 |
Sexism in Israel manifests differently in different categories of Israeli population and culture.
|
Sexism in Israel manifests differently in different categories of Israeli population and culture.
Sexism in Jewish population is mainly a byproduct of the traditional role of women in Judaism, especially Orthodox Judaism. [1]
In 2014, Reform Jewish feminist sociologist Elana Maryles Sztokman published a book called The War on Women in Israel describing her perception of the misogyny observed in Israel's public space. [1] According to Publishers Weekly , Sztokman chronicles how the demands of an ultra-Orthodox minority led to the removal of women's imagery and presence from public venues on the pretext of modesty. Her book analyzes sexism in the Israeli army, legislature, and Orthodox rabbinical courts. [2]
According to an editor at Haaretz newspaper, girls and boys are treated differently from preschool. Attending a school party, she claimed that the boys were given Torahs to hold whereas girls were given rimonim adornments <of Torah scrolls>: "...The girls stood up and followed the instructions: to form an outer circle of decorative objects, in the most literal way imaginable." [3]
At the Western Wall, women have been arrested for carrying a Torah scroll on the grounds that this practice violates the religious status quo of the site. [4]
In Smadar Lavie's Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture, Lavie analyzes the racial and gender justice protest movements in the State of Israel from the 2003 Single Mothers’ March to the 2014 New Black Panthers. Lavie equates bureaucratic entanglements with pain—and, arguably, torture—in examining the State's treatment of its non-European Jewish women. Lavie's focus on the often-minimized Mizraḥi women juxtaposed with the state's monolithic Ashkenazi, male-centred culture suggests that Israeli bureaucracy is based on a theological notion that inserts the categories of religion, gender, and race into the foundation of citizenship. Lavie is the first to apply [5] [6] the intersectionality model to the analysis of sexism in Israel and how it is inseparable from racism. [7]
Women in Judaism have affected the course of Judaism over millenia. Their role is reflected in the Hebrew Bible, the Oral Law, by custom, and by cultural factors. Although the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature present various female role models, religious law treats women in specific ways. According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, women account for 52% of the worldwide Jewish population.
Jewish feminism is a movement that seeks to make the religious, legal, and social status of Jewish women equal to that of Jewish men in Judaism. Feminist movements, with varying approaches and successes, have opened up within all major branches of the Jewish religion.
A Jewish day school is a modern Jewish educational institution that is designed to provide children of Jewish parents with both a Jewish and a secular education in one school on a full-time basis. The term "day school" is used to differentiate schools attended during the day from part time weekend schools as well as secular or religious "boarding school" equivalents where the students live full-time as well as study. The substance of the "Jewish" component varies from school to school, community to community, and usually depends on the Jewish denominations of the schools' founders. While some schools may stress Judaism and Torah study others may focus more on Jewish history, Hebrew language, Yiddish language, secular Jewish culture, and Zionism.
Partnership minyan is a religious Jewish prayer group that seeks to maximize women's participation in services within the confines of Jewish law as understood by Orthodox Judaism. This includes enabling women to lead parts of service, read from the Torah, serve in lay leadership positions, sit in a more gender-balanced format, and in some cases count as part of a minyan ("quorum") of ten men and ten women. Partnership minyanim began in 2002 simultaneously in New York and Jerusalem, and have now spread to over 30 communities in at least five different countries around the world.
The Yeshivah of Flatbush is a Modern Orthodox private Jewish day school located in the Midwood section of Brooklyn, New York. It educates students from age 2 to age 18 and includes an early childhood center, an elementary school and a secondary school.
Jewish education is the transmission of the tenets, principles, and religious laws of Judaism. Jews value education, and the value of education is strongly embedded in Jewish culture. Judaism places a heavy emphasis on Torah study, from the early days of studying the Tanakh.
Women of the Wall is a multi-denominational Jewish feminist organization based in Israel whose goal is to secure the rights of women to pray at the Western Wall, also called the Kotel, in a fashion that includes singing, reading aloud from the Torah and wearing religious garments. Pew Research Center has identified Israel as one of the countries that place "high" restrictions on religion, and there have been limits placed on non-Orthodox streams of Judaism. One of those restrictions is that the Rabbi of the Western Wall has enforced gender segregation and limitations on religious garb worn by women. When the "Women of the Wall" hold monthly prayer services for women on Rosh Hodesh, they observe gender segregation so that Orthodox members may fully participate. But their use of religious garb, singing and reading from a Torah have upset many members of the Orthodox Jewish community, sparking protests and arrests. In May 2013 a judge ruled that a 2003 Israeli Supreme Court ruling prohibiting women from carrying a Torah or wearing prayer shawls had been misinterpreted and that Women of the Wall prayer gatherings at the wall should not be deemed illegal.
