Last week, Rabbi Ari Hart, the co-founder of Uri L’Tzedek, wrote about his personal struggle with the liturgy and the recitation of the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman,” which as a liberal sort, he finds problematic, you know, because of misogyny.

Rather than omit or amend the blessing as some Modern Orthodox folks—from Rabbi Yosef Kanefsky to Senator Joe Lieberman—have done, Hart decided on a different tactic. Citing his fidelity to Orthodoxy and the entirety of halacha, Hart does not feel comfortable changing the blessing to match his principles. Rather, he will continue to thank God for not making him a woman while keeping in mind all of the reasons that it is indeed better to be a man—from rape to the glass ceiling to lack of religious leadership opportunities (particularly in his denomination, which doesn’t allow for women rabbis) and so on. You see, it really sucks to be a woman and Hart is rabbi enough to admit his privilege.

My knee jerk reaction was to blog snarkily about Hart’s post, pointing out that what he was suggesting is akin to the oft-discussed and derided ironic hipster racism. As Jezebel’s Lindy West astutely pointed, some white folks (the ones with college degrees) seem to think that “not wanting to be racist makes it okay for them to be totally racist.” Hart is suggesting something similar—as a male, a member of the privileged group in Orthodoxy, he gets to rejigger the meaning of a blessing that has often been viewed by women as hurtful, to twist into something that he can feel good about. It’s sort of like how straight people decided that “queer” was no longer insulting and that LGBTQ should reclaim it. (Oh, wait—it didn’t happen like that?)

While I still stand behind that original blog post and the arguments contained therein (and as a very belated birthday present, I would very much like someone to make Hart a “Shelo Asani Isha” t-shirt he can wear ironically on a New York street corner while explaining his intent), I’d like to address the emotions and feelings that seem to motivate the writing of his piece. (And I think it’s totally fair to make assumptions about Hart’s inner mental state since his “strategy” demands the same of those around him—for us to hear him recite the particular blessing and infer what he’s thinking about his male privilege.)

Like many progressive Orthodox Jews, Hart is torn up about the sexism embedded in Jewish law and liturgy. But he really likes being Orthodox and doesn’t want to do anything that calls his status into question, which is a reasonable fear. When Kanefsky wrote about not saying the blessing, some considered him to have stepped outside the bounds of Orthodoxy. So Hart continues to thank God daily that he was not made a woman. And the cognitive dissonance he feels living as an Orthodox male who believes that sexism and its consequences are wrong is clearly weighing on him.

I think we can all sympathize. It’s difficult to live perfectly in accordance with one’s values. We all buy goods that are made by workers who underpaid and mistreated. Those goods are often manufactured in ways that are destructive to the physical environment. The list goes on and on.

Some may protest these unjust systems and try to change them for the better. But for those of us who don’t take to the streets to fight against oppressive institutions, I’d like to think that at least we’re not actively rationalizing and defending our actions. (This isn’t much, I’ll grant you. In fact, it’s so little, it’s practically nothing at all.)

Hart, however, is treating the blessing as a thought problem, one that can be fixed if you can simply find the right arguments. By coming up with a different way of understanding it, he seems to think the matter is put to rest at least until all of the ills he lists at the end of his post are corrected. (And what then? What happens when women are totally equal? Will the Orthodox, if that category still exists, say the blessing a hundred years from now or whenever women have achieved equality?).

His approach has been fairly typical of Orthodoxy’s encounter with feminism—at least online. Confronted with certain practices that have their roots in very misogynistic notions about women, many Orthodox men and women insist that the problem is not the law but the explanation of it. ‘No, wait! You don’t understand!’ is the sentiment that has launched a thousand apologist pieces. (This also typifies the Republican response to their thrashing in the 2012 election. They seem to think that blacks and minorities simply didn’t understand their message and platform; their new strategy is to better explain themselves to minorities. I wonder how they’ll rationalize voter ID laws.)

The problems with the blessing (and with the status of women with Orthodox Judaism in general) cannot be explained away. In a small way, “shelo asani” contributes to all of the ills that Hart opposes and even some others, like homophobia, since the blessing implies that the worst thing a man can be is feminine. It’s not just a locker room taunt—it’s written into our liturgy. We have to do better than finding a more palatable explanation.

What’s so disappointing about the Huffington Post defense of “shelo asani” is the source. Hart has made a career out of helping the poor and aiding workers, out of taking action against injustice, out of doing something.

Of course, helping those groups doesn’t fundamentally disrupt the halachic system (though it is disruptive to the capitalist system). We are supposed to perform acts of charity and treat the goy in our midst with kindness and dignity. We are not allowed to mistreat workers and deprive them of pay or even make them wait for their money. Uri L’Tzedek is not changing the legalistic status quo as much as enforcing it, which is still highly commendable and difficult work.

But when Hart is confronted with the idea of change that could be disruptive to the Orthodox status quo—addressing women’s status and treatment—he doesn’t respond with the same verve. He seems to feel powerless to do anything, even amending or omiting a blessing.

William Faulkner is rumored to have said, “In writing, you must kill all of your darlings,” referring to those exceptionally fine and funny sentences that a writer is in love with despite the fact that they are off-topic or detract from your narrative intent. The writer’s emotional attachment to a particular phrase, paragraph, or page can keep it off the chopping block.

The offending blessing is hardly a “darling,” but Hart and others are treating it as such, permitting nostalgia and the emotion the old-timey liturgy evokes to cloud their judgment.

Yet as painful as darling slaughter is for many writers, it usually improves the overall work. If writers can eliminate their favorite phrases then perhaps we can have an honest discussion about cutting deeply troubling sections of our liturgy.

Because there’s a limit to how much sympathy I can muster for progressive men like Hart who argue to retain the old, oppressive forms for reasons of nostalgia or the desire to retain membership in a certain clique.

I get it. Change is difficult and destabilizing. It can be unpleasant to tinker with traditions and prayers that are part of a lifestyle that you mostly find beautiful and meaningful. Yet to these folks I still say—get over it. Your pain, while legitimate, is minor compared to the experiences of those who have been marginalized and oppressed by thousands of years of rules and blessings that have regarded them as property, trivialized their intellectual capacity, and denied them access to power.

But even if you can’t get over it, please don’t argue your liberal bona fides even as you continue to retaining those practices and prayers that many women find damaging.

I know, I know—perhaps I should be grateful that an Orthodox rabbi is even able to acknowledge his privilege. But guess what? I’m fresh out of gold stars.

