The new Hulu show The Handmaid’s Tale – based on the novel of the same name by Margaret Atwood – is, like other dystopian stories, a warning. It paints a picture of a possible future society in which women are fired from their jobs, their money is taken by the government, and they’re forced into servitude to men. Their oppression is perpetuated by strict rules like dress codes and curfews. At first glance, anyone could call this future ridiculous and impossible. But the point of portraying these hypothetical societies is to to take a critical look at our own: our culture in anyway similar to The Handmaid’s Tale, in which we oppress women?

The answer is, obviously, yes. Women are policed all the time, from their reproductive choices to their clothing choices. And a recent example in the New York ultra-Orthodox community looks like a step down the road towards the dystopic nation of Gilead.

Recently, an all-girls Haredi high school called Bnos Menachem in Crown Heights issued a dress code. It’s not unusual for a school to require this of their students, but this time, it wasn’t for their students. It was for the moms of their students.

The school had an already-established dress code for parents, which included covering the elbows and collarbones, covering their feet, and wearing a sheitel. (The policy also requires parents to agree to a “TV free home policy,” and to monitor and restrict videos and Internet usage.) Apparently, the women must have been taking extreme advantage of the leeway in this policy, because Bnos Menachem decided to step it up a notch – or twelve.

The school sent home a new policy with a letter to the moms (for both the mothers and fathers to sign) with requirements like, “shaital length should not exceed the shoulder blades,” (the underlining meaning they’re serious,) and, “nail polish should be conservative/soft colors.” Because of course, the louder nail polish colors might incite women to have a voice and speak out against bullshit.

Unfortunately for Bnos Menachem, that didn’t work. Women of the community began sharing their opinions about the new restrictions. Some were infuriated, but some were definitely less triggered. Of course, men, as they are wont to do, weighed in on the woman’s issue as well. Crownheights.info, a news website for Haredi Jews, became the main forum for people to write in and give their two cents.

One woman who opposed the new policy from within the community was Chaya Sara Waldman. She asked how “a man, especially a frum man and a chossid – could ever imagine it appropriate to speak to a woman about her body?” (Yaaas, Chaya Sara!) She argued that other issues are more pressing of the community’s attention than whether a woman’s skirt is cotton or denim:

“To me, more appalling than denim, is the eight-year-old boy who has been bullied since he was four. More obscene than a three-year-old girl’s bare calf, is the shameless conspicuous consumptionism [sic] of a bar mitzvah I recently attended… More dreadful than red nail polish, is the silent serpent of poverty that poisons the happiness of young families who can barely make ends meet… More alarming than a tight skirt is the rampant consumption of alcohol by our children in yeshivos.”

One man who couldn’t resist weighing in was Rabbi Avrohom Brashevitzky. Rather than commenting on whether he agreed with the policy, he chose to address the people who were angered by it. He argued that parents have a choice in which school they send their children to, writing, “you don’t like the school – you don’t send your child there.” He also provided a metaphor of following an airline’s instructions while flying to following the policies of a school.

“Imagine buying an airline ticket and demanding consideration from the airline for your own choices, such as not using the seat belt or to remain standing in the aisles for entire duration of the flight. If you CHOOSE to fly – you have to follow the rules! No one is forcing anyone to travel; certainly not with a particular airline.”

Regardless of what Rabbis or other women think, it’s important to listen to the people this directly affects–the mothers of Bnos Menachem. One wrote an op-ed anonymously. She agreed with Rabbi Brashevitzky – she thinks that the school has a right to set their standards. However, she also believes that woman should be able to look fashionable. “I want my daughter to feel pretty and confident and not to be embarrassed of her mother who looks like a ‘nerd,’” she wrote. While the school argued that the dress code for mothers will allow them to be role models for their daughters, this mom argued that it’s in being “beautiful and Tznius” that she’ll encourage her daughter to have similar values.

You could say that this woman, who believes in “classy, light colors only” for her nail polish and chose to speak anonymously, shows internalized sexism. But that wouldn’t be a feminist standpoint. She has a choice, and can choose a life of religiosity and modesty. But I still wonder if she’s just drinking the kool-aid.

At least the girls of Bnos Menachem wear uniforms. I hope they’ll be able to put of the stress of picking out the right skirt – and deciding whether dress codes are empowering or oppressive – for at least a little longer.

Photo from a fascinating piece from Lehraus, about the oft-used facetious argument that strict modesty rules are the way it’s always been, when instead there’s been revisionism to hide a more liberal past. The above photo was photoshopped to give sleeves to Bais Yaakov girls in the 1940s.

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“Shanti is the most important thing,” the shopkeeper told me as we sipped chai in his cramped, hole-in-the-wall trinket shop, which I had wandered into by chance.

There was nothing unique about Rajnish’s shop, which was located in a narrow alleyway in a touristy area near Jaipur’s Amer Fort. All of the vendors were selling the same items: god statues, bangles, incense, Aladdin pants, knit bags, and every other knickknack you could imagine getting in India. I don’t know what drew me into Rajnish’s narrow shop. And yet, months later, I can’t imagine having not met him.

I entered his shop to browse—nothing more. He immediately welcomed me like a long-lost friend. I reminded him of his daughter, he said, as he pulled up a stool beside his in the rear of the store and went about pouring me some chai. I insisted that I was just browsing, and that I didn’t need the chai. He wouldn’t hear of it. I sat between him and his Ganesh shrine on the wall.

My immediate thought upon sitting beside the golden idol of Ganesh, the Hindu God of luck, was, This is totally idolatry. But I’m not worshipping it. So there’s that. What would my parents think, I wondered, if they could see me? Upon telling them about my plan to travel to India, my father, a deeply religious man, deemed the entire subcontinent impure: “makom avoda zara,” he called it. A place of idolatry. He was concerned for my soul. Given how far my Jewish identity has drifted from the Orthodox one with which he raised me, it wasn’t an outlandish source of anxiety.

When I was comfortable sitting on the stool—or as comfortable as you can be on a stool—Rajnish immediately started showing me his merchandise. I despaired, fearing another scam. My first few hours in India had been an exhausting trek around Delhi in a taxi operated by a tout intent on taking me anywhere other than the hotel where I’d reserved a room—the experience made all the more frustrating because I knew exactly what was happening, I just couldn’t do anything to set him on the correct course. Even a call to Chabad had been intercepted by one of his co-conspirators.

So when Rajnish started displaying his wares—“historic” brass keys, “hand made” notebooks, and “one-of-a-kind” hookahs—I was skeptical. But I listened politely as he pulled out the items. Then he showed me a pipe. “This one,” he said gesturing towards the engraved, pink piece of marble depicting the Hindu symbol for Om Shanti, “is for Shanti. You know