The Israel Religious Action Center also known as IRAC, was established in 1987 as the public and legal advocacy arm of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism. It is located in Jerusalem, Israel. IRAC aims to defend equality, social justice, and religious pluralism within Israel, through the Israeli legal system, lobbying and publications. Author Elana Maryles Sztokman calls IRAC "the preeminent civil and human rights organization in Israel," advocating for a broadly inclusive democracy and promoting social justice. Recent campaigns include an effort to ban gender segregation on Israeli public buses, a successful public campaign for the abolition of income guarantees to kollel students, and a lobbying campaign in defense of human rights organizations operating in Israel. Anat Hoffman, currently the executive director of IRAC, is also the director and a founding member of Neshot HaKotel, also known as "Women of the Wall" or WoW, an organization of women who pray at the Western Wall in an egalitarian manner. Rabbi Noa Sattath is director of IRAC. She has completed five years in that role.
In Judaism, especially in Orthodox Judaism, there are a number of settings in which men and women are kept separate in order to conform with various elements of halakha and to prevent men and women from mingling. Other streams of Judaism rarely separate genders any more than secular western society.
Smadar Lavie is a Mizrahi U.S.-Israeli anthropologist, author, and activist. She specializes in the anthropology of Egypt, Israel and Palestine, emphasizing issues of race, gender and religion. Lavie is a professor emerita of anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Ethnic Studies, University of California, Berkeley. Lavie received her doctorate in anthropology from the University of California at Berkeley (1989) and spent nine years as assistant and associate professor of anthropology at the University of California, Davis. She authored The Poetics of Military Occupation, receiving the 1990 Honorable Mention of the Victor Turner Award for Ethnographic Writing, and Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and Bureaucratic Torture receiving the 2015 Honorable Mention of the Association of Middle East Women's Studies Book Award Competition. Wrapped in the Flag of Israel's first edition was also one of the four finalists in the 2015 Clifford Geertz Book Award Competition of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion. She also co-edited Creativity/Anthropology and Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity. Lavie won the American Studies Association's 2009 Gloria Anzaldúa Prize for her article, “Staying Put: Crossing the Palestine-Israel Border with Gloria Anzaldúa,” published in Anthropology and Humanism (2011). In 2013, Smadar Lavie won the “Heart at East” Honor Plaque for lifetime service to Mizraḥi communities in Israel-Palestine.
Women in Israel comprise 50.26 percent of the state's population as of 2019. While Israel lacks an official constitution, the Israeli Declaration of Independence of 1948 states that “The State of Israel (…) will ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
The Center for Women's Justice is a public interest law firm devoted to advancing and protecting the rights of women to justice, equality and dignity under Jewish law in Israel. CWJ is a member organization of ICAR, the International Coalition for Agunah Rights.
Elana Maryles Sztokman is an American sociologist, writer, and Jewish feminist activist. Her first two books, which explore the topic of gender identity in the Orthodox Jewish community, were awarded the National Jewish Book Award. She ran unsuccessfully for the Knesset in the 2020 Israeli legislative election as a founding member of the Kol Hanashim Women's Party.
U'Bizchutan is an Israeli political party formed in early 2015 by social activist Ruth Colian. It is the first political party in Israel focused on Orthodox Jewish women. The two previously existing Haredi Israeli parties, Shas and United Torah Judaism, do not allow female candidates to run on their election slates. Colian says the party will represent all women who are dissatisfied with the current state of Israel's religious establishment. In the 2015 election, the party failed to pass the electoral threshold necessary to win seats in the Knesset, receiving only 1,802 votes (0.04%).
Adina Bar-Shalom is an Israeli educator, columnist, and social activist. She was the founder of the first college for Haredi students in Jerusalem, and has spent years working to overcome gender discrimination in the Orthodox Jewish community. She was awarded the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement and special contribution to society in 2014. A daughter of Ovadia Yosef, she is a member of the prominent Yosef family.
Feminism in Israel is a complex issue in contemporary Israeli society due to the varied demographic makeup of the country and the country's particular balance of religion and state issues. For secular Israeli women, the successive campaigns for women's rights and equality reflect a similar timeline and progression as Western democracies. For Israeli Arabs, however, the issue of feminism is strongly linked to Palestinian causes. And for Orthodox Jews, selected women's rights and women's representation in the Israeli Parliament are recently debated issues.
The Kotel compromise is a compromise reached between orthodox and non-orthodox Jewish denominations, according to which the non-Orthodox "mixed" prayer area for men and women was supposed to be expanded in the southern part of the Western Wall. In contrast to the existing situation, access to this "mixed" prayer area was supposed to be from the main entrance to the Western Wall, and in addition it was supposed to be run by a council which would contain representatives of the non-Orthodox denominations and women of the Wall.
Mizrahi feminism is a movement within Israeli feminism, which seeks to extricate Mizrahi women from the binary categories of Mizrahi-Ashkenazi and men-women. Mizrahi feminism is inspired by both Black feminism and Intersectional feminism, and seeks to bring about the liberation of women and social equality through recognition of the particular place Mizrahi women hold on the social map, and all the ways it affects Mizrahi women.
Lesley Sachs is an Israeli social activist and leader of battles for gender equality and religious freedom, CEO and Artist. She served as the CEO of The Israel Women's Network (IWN), the Israel Religious Action Center (IRAC), the World Union for Progressive Judaism (WUPJ) and Women of the Wall (WOW).
Kolech, also known as Kolech: Religious Women's Forum, is an Israeli women's organization associated with Orthodox Judaism. The group's stance is aligned with Orthodox Jewish feminism and religious Zionism.