderful post, Becky. I love how you tie in the whole context so well.
It’s exactly the same issue. Using government tax dollars to promote misogynist practice. Ugh.
Agreed. And of course, the impetus for that is mostly coming from the evangelicals in the GOP base, so I think it’s another situation we can file under PhDork’s “fundies be fundie’in.” If there’s fundies, it’s never good for women.
I am now tempted to fly across the country – and the border – simply to get on one of these buses, stand directly behind the driver, remove my shirt (bra can stay), and shake my flabby body at them.
My (late) aunt was a very, very strong good, caring Orthodox woman in Borough Park.
At her funeral (gender segregated of course!) it was sad, though understandable (given the culture), to see and hear her three sons and various rabbis speak, but of course there were no women who spoke (including her daughters).
She was a giant within her community, unlike my uncle – as well as a loving, caring person. It didn’t and doesn’t matter however – as you’ve pointed out most clearly!
a. Ru Paul and friends should ride that bus regularly–and blow simple-mindedness to bits.
b. Two women should go to Williamsburg, and as a Hassid approaches, stand on either side of the pavement.
interestingly, i would argue that the kinds of misogyny and institutionalized patriarchy that the haredim are instituting nowadays is hardly “old-world.” i think that the democratic ideological space, in which religion is private, has allowed for an intensification of extremism amongst the ultra-orthodox in a manner that was never seen in eastern europe. this is partially due to the more patriarchal quality of the environment, so there was less to react against. the kinds of displays and performances of patriarchy present today are new, since only now have jews had access to the public sphere in this kind of manner, in which they have been able to articulate and perform their private ideological concerns.
Someone asked for reading about women’s experiences growing up in a Hasidic community. My religion course on Hasidism last semester used an excellent one:
Ayala Fader, Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn (2009)
We also read two articles about the baalei teshuva (sp?), those who “return” to Orthodoxy, and the men and women who leave it.:
Lynn Davidman, Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to Orthodox Judaism. Berkeley: University of California, 1991, pp. 49-107.
Hella Winston, Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. Boston: Beacon Press, 2005, pp. 19-35, 71-86.
Also, excellent analysis! Thanks. This is the kind of thing my course didn’t really critique much, so it’s very useful.
@Skada
My mother got us involved in a local Hasid synagogue when I was 7. After I was Bat Mitzvahed (only in front of women of the congregation, reading a text on women’s rules, not the Torah, and only because my Grandmother — who is a Conservative Jew — insisted), I basically acted out to the extent that my mother was forced to let me go live with my father or risk me being arrested for the behaviors I was purposefully engaging in.
So I was only in a Hasid congregation from ages 7-13, and I still attended public school. But those 6 years determined a massive part of my upbringing, and messed with my sexuality, body image, and every facet of my developing self in an extremely negative fashion that I still struggle to untangle in my mid-20s.
I don’t doubt that exiting is much much harder for girls unfortunate enough to be born into that kind of extreme Orthodoxy, and those that don’t have the fortunate to be already enrolled in public school, friends that aren’t Hasids, and a father that isn’t one either (my father’s an Atheist that grew up devout French Catholic… which contributed to another set of religious dogma imposed on my developing body when I exited the Hasid community).
I know that freedom of religion is paramount in this country. But a lot of what goes on in such insular communities — not just Hasids but also Mormons, Evangelical Christians, etc. — is indistinguishable from child abuse.
When I exited the Hasid community, the girls and women I counted as friends for years never spoke to me again. Most of them now are married with two or four children in their mid-20s… no diploma, high school or otherwise. It’s an insidious trap that no girl, teenager, or young woman has the ability to escape in a country that leaves so much of a child’s life up to the whims of their parents and community.
Thank you for this!
“They are educated separately from men, and their education focuses on making them good, obediant wives and mothers, not academic achievers.”
NO KIDDING! My sister volunteers at an adult literacy program in NYC. Her students are ~1st grade level readers. She recently had a 22yo Hasidic woman in the program. My sis said mostly the issue was a mild reading disability which no one ever thought was important to help her with. She confided some in my sister; sis got the impression this woman would be in some serious hot water if her participation was found out. Apparently there was some cloak and dagger involved on the part of this woman’s female relatives so that she could even *attend* the program.
“.. signs were bolted to a tree that read in Yiddish”
A question; were those signs actually in Hebrew, or in Yiddish using the Hebrew alphabet? I’ve only seen Yiddish written in the Latin alphabet that I’m aware. So I was wondering if my assumption that Hebrew alphabet = Hebraic words is mistaken.
@IrishUp: You’re mistaken, but it’s a very common mistake. Yiddish has always been written in Hebrew characters even though it’s a Germanic language, and yes, the sign is in Yiddish, not Hebrew. If, like most people, you’ve only ever seen Yiddish slang as used by English speakers, you probably didn’t realize that those words were transliterated from another alphabet. Here’s a little info about Yiddish if you want to know more.
@invisible_hand: You make a good point. I do think that a lot of the misogyny is old-world in the sense that the women are kept as unempowered as they were in the shtetls. The patriarchialism of the Haredim hasn’t changed a bit since then, but yes, they’ve been able to reinforce and display it in new ways.
One of the things I find fascinating about the Haredim is the way they have been able to use the tools provided by modernity, democracy, and freedom of religion—which their founders and European ancestors never had—to maintain an extremely un-modern, ultra-traditional way of life.
@BeckySharper re Yiddish: v interesting! I knew that Ladino was (at least in the past) written using Hebrew characters, but had no idea the same was true of Yiddish.
More linguistic info=GOOD THING.
Thanks so much for the link and the correction! And you’re right; growing up, Yiddish slang and phrases were part of our local vernacular. I’d also heard it spoken by my friends’ Ashkenazi parents & grandparents at home, and so was familiar with the linguisitc roots of Yiddish. But since a lot of my friends studied Hebrew too, I guess I early jumped to the conclusion that each used a different alphabet.
Hi Becky,
I just chanced upon your article. I must commend you on it as some of it was well written. But just like all the other articles out there you have achieved in depicting Hasidic women as helpless, second class creatures without even speaking or knowing them. Not only have you stereotyped them not according to facts but according to your own perspectives, but you have listed many faulty facts about our lives. (Women can’t divorce??!! Where did you get that from?)
I am not only a Hasidic woman, but I live in Willamsburg to boot, probably one of the most fanatic of the Hasidic enclaves in NY.
I am saddened that you have this impression and give others this impression of us Hassidic women. I am actually shocked.
If you are interested in hearing more about our lives then I would gladly communicate with you or write about it right here on your blog.
I do not really have time to elaborate right now as I am supposed to be working and am actually supposed to be booking a flight for an upcoming business convention (gasp! you probably didn’t think we know how to do that or that we are able to fly for business ventures).
I am very limited in time right now but would love to let you know some true facts, only if you or your readers are interested though.
Enjoy your day meanwhile and I will check back.
Estella
For an interesting woman’s perspective on life in the ultra-Orthodox, read “Unorthodox” by Deborah Feldman. She was a Satmar in Williamsburg.
Well written and insightful.
Just wondering if Estella, the Hassidic woman who disagreed with your article, ever did get back to you…
@Theresa: I did exchange some emails–friendly, not contentious at all–with Estella, but nothing more.