Not a lot of progress – reports the Forward
Patrilineal Jews Still Find Resistance – Forward.com.
My question: Why is patrilineal descent good enough for determining who is a kohen but not who is a Jew? (This is not only a rhetorical question I actually want to know).
This article in the New York Times shows where private schools are headed, which is relying more and more on a few large donors and less and lesson tuition and smaller donors to cover operating costs. And this is exactly where days schools will end up if they have competing with private schools instead of educating the children of the community as their goals.
Leonard Saxe proposes creating a (voluntary) tax to fund the Jewish education of families of the many Jewish educators and professionals who cannot afford day school (Create Tax for Jewish Education – Forward.com.) While this is definitely a forward-thinking (no pun intended) proposal aimed at areal and growing problem, my only question is what happens to the families of other professionals who work for other non-profits or serve the community. Why should the child of a social worker at a Jewish retirement home get to go to day school but not the child of a social worker who works for a Children’s Aid society?
As a parent of a 11 year-old girl I am constantly astounded at how the march towards the sexualization of young girls continues and seems to accelerate every year. In stores there are padded bikini tops for 8 year olds. On the cover fashion magazines of there are pre-adolescent girls in porn-inspired poses. There were bikini-clad profile photos of my daughter’s 11-year-old classmates on Facebook. My 4 year-old daughter was told by a classmate that you need lipstick to make you beautiful. I often feel surrounded with no place to turn for appropriate models for my children. A friend of mine joked that the pressure is enough to make you want to enroll your child in an Orthodox Jewish school with a strict uniform or encourage her to wear a hijab. To some degree I see the appeal of escaping the constant barrage of messages telling girls that the most important thing they can be is attractive, and specifically sexually attractive. As a mother of a 11 year old, I see these religious girls and their freedom from the intense anxiety of middle-school dressing is appealing. Both a Muslim feminist who championed the hijab (but not the burka) and Orthodox Jewish women have pointed out to me that modest clothing and hair-covering forces the people you interact with to focus on you as a person and not as merely a sexualized object. Their eyes (and perhaps their thoughts) cannot drift somewhere distracting.
Even as I struggle to find non-sexualized and appropriate clothing, and movies and books for my children, I just cannot embrace religious-based modesty as it is currently practiced. The problem with most religious based modesty restrictions is that they are much stricter for women than they are for men. I have seen Jewish Orthodox couples in the extreme heat where the man is wearing pants and a t-shirt and his wife is wearing an ankle-length skirt, long stockings, sleeves below her elbows, a sheitl (wig) with a hat on top. I have seen the male half of a Muslim couple in similar heat wearing wearing shorts and a t-shirt while his wife was covered from head to toe in a black burka, including a face veil. There are the obvious unfair advantages of freedom of movement and freedom from heatstroke, and in the case of the burka, the safety hazard of no peripheral vision. But worse is the disturbing message this gender-imbalanced modesty sends to boys about the men they will grow up to be. The message that men only think about sex is a troubling as the messages hyper-sexualized images of women in the mainstream culture send to girls and the women they will become.
If women are covered and men are not, it is because of the implicit (and sometimes explicit) expectation that men are hyper-sexual beings who are so unable to deal with their sexual desire that they will at best be inattentive to the issues at hand or inappropriate and at worst, physically force themselves on women. It also suggest that one wrong look or touch from a women will arouse a passion so great in a man that he will be unable to control his urges and will be violent and possibly destructive. (This is the major theme of Twilight, which my daughter’s fourth grade class was into). This practice of covering one gender and not the other suggests that men they cannot manage their desire as one facet of their humanity, noting their feelings and moving on when there are other aspects involved like listening to a lecture, conducting business or conversing with friends. This is not a self-image I’d want my son to have.
Unbalanced modesty also views male bodies as non-sexual, or not attractive to women and suggests women either have no sexual desire or never act on it or initiate sexual contact. Thinking there is no danger women will act on sexual desire is why men in traditional societies can cover less of their bodies without worrying about unleashing the possible damage of uncontrolled female sexuality. I can vouch for the fact that women (and of course some men!) do indeed find male bodies sexually attractive in and out of clothing and that male hair is sexually attractive (at least my husband’s is).
If young women grow up viewing only men as sexual beings, they may feel shame for the sexual desires or their sexual contact with men (even their husbands). Covering only female bodies says only women are inherently and primarily sexual and in need of hiding from public view. But the idea that the female body is sexualized and the male is not is what my friend was trying to escape in the first place, by grasping at the solution of religious-inspired modesty. It is in fact, the other side of the same coin. “Women are sexy- work it baby!” is not really different from “Women are sexy- hide them”.
This article (in Haaretz (Medieval siddur battles gender inequality via Jewish prayer also reported in the Sisterhood blog) talks about a variant of the infamous “who has not made me a woman” prayer, which has a line for womean to say thanking God “who has who made me a woman” which occurs in a medieval siddur. The article and makes it sound like a new argument toward gender- equal language in prayer and a new discovery. But it is not new at all.
There were many variants of this prayer including “for not making me an animal” in the middle ages, and the siddur was not as standardized as it is now. (As in the three negatives blessings for not making one a slave, a woman and a non-Jew were not uniformly said in all communities yet at that time.) This is also not the only instance of an older manuscript with the version or one that says ” for making me a woman, and not a man”- even more radical.
This is not a discovery of a new manuscript and others like it have been documented for some time : see Cultures of the Jews: a new history by David Biale or The three blessings: boundaries, censorship, and identity in Jewish liturgy by Yoel H. Kahn and many other writings on the history of Jewish liturgy. Or this blog post http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/content/module/2011/3/23/main-feature/1/three-blessings or mine Egalitarian.. you keep using that word
Eleven years ago, my husband and I were poring over baby name books looking for Hebrew names that would work out well in English and we found many that did. And a bunch that really did not. With apologies to all of the Shais and Drors out there here is our list of the ones that just don’t work. And thanks to my brother-in-law David for getting us started.
In the What Were the Authors of the Baby Name Books Thinking category:
My own FAIL:
Got more?