Previous columns: The Photographer Who Captured a Disturbing Domestic Violence Incident
Misogyny in Israel—and Not Just at the Western Wall
Obsessive Compulsive Passover

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The week that the Congress was set to reauthorize the Violence Against Women Act, Time published a photo essay by Sara Naomi Lewkowicz that documented a night of domestic violence at a house in Southeastern Ohio.

The 30-year-old Ohio University graduate student had been documenting the relationship of Shane, 31, a recently released felon with a history of drug problems, and Maggie, 19 and a mother of two young children from her estranged husband for four months. It had been her intention to chronicle Shane’s reintegration into normal life after years spent in and out of jail. But on the night of the fight, Lewkowicz’s photo essay turned into a portrait of a hidden private crime—domestic violence.

Since the publication of “Shane and Maggie”—first on fotovisura and then in Time—the essay has gone viral and sparked conversation about domestic violence. It has also brought no shortage of criticism on the victim and the photographer who witnessed and chronicled that dark night.

I spoke to Lewkowicz about what happened that night, and the controversy that followed.

How did the violence begin and escalate?

They got into an argument at the bar because another girl was flirting with him and Maggie got jealous and left. Once we got back to the house and it started to escalate and he started making it about him, how he was the one who had the right to be angry, not her.

He shoved her as soon we got into the house. I wasn’t sure if it was going to be it. By the second time, I said okay, this is going to go to a place that isn’t going to be good.

Did you feel in danger at all during the incident?

I never felt at all in danger or scared. I kind of intellectually acknowledged that there was a very real possibility that I could be in danger but he never directed his anger towards me. The only time I felt actually in danger was when I put my hand in his pocket to get my phone back. I was like, “Alright, I might get punched in the face.” [Shane had previously borrowed it to call Maggie after she left the bar.]

What went into the decision to continue taking photos of the incident?

It was kind of a multilayered thing. Part of it is that I’m a visual journalist—I document what I see and I know that people don’t see this very often. It was the idea of taking something that is usually such a hidden crime, so private, and showing what it looked like. Also, I wanted him to know that I was taking those pictures. I wanted him to know on some level that somebody was watching, somebody was witnessing.

What was your reaction to seeing the photos you took for the first time after the incident?

I pretty much knew what I had that night. I knew from scrolling through the photos. I showed them to Maggie that night. I said, ‘Look I’m not trying to tell you what to do or how to live your life, but this is what it looked like from where I was standing.’ It’s a lot harder to deny the severity of something when it’s presented to you in a photograph. You can get into a fight with somebody and then later deceive yourself into thinking it wasn’t a big deal when it really was.

Honestly, I didn’t react very emotionally to the photos. I reacted emotionally later on when I heard the 911 tape. [After Sara took her phone back from Shane, she gave it to another person in the house and directed them to go to the bathroom where he couldn’t see them and call 911.]

I got really emotional over that. I looked at the photos and I knew that this was a very intimate portrayal of something I don’t usually see portrayed. I didn’t react differently to the photos than I did to being there. I was there.

You noted that domestic violence is something that most people never witness. Now having witnessed it, did it upset any of your preconceived notions of DV or confirm them?

It gave me an introduction. I had never seen it. I have never experienced it in that I’ve never been physically assaulted by a partner. What struck me about it was how many signs were there before it happened that I wasn’t even aware of or completely conscious of. When I look back at the photos, the photos seem to know what I didn’t. I think I was unconsciously making certain decisions about what to shoot and how to shoot that now looking back made sense. At the time I wasn’t sitting there thinking that this guy is going to beat this girl up.

What were some of the signs that you picked up in the photos?

He was isolating her. That’s a big one. He moved pretty far away from her family and friends and controlled her ability to come and go. He had the car keys and if they got into a fight, he would take them away and wouldn’t let her leave. He was always invading her personal space. He couldn’t just let her be. He always had to be in her personal space, physically dominating her, physically dominating the kids. He was in competition with the little boy, which I was conscious of very early on and I thought was very weird.

He had gotten her name tattooed on his neck in really big letters. Initially, I made a decision not to judge that because I wouldn’t go to the Pacific Island and see a tribesman with tattoos on his face and judge him for that. I’m in Appalachia and this is a different culture from anything I’ve grown up with. I approached this with the same openness as I would anything else.

But getting a name tattooed on you like that can be a way of making them feel like they owe you.

And was it early in the relationship?

He got it after they were dating for a month.

There was so much rage heaped on you as the photographer for not intervening and protecting Maggie just as there was the photographer in the case of the subway pusher.

Which I thought was interesting considering the fact that in that case, there was a station full of people who didn’t do anything.

Beyond the journalistic ethics, the suggestion that I should’ve interceded is ludicrous. I’m not trained in combat. I’m not trained in mediation. I’m not trained in how to disarm somebody. I was dealing with a guy who was drunk, angry, and clearly didn’t have a problem hitting women.

All of the other bystanders who aren’t journalists and don’t have to concern themselves with journalistic ethics—why do they escape disapproval?

I think that it’s a matter of identification. In my photos you can’t see the other people in them. I deliberately edited it so that they aren’t identified. And essentially you have three or four different people you can identify with—you can identify with Maggie. You can identify with Shane. You can identify with Memphis [Maggie’s daughter]. Or you can identify with me. Since most people viewing the pictures are in the act of witnessing, they’re going to identify with me because I’m the firsthand witness. And most people would like to think that if they were in that position, they would’ve done X,Y, and Z. When you’re identifying with someone, you’re really wondering—what would I have done?

People also don’t want to feel helpless and they think witnessing something is tantamount to being helpless. But I wasn’t helpless in that scenario. I put myself at risk by sticking my hand in his pocket and physically coming in contact with him that way. I made sure the police were being called. I surrendered the photos to the police and was willing to testify. I didn’t feel helpless at all.

I know you went to see Maggie in Alaska. Can you give us an update on how she is doing?

She’s doing better than she was. It’s still really difficult for her and she has to do some work to sort through it. Her husband who she was estranged from when he was with Shane—they’re both young and they have a lot of history together. They met when they were 14 and got pregnant at 15. They care about each other a lot but they have a lot of stuff to deal with.

I know that you sort of stumbled into this topic by accident but do you plan to continue to pursue domestic violence as a subject?

It’s tough to answer because it is a thing you just have to be there for. I want to use this story to do work and I’d love to do some work with some battered women’s shelters, but it’s not going to be the only subject I ever document. I have a particular interest in gender issues but they range pretty widely. I already know that whatever I do in the future, this piece of work will be a pivotal body of work within my career.

Previous columns: Misogyny in Israel—and Not Just at the Western Wall

Obsessive Compulsive Passover

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It’s not just on gender segregated buses that travel through ultra-Orthodox areas of Jerusalem or at the Western Wall where Women of the Wall continue to challenge the authorities over communal prayer on the ladies’ side of the partition—women’s access to communal space in Israel is limited in other settings as well. In a post for the Times of Israel, Rivkah Lambert Adler lists the ways that she, as an Orthodox woman, has encountered discrimination at synagogue classes, lectures, and even concerts where her ticket price is the same as a man’s but her seat is way worse.

I was nodding pretty vigorously as I read her post—it’s hard to disagree with Adler when she argues that she should be able to see the performer in a show she paid good money to see—until I got to this paragraph:

Please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not suggesting that I want to wear tefillin or serve as a ba’al tefilla or be called up to the Torah for an aliyah. I’m not inherently opposed to separate seating during services. Please don’t conflate and thereby dismiss what I’m saying because my point is based on gender. I’m not revealing my disdain for being a Jewish woman and I have no secret desire to be a Jewish man.

Adler is worried about coming off as a ranting feminist (heaven forfend!) when all she’s asking for is a fair seat. So she reassures readers that she doesn’t actually want many of the things that Jewish feminists want—such as participation in public ritual.

This was wholly unnecessary. She had already made a pretty convincing case for more equitable use of public space. There was no need to bring the aspirations and goals of other Jewish feminists into the mix and imply there was something wrong with them, that they were somehow radical and improper. She could’ve rested her argument on “kavod habriyot,” simple respect for others.

Part of this is defensive. In high school, I encountered several teachers with the audacity to use the F-word—feminism—to disparage women who wished for leadership and ritual participation as wanting “to be Jewish men” instead of the Jewish uteruses, er, women, we were created to be. I wasn’t quite savvy enough to challenge the rabbis’ basic premise—that leadership and tefillin were somehow intrinsically bundled up in masculinity.

Another tactic frequently used to discredit Jewish feminists is to impugn their motives. “Do they even want to be counted in a minyan?” one teacher asked, “or are they simply insisting on it because men can be counted?” The problem here, according to these teachers, is that these women don’t want to perform the mitzvah for its own sake, but are merely trying to prove a point. This is the classic privileged argument. When you’re part of the ruling class, you never have to explain yourself. A man who walks into a shul and asks for an aliyah never has to explain why he wants it. As a Jewish male over the age of thirteen, it’s merely his right and privilege. His motives are irrelevant.

Adler clearly was hoping to head off the type of mocking I heard as a teen, convincing her would-be critics that what she’s asking for isn’t a big deal. A nice chair here, a better view there—nothing like those crazy feminists we’ve all been warned about. While I understand the strategy, I wonder how effective it is. Is it useful to downplay the work of other feminists in an attempt to distinguish yourself from them?

She may not give the benefit of the doubt to those women who supposedly wish to be men, but she gives it to the people who keep giving her shitty seats. “I’d like to assume it’s a problem of oversight rather than intentionality,” she writes.

I have no problem with that. I also don’t like to make assumptions about people’s intentions and personal motivations unless I have actual proof of what they think and feel. And it’s likely true that the organizers have no special animus towards women. But to call it a simple “oversight” is shockingly naïve when it continually happens and to just one group and all the time. This points to a more systemic cause. And in invoking the “derech eretz” argument over and over, Adler is clearly trying to avoid having that more difficult conversation.

It’s her approach, however, that irks me. It’s true that social change takes time and happens incrementally. Martin Luther King, Jr. famously said, “The arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice.” But do we get there by asking for pittances and disparaging those that dare to ask for more?

As someone who has chosen to leave the Orthodox community, I recognize that my credibility is pretty much shot with those who still claim communal membership. (Part of the reason I lingered on the fringes of Orthodoxy for awhile was to keep some of that credibility. Ultimately, I decided it wasn’t worth it.) I don’t really have a right to tell an Orthodox woman still functioning within that community what she should demand and how she should go about getting it. She and I face somewhat different challenges and restrictions when it comes to misogyny. Nor do I have the right to tell Orthodox women how I think they should feel—angry, frustrated, revolutionary—about their present situation.

But I also don’t think that Orthodox women, in making their case for greater respect within their own communities, should disparage the aspirations of other Jewish feminists who want greater ritual participation. This desire doesn’t make them Jewish men, but rather, committed Jews.

As for Adler—may she get those front row seats she’s after. I just hope she doesn’t stop there.

Previous columns: Obsessive Compulsive Passover

David Brooks’ Orthodox Fantasy

(Image via ChameleonsEye / Shutterstock.com)

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Purim is my favorite Jewish holiday for all of the obvious reasons—costumes and candy—but as a friend of mine grimly warned a few weeks ago amid a stream of celebratory Facebook statuses, “Purim is the horse Pesach rides in on.” And like that, all my mirth was sapped. (Don’t worry—it was later restored by alcohol.)

I despise Passover. I start dreading it the moment my Purim hangover subsides. Back when I was younger, I didn’t even wait until the holiday was over; I started fretting about Passover as the mishloah manot baskets arrived out our house. My mother would lament, “What are we going to do with all of this chametz right before Pesach?” and then started setting aside snacks to give to our gentile neighbors.

She also told me to pick out chocolates and candies to bring to school to share with my classmates. Imagine if after receiving a bounty of Halloween candy, a mother told her kids that they had to give most of it away—to neighbors, friends, classmates—because in a few weeks time, it couldn’t be kept in the house. (This actually sounds like something Jimmy Kimmel would suggest to parents—tell their kids that they had to give away all of their candy and then record their children’s reactions and upload it to YouTube.)

We even regifted on the spot—as mishloach manot deliveries poured in, we repackaged them and handed them out to all the Purim comers we hadn’t thought of when we made our original round of holiday baskets. Within a few days of Purim, all of the goodies had either been eaten or given away.

Growing up as an Orthodox Jew, I tolerated and accepted as normal all kinds of unusual, non-mainstream behavior—from not using electricity on the Sabbath to keeping two sets of dishes in the house to rock climbing with a skirt over my pants. Vacationing in Disney Land entailed packing a week’s worth of food into a suitcase. Going to the movies meant bringing your own snacks because you couldn’t be sure that the popcorn is kosher. (To this day, I can sneak any food into a movie theater in my purse. This includes milkshakes.) And none of this stuff actually bothered me at the time.

But Passover took it all too far. I’m a naturally anxious sort of person and holiday prep exacerbated it. One teacher told us to unscrew the receiver on our phones to find crumbs that we might’ve spit while talking and I spent an hour trying to figure out how to disassemble our phone until my mother caught me. I spent hours reading the miniaturized list of ingredients of the family’s moisturizers, deodorants, and to ensure they didn’t included chametz ingredients. I verified these lists against the the annually updated guide written by Rabbi Blumenkrantz.

I did the same thing when it came to my makeup, but in this instance, my zeal was a little self-serving—the more chametz-laden makeup I found, the more chametz-free stuff I could buy at the makeup counter at the Kings Plaza Macy’s where many other religious women were scrutinizing cosmetics with Rabbi Blumenkrantz’s book in hand. We were all there to buy makeup for God. And because Clinique was offering a free gift. (Don’t tell me that the major cosmetic companies don’t know that Passover helps them move product. They must know.)

These are just a few examples of the type of over-the-top behavior that you hear about as this holiday draws near. All Orthodox Jews have their own stories about the craziness. (In fact, this story in the New York Post describes the lengths that some will go to and the amount of money they’re willing to pay to make sure their homes are crumb-free.)

If the Haggadah were rewritten in modern times, I’d like to think that the character of the Wicked Daughter wouldn’t ask about the Exodus from Egypt, but would instead ask, “What is this cleaning to you?”

The Haggadah would continue, ‘To you’ and not to herself. Because after several years of therapy, she has finally learned how to separate herself from her family’s pathology.” And it should be considered a pathology. In the upcoming version of the DSM, Passover would be perfectly at home under “anxiety disorders.” (Perhaps we can lobby for its inclusion in the latest version of the manual.)

And yet despite recognizing the insanity of the holiday’s preparation, I continue to observe it more stringently than I do anything else. During the rest of the year, I laugh off a lot of kashrut as “food cooties” and order freely at restaurants, not concerned that my brunch omelet might touch something forbidden on the griddle. Yet on Passover I worry, like a little boy confronted with a girl on the playground, as to whether the salad I’d like to order from my usual café will get chametz cooties from the nearby bagels.

I’ve often wondered why I continue to fret over minutiae when it comes to this holiday when I’ve largely given it up in other domains in my life. The reason, I’ve concluded, is fairly disappointing—Pesach only happens once a year. As I’ve noted earlier, my so-called rebellion took a long time and a lot of thought. Decisions about my kashrut observance were considered and made multiple times—will I eat that restaurant? What will I eat? What won’t I eat? So many questions, and I answered them differently day-to-day until I figured out answers I was comfortable with. Similarly, my deliberations over my Sabbath observance repeated themselves, week after week, for several years.

But holidays such as Passover only happen once a year, which means I don’t get as many opportunities to figure out how I want to observe them. I don’t have the chance for the same sort of trial and error. So for one week, I default to something that very closely resembles the sort of Passover I was raised with, not out of any sort of principle but because I haven’t had the chance to think up anything better.

Not that I haven’t made any changes. A few years ago, I joined the ranks of many other Jews who have incorporated kitniyot into their Passover diets. I now buy and drink coffee from the same vendors I purchase from year round. I no longer cover my countertops with layers of aluminum foil. But that’s about it.

Once again, I will boil my sink, wipe down my countertops, and eat off of plastic plates. (Sorry environment!) I might even buy a new lipstick. You know, because the old one might have miniscule crumbs on it. And because Clinique was offering a gift with purchase.

Previous columns: David Brooks’ Orthodox Fantasy

Aly Raisman’s New ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Moves

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Today, David Brooks published an op-ed that read like a press release for Pomegranate, a high-end kosher market in Midwood, Brooklyn, and the Orthodox Union. In it, he marvels at the wonder that is the non-dairy cheese puff. (You can eat with a meat meal!)

Clearly he didn’t visit the supermarket on a Friday afternoon, a few hours before Shabbos. The experience would’ve been much less positive if he had tried to push a cart through the pre-Sabbath last minute dash for groceries.

But Brooks wasn’t merely singing the praises of “the kosher Whole Foods,” as he put it. He also rained down compliments on the community that shops there—the Orthodox Jews. As if reading tea leaves, Brooks saw the reasons for the Orthodox’s success in the products on Pomengranate’s shelves. “Pomegranate,” he writes, “looks like any island of upscale consumerism, but deep down it is based on a countercultural understanding of how life should work.”

For the record, an all-kosher supermarket is about as countercultural as the gluten-free aisle of any health food store. So long as it’s sold in the store in a capitalist society, it’s very much part of the mainstream cultural activity.

The rules—or halacha, to put it Hebraically—in Brooks’ estimation constitute “moderate religious zeal.” Remember, he’s publishing this article mere weeks before Passover. Clearly, he’s never been witness to Orthodox preparations for the holiday during which some folks use so much aluminum foil to cover countertops that these rooms resemble the interior of a 60s B-movie spaceship. Passover is to competitive piety as the Olympics are to gymnastics—it’s the biggest stage on which to show your neighbors how much more religious you are than them.

It’s quite easy to go through Brooks’ essay and find other laughable assertions. But I’m more curious as to why Brooks has seemingly abandoned his critical faculties to write this piece of pabulum that is devoid of any sort healthy skepticism.

The sort of romanticizing that Brooks engages in is something I’ve encountered on occasion from non-observant Jews who feel insecure about the degree of their religious knowledge and practice. Nodding to pluralism, they’ll concede that Orthodoxy may not be right for them, but many feel, deep down, that the Orthodox are doing it right, that they are somehow more “authentic” than other Jews. To put it into Sarah Palin terms, the Orthodox are the “real Americans.” The rest of the Jews are “fake.”

What the Orthodox are doing right, according to Brooks, is reproducing. He cites this stat:

Nationwide, only 21 percent of non-Orthodox Jews between the ages of 18 and 29 are married. But an astounding 71 percent of Orthodox Jews are married at that age. And they are having four and five kids per couple.

I’m not going to talk about whether or not I think it’s good or bad that Orthodox Jews marry so young and have so many children. Matrimony and childbearing, I believe, are personal choices. I’d like to think (or at least pretend) that all of these young Orthodox men and women are acting of their own free will and not under extreme pressure to marry young and have many children.

Nor am I here to quibble with Brooks’ assertions about the Orthodox population boom. They clearly enjoy a much higher birthrate than the rest of the Jewish community. But since when does having more kids than other groups validate your lifestyle? It certainly does not mean that you’re necessarily doing something “right.” It’s only “best” insofar as we’re talking about survival of the most populous and in purely evolutionary terms. (For the record, I learned a barebones version of evolutionary theory in my yeshiva high school. It was proffered with the caveat, “We’re only teaching this to you so you can answer the questions on the Regents,” referring to the state examinations. Talk about giving an essential scientific theory the short shrift.)

Missed in all of this treacle is what happens to those whose desires aren’t perfectly in line with the demands of the community—they are either forced out or feel hemmed in. In that case, no amount of dairy-free cheese puffs will fulfill you.

(Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images for Meet the Press)

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This past weekend, the American Cup, the only international gymnastics competition held in the United States, took place in Worcester, Massachusetts, near Aly Raisman’s suburban Boston hometown. It was at this very gymnasium in 2010 that a then-unknown Raisman burst onto the senior elite scene by placing second in the all-around competition,

This year, however, the Olympic champion did not compete. She was on hand to sign autographs for young fans and speak to the press about her latest venture—her upcoming stint as a contestant on Dancing With The Stars.

Raisman is following in the footsteps of 2008 Olympic gold medalist Shawn Johnson, who beat out Giles Marini to win her post-Games season on the show. Raisman even performed with Johnson and the rest of Fierce Five during the DWTS: All Stars finale back in November.

Giving interviews at the American Cup this weekend, the Jewish gymnast said that when she was in Los Angeles to film last season’s DWTS cameo, she made it clear that she wanted to be a contestant on the show. “I made sure that I let everyone know I wanted to do it when I went on the show,” she said. Sounds like she took some of Sheryl Sandberg’s “lean in” advice.

The golden gymnast has even been partnered with Mark Ballas, who co-won the mirror ball trophy with Johnson. After coaching Johnson to the win, Ballas probably knows better than anyone how to break the many bad dancing habits—flicked wrists, anyone?—that gymnasts learn as part of their athletic training. (Gymnasts’ dance training is often laughable. Raisman’s gymnastics dance background will help her as much Baltimore Ravens’ Jacoby Jones’ end zone dances will help him.)

Olympic athletes—from Kristi Yamaguchi to Apollo Anton Ohno and others—have fared very well on the ballroom dancing show, which bodes well for Raisman, who seemed excited to apply her famous work ethic to the dance floor. But this isn’t merely a competition of dance skill and physical prowess. The voting aspect of the show still makes this, at least in part, a popularity contest—not unlike the election for a high school class president.

Though Raisman left the Olympic Games as a bona fide star, she was still overshadowed by Olympic all-around champion Gabby Douglas and the ever meme-able McKayla Maroney, who herself turned down an offer to be on the show in order to get back to the gym and resume training.

Johnson, as gymnastics blogger (there are several of us!) Blythe Lawrence observed, did more than learn the dances; she created an appealing coming-of-age narrative arc during her time on the show. She grew up, literally and otherwise, while she was a contestant on the program. The youngest member of the 2008 U.S. Olympic team, she arrived as a fresh scrubbed, corn fed Iowan girl and morphed into a strutting woman who wore provocative costumes and makeup, not scrunchies and bows.

Raisman will begin her run without that kind of backstory. She will be older—almost 19—and does not have the same Midwestern appeal, hailing instead from a suburb just outside of Boston. Also, Raisman has a reputation for competitive verve and consistency, not adorableness.

Other past contestants have made their improved physical fitness and weight loss a central part of their experience on the program. Obviously, this would be ridiculous for an Olympic athlete who just completed a nationwide gymnastics tour. So the question is—what will Raisman’s storyline be for DWTS?

It may, at least in part, be Jewish. Her bio, after listing her gymnastics accomplishments, reads:

The eldest of four kids in her family, Raisman comes from a Jewish background and famously performed her gold medal-winning floor exercise to the traditional Jewish wedding song, “Hava Nagila,” for which she earned worldwide recognition in the Jewish community.

I have no idea who wrote this—Raisman, her mother, or some ABC intern—but I was taken aback to see one really long sentence (or short paragraph) devoted to her Jewishness. Is this a call to the Jewish community to support her bid to win the mirror ball trophy? And if we Jews are expected to vote for her, we need to know—where does she stand on Israel? AIPAC is asking.

Will the producers milk the Jewish angle and find some jazzed up version of “Hava Nagila” for Raisman to do the quickstep to? It wouldn’t be entirely out of line, given both DWTS and the song’s own reputation for cheesiness. I’m both hoping for and dreading this sort of pandering. (But it would work. It would so work.)

For Raisman’s sake, I hope that this is just an anecdote in her bio and nothing more, a nod to this summer’s frenzied response to her Jewishness, music selection, and gold medals. I wouldn’t want to see her try to incorporate “Hatikvah” or the score from Schindler’s List in her performances.

Her bigger concern, after all, is not the approval of the Jewish community, but of the “gymternet,” which has long maligned (and that’s putting it euphemistically) her for her artistic abilities, something she is aware of. “People would always complain that I wasn’t expressive enough in my floor routine and I want to show people that I can do that,” she told reporters this weekend.

Now’s your chance.

(Art by Margarita Korol)

Previous columns: Time Machines Don’t Work for Women
A Jewish Childhood After Divorce

The post The BallaBuster: Aly Raisman’s New ‘Dancing With the Stars’ Moves appeared first on Jewcy.

In a well-known portion of his standup act, comedian Louis C.K. talks about how it’s better to be a white male. Not that whites are better, mind you, but that it’s clearly better to be white. To prove his point, he uses the example of time travel and how only white men can go backwards in time. And since I’m in no way funnier than he is, I’m just going to quote him directly:

Here’s how great it is to be white. I can get into a time machine and go to any time and it would be fucking awesome when I get there. That is exclusively a white privilege. Black people can’t fuck with time machines. A black guy in a time machine is like, ‘Hey anything before 1980, no thank you, I don’t want to go.’ But I can go to any time. The year two? I don’t even know what was happening then. But I know that when I get there, ‘Welcome, we have a table right here for you sir.’

This bit came to mind when I was considering data published in The Unfinished Revolution, Kathleen Gerson’s 2010 book about modern attitudes toward relationships, work, and family. Encouragingly, 80 percent of young women and 70 percent of young men said that ideally, they would favor an egalitarian arrangement where both partners have high paying careers and share equally in child rearing responsibilities.

But since we don’t live in an “ideal” world, Gerson asked her respondents about how they would handle a situation where this 50/50 split isn’t possible.

When confronted with the impossibility of attaining equality in their relationships and professional lives, the men opt to jump into their time machines and go back to the past—preferring that their female partners deprioritize their jobs and tend to hearth and home while they continue on their career paths and become the primary breadwinners for their families.

Women, on the hand, opted to keep their jobs and hypothetical children—and ditch their men. They wouldn’t give up their careers and become housewives. Because women, unlike men, can’t mess with time travel. For most women with modern sensibilities, life in the 1950s is not a palatable choice.

Obviously, this is a pretty extreme example. There are many couples who may not have perfectly equitable partnerships—working women still do a disproportionate amount of the childcare and housework compared to their male counterparts—but have made it work while keeping their jobs and being supportive of each other’s goals.

Yet this data reminded me of another place where gendered time travel is possible—the Orthodox community. It’s a world where the old gender roles are still alive and kicking. Orthodox women may have careers, demanding ones at that, but once they step into the synagogue, that ritual space with its male-only clergy and clearly demarcated sections and roles for women, they may as well have traveled backwards in time.

I can’t take full credit for the Orthodox time-traveling analogy, sadly. I recently bumped into a guy I met on J-Date several years ago (he was testing the Orthodox waters just as I was getting out of them, and it never went beyond one date) who directed me to the Louis C.K. clip in the context of our discussions of Orthodoxy. We had stayed in touch and during one conversation a while back I remember expressing my disapproval of his choices. How, I asked, after being raised secularly, could he choose to enter a world where he, as a man, possessed certain privileges that were the result of biology, not merit?

This, I later realized, was wholly unfair. He wasn’t trying to oppress women or deny them their rights or take more than his fair share. He was merely searching for the best spiritual course for himself. He didn’t create the system even if he benefited from it—the same way that I, as a white woman with well-educated parents, wasn’t turning away advantages or opportunities that came my way as a result of my race and educational class.

I also realize that part of my frustration was due to my own confusion. At the time, I felt a sentimental connection to Orthodoxy and was trying to maintain some semblance of it while also feeling that it was wholly incompatible with my feminist beliefs. The fact that he could slip easily (or at least I thought) into the world I was born and raised in really bugged me.

It’s the same sort of annoyance I feel when anyone expresses nostalgia for a so-called halcyon past, as Aaron Sorkin did before the premiere of The Newsroom, when he waxed poetic about journalism in the age of Walter Cronkite and Edward R. Murrow—a world that excluded women and minorities. Nostalgia, I learned in one college class, entails a whole lotta forgetting.

And time travel. As Louis C.K. pointed out at the end of the bit, white men can travel in only one direction—backwards. “I don’t want to go to the future and find out what happens to white people,” he says. “We’re gonna pay for this shit.”

I certainly don’t wish to see any group punished. But if I were to time travel—future only—I hope to see a little less privilege and a little more fairness for everyone.

(Note: this whole essay about time travel was written without any recollection of Back To The Future, so my apologies if I got any of the science wrong.)

Previously: A Jewish Childhood After Divorce
Don’t Call Me a Rebel
The Problem With Modesty Blogging

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: Time Machines Don’t Work for Women appeared first on Jewcy.

An editor once told me that divorce “fractures the narrative of childhood,” a phrase which has stuck with me ever since. But does growing up in a broken family or single parent household similarly impact the way a person experiences religion?

A recent study suggests that it does. Researchers studying Christian children found that a child of divorce is less likely to be religiously engaged than a kid who hails from a two-parent household. “Youth who experience parental divorce,” the researchers conclude, “report lower religious involvement and identity than their peers from intact families.”

Over at Slate, Amanda Marcotte took issue with the study—not with the findings, however, but with how the researchers interpreted their results. “I find it simultaneously amusing and disturbing how assured the researchers are that people like myself—I’m both a ‘child of divorce’ and an outright atheist—are a problem to be fixed,” she writes.

Like Marcotte, I am a child of divorce who experienced marked declines in religiosity as I grew older. And though I’m not an atheist, I don’t take kindly to the presumptions of the researchers that the possible fallout from a divorce—decreased religious engagement—is necessarily cause for alarm. (I am far more concerned with other measures of psychological well-being post-divorce.)

Perhaps I’m particularly sensitive to this sort of assumption because when I was growing up, I consistently heard it repeated by teachers who faulted divorce for all sorts of things—general misbehavior, rebellion (you know how I feel about that word), and of course, religious transgression.

‘I’m sitting right here,’ I’d want to shout as yet another teacher, seemingly oblivious to the diversity of her students, described my family situation as though it was the root of all evil.

Unlike the families described in the study who became less likely to attend religious services after a divorce, my family’s religious practice wasn’t drastically altered after my parents’ split. My mother, my sole caregiver, remained steadfastly Orthodox. We attended synagogue just as much as we had before, which is to say every week. My sister and I continued going to yeshiva. We still kept kosher.

If the researchers had been studying my family’s religious engagement after the divorce, they probably would’ve found nothing to support their conclusions. Yet upon closer examination, they may have been able to detect small fissures in our observance, minor shifts that might have predicted my future choices.

At our Shabbat table, ritual functions my father had previously performed now trickled down to us, three females. Though we blessed the wine and challah in his stead, we did so with the full awareness that we weren’t observing in an optimal fashion, which made us feel uncomfortable.

At school, we had learned that ideally a man should say these blessings, and in my friends’ homes, that was exactly what happened. When these same friends came to our house for lunch, I felt embarrassed as my mom stumbled over the liturgy. They, too, looked uncomfortable.

I noticed other things. I saw how as a single woman, my mother had no counterpart on the other side of the mechitzah, which meant she had no true say in synagogue affairs, and no one to say kaddish for her on behalf of my maternal grandmother.

My mother would complain about this—not angrily or in a way that suggested she thought things should be different. While she identified as a feminist (and was the reason I was pro-choice before I knew what that meant), her feminism was the type that stopped at Orthodox Judaism’s door. She never expressed a real desire to see her status and role changed.

Through my parents divorce, I was getting a glimpse of how truly unequal women were in the observant community. My friends, whose childhood narrative hadn’t been fractured as mine had, weren’t noticing these inequities.

It was as though my family’s “untraditional” structure conferred on me a sort of superpower (honed by many trips to the therapist), allowing me to notice what was wrong with the community. I felt like the kid in The Sixth Sense, who can see dead people when no one else around him can. (Spoiler alert: Bruce Willis is dead in that movie.)

I think of divorce as a storm that not only causes its own damage but also reveals other problems lurking beneath the surface. It’s sort of like what happened in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy (and before that, Katrina), when the existing poverty of the hardest hit, most underserved areas is exposed. The storms didn’t cause poverty; they simply highlighted the problem. In Judaism, divorce definitely isn’t the cause of gender inequality—but in my experience, it made its existence all the more glaring.

Divorce, of course, isn’t viewed as some naturally occurring calamity. It’s viewed as a choice—a bad one. Traditional Judaism, like other organized religions, is arrayed around the family unit. The researchers acknowledged this issue, stating, “Many congregations hold traditional family models as the normative ideal and explicitly or implicitly discourage divorce.” Undoubtedly, this will make some kids feel like outsiders.

Given the centrality of the two-parent family in religion, divorce fractures more than just the narrative of childhood. It disrupts religious ideals, too. But the religious response to divorce shouldn’t be to uphold those ideals at the expense of those who fall short. Take it from someone who knows: that approach might do more harm than good.

Previously: Don’t Call Me a Rebel
The Problem With Modesty Blogging

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: A Jewish Childhood After Divorce appeared first on Jewcy.

I’m about to turn 30—next week, in fact—and though I’ve been reassured by numerous friends who have already cleared this hurdle that nothing bad happens once you leave your twenties (and that in many cases, things actually get better), I’m still apprehensive. I’m not exactly enthused about getting older, perhaps because I’m not quite where I thought I would be at this age, both professionally and personally. And since much of my life revolves around fairly youthful passions like break dancing and gymnastics, I worry these pursuits might become incongruous with my new maturity. And let’s face it—while 30 doesn’t make you old, it makes you un-young. If you haven’t been already been called “precocious,” you probably never will, unless you somehow manage to make it on one of the New Yorker’s “best of” lists. (They consider anyone under 40 to still be young.)

But I do see potential upsides to turning 30, chief among them that I can no longer plausibly be a called “rebel.” I’m simply too old for that ish.

Throughout my twenties, as I moved away from Orthodox Judaism, I was branded a “rebel,” a label I grudgingly accepted even though it never really fit. New acquaintances, upon discovering my religious upbringing, would ask, “When did you rebel?” I’d grimace slightly at the label’s flexibility, this time appearing in verb form. My interrogator was imagining a more youthful version of me, cavorting with guys as I ate cheeseburgers on the Sabbath or went out dancing on Yom Kippur or something similarly extreme and sacrilegious.

But it wasn’t that way at all. It was gradual, methodical, and carefully thought out— the work of many years, not a wild summer. And nothing I did was extreme or particularly “in your face” or purposely contrarian. I wasn’t trying to get a rise out of anyone. (I was actually quite the rule-follower in high school.) Deciding to wear jeans or eating a salad with cheese or even getting a tattoo is all fairly banal stuff. It’s certainly not the stuff of movies or even reality television (unless it’s a show as boring as The Hills). In short, I was no James Dean.

Sisterhood contributor Chanel Dubofsky articulated my discomfort with the term “rebel in a piece for Role/Reboot where she examined the life lessons imparted to her by her mother and grandmother that she felt she had to undo. “There’s an incongruity, though, between the way we’re socialized to think about rebellion (something that a spoiled child does) and what unlearning the stuff we’re programmed to believe really looks like,” she wrote.

Unlearning what I had been programmed to believe has been the project of my teens and most of my twenties. It began in high school by simply challenging rabbis on subjects of Jewish import, especially as they pertained to the role of women. But even as I went back and forth with my teachers, I never really thought about acting on any of it. I mostly considered it an intellectual contest, one I wished to win because I’m gratuitously competitive. I loved it when I backed my teachers up against the wall with a powerful line of questioning, forcing them to resort to non-answers like citing a rabbinic scion, who was infallible by virtue of being a generation or two closer to the revelation at Sinai or something like that.

Of course, it didn’t end in debate—it never does. After spending years laying the intellectual groundwork for “rebellion” by studying source texts about modesty and women, I began to act on my knowledge. I started wearing pants once I realized that the halachic impediments to doing so were minimal at best. I did other things for less principled reasons (or at least without much textual support). At this rate, it took years to reach full-fledged nonobservance. I was the tortoise of going off the derech.

That’s why I bristle at being called a rebel, compared to bored kids thoughtlessly acting out. As Dubofsky observed, we have a tendency to view rebellion as juvenile, as something a child does to irk her parents or get a reaction from authority figures. And in the Orthodox community, this is definitely how the term is understood. “Rebellious” is used to describe any sort of adolescent misbehavior, especially as it pertains to violations of halacha (and almost always refers to breaches of modesty between the genders). But it’s also affixed to anyone who makes serious intellectual inquiries about Jewish law and worldview and questions the status quo. Nechamya Weberman’s victim was sent to him, in part, because she was considered rebellious for raising some serious theological questions in class.

The linking of these two forms of rebellion, whether by design or by accident, serves to delegitimize the more thoughtful version. (And, by the way, I have no problem with the “rebel without a cause” iteration. It’s probably an important developmental stage that I completely skipped.) A kid acting out is considered troublesome because he might entice others to the dark side, but his behavior is not viewed as a criticism of the status quo. “He’s just having fun,” or “He’s being influenced by the internet.” That rebel’s actions don’t constitute a major threat to the traditional worldview. But someone expressing cogent criticisms of the system is far more worrisome. Calling these people “rebellious,” with all the implied connotations of juvenile frivolity, is an attempt to neutralize their voices.

With or without a cause, I’m no longer a rebel. At 30, I just am. There are no more jeans to buy or colors to dye my hair or subways to take on Shabbos. I have done and will continue to do all of these things and more. But these days they’re simply part of how I live my life—not some means of being contrarian and sticking it to anyone else, be they family members or religious authorities.

And they never really were in the first place. Because I never was a rebel.

Previously: The Problem With Modesty Blogging
Olympic Gymnast Gabby Douglas’ Jewish Past

(Art by Margarita Korol)

The post The BallaBuster: Don’t Call Me a Rebel appeared first on Jewcy.

The BallaBuster is Dvora Meyers‘ biweekly column about all things Semitic and womany.

Earlier this month, Saige Hatch began a modesty crusade at her high school in Southern California. In response to Hatch’s newly-created modesty club, the city of South Pasadena set aside an entire week to encourage their young girls to resist pressure from popular culture and dress with “dignity.” While some of Hatch’s arguments are perfectly reasonable—the media does commodify women’s bodies in order to sell products—the movement’s agenda is decidedly not progressive. Unless, of course, it’s considered forward thinking to tie a woman’s dignity to her sartorial choices.

More problematic, however, than this 15-year-old’s well-intentioned attempt to get her classmates to cover up is the recent proliferation of blog posts written by adult women proudly defending their choice to show less skin as a feminist, progressive act—while also subtly putting down women who choose to show some cleavage and a little leg. In short, modesty apologia.

These types of essays and blog posts seemed fairly innocuous at first. A woman—sometimes Orthodox and sometimes not—testifies about how covering up makes her feel good about herself. Seems pretty positive, right?

But the problem with these essays is that the authors frequently don’t restrict themselves to their own subjective experiences. Rather, the writers pass judgment on how other women dress by insisting that covering up isn’t just optimal for her, as an individual, but also helps her earn respect. And here I thought people should judge me based on my ideas, actions, or even my taste in television shows.

Last month on XOJane, Chaya (who made waves a few months earlier with a blog post insisting that Hasidic women were more empowered and liberated than they’re portrayed to be) wrote a defense of modest dress that typifies a lot of the modesty apologia I find so troubling. In describing how modest dress made her feel better about her size, Chaya included this little gem: “Not only did I feel better about myself by keeping my body for me, but I also felt more beautiful.”

I am super happy that Chaya (and the other women she quotes) have found a mode of dress that makes them feel beautiful and confident. What I take issue with, however, is how she connects her decision to cover up with the ownership of her body. Naked or clothed, your body always belongs to you and never to anyone else. Someone else seeing your breasts doesn’t transfer ownership of them to that person.

Anyone who has been educated in the Orthodox community—at practically every level—knows that the rules of tznius, or modesty, are not bound up in liberation, no matter what sort of modern-day apologetics are used to explain the strictures, but in patriarchal control. Women are taught to cover up what rabbis, over generations, have deemed sexually titillating.

We’re told to think of the men on the street and how they perceive us, especially our Jewish brothers who have been commanded to think only about Torah 24/7. We’re taught that men cannot fully control their thoughts when they see us women, especially if we are immodestly dressed, and therefore the burden falls to us to manage our appearance and minimize their temptation.

During one of our innumerable lessons about feminine modesty, a high school classmate challenged the teacher, asking her why we have to modify our behavior simply because men cannot control their own thoughts and actions.

“You don’t know how hard that is for the boys. When they see a girl, all they can think about is sex,” the female teacher explained. To further illustrate her point, our teacher quoted Leviticus: In front of a blind person, do not place a stumbling block.

In this setup, males are blind and females are obstacles (literally, objects). A blind person can’t be held responsible for tripping over an obstacle, right? And if the object doesn’t want to become a stumbling block, it better get the hell out of dodge by not walking alone at night dressed like a slut.

My teacher certainly wasn’t condoning sexual violence, but in the way she explained the need for feminine modesty she was reaffirming and perpetuating the idea that men cannot be fully accountable when it comes to their behavior around women.

Equally troubling, Chaya’s essay contains dubious claims about how women’s dress illustrates their sense of self-worth. She quotes one woman who says this:

When a person is comfortable with her sexuality, she can much more easily dress modestly. When people have complexes about it, and are trying to prove themselves, and are not comfortable in their own skin, that’s when they have a problem covering up.

If you’ve ever been a teenage girl who felt fat and hid under baggy clothes, you might be tempted to call bullshit on this assertion. My most modestly-clothed years were also the years I was the most insecure about my body. I was wearing long skirts at the time, but I often wished for even more layers of sartorial camouflage.

I don’t fault tzniut rules for how I felt about my appearance. There were many forces at work, including my age. At my body hate nadir, I was in my teens, a particularly trying time for any girl, Orthodox or otherwise. During those years, self-consciousness is the rule, not the exception.

But as I’ve gotten older and more comfortable with my body and sexuality, I’ve dressed less modestly, not more. I especially favor backless shirts because they show off my muscular back—something I’ve worked hard for as a gymnast—and the scar from spinal surgery that I consider particularly badass. Our bodies are the keepers of our personal narratives and that scar, which runs from just above my bra line down to the base of my spine, is a visceral reminder of a major medical crisis and my ability to bounce back from it.

Of course, that isn’t what I’m thinking every time I don a backless top—sometimes I just think it looks hot. And that’s not a bad thing. It’s okay if a guy looks at me and finds me sexually attractive. I’m a full-fledged human being and my sexuality is a part of all that human goodness. God knows, I spend a good chunk of my subway commute scanning the car for hot guys to glance at surreptitiously while reading or listening to music. No one suggests men modify their dress or appearance to ward off the libidinous thoughts of women. If that were true, all guys would immediately grow soul patches.

Unlike the woman quoted in Chaya’s essay, who sees a woman dressed immodestly and instantly makes all sorts of assumptions her self-esteem, when I see a woman who is covered up, I don’t assume that she’s prudish or oppressed. Liberation isn’t a mode of dress. I feel liberated when I have an intense intellectual debate with a worthy opponent. I feel liberated when I dance, whether it’s in front of others or by myself. And I always feel fantastic when I dance in drop crotch leopard-print pants because they are awesome. I hope she feels as good in her clothing as I do in those ridiculous pants.

To a certain extent, I sympathize with the writers of modesty apologia. They, too, are bombarded by messages from advertisers about what constitutes feminine beauty. They know their way of dress does not conform to mainstream notions of sexual appeal. These blog posts are often their way of saying, “Guess what? I’m beautiful and look good, too!”

I heartily agree with that sentiment. You—in the long sleeves and skirts and hats and scarves—are beautiful and deserve to feel good about yourselves. But you are not more dignified or more deserving of respect than the women whose hemlines are higher or whose necklines plunge deeper. Respect and dignity should always be determined by our actions and the content of our character, not the contents of our closet.

Previously: Olympic Gymnast Gabby Douglas’ Jewish Past
Feeling Out My Post-Shomer Negiah World

The post The BallaBuster: The Problem With Modesty Blogging appeared first on Jewcy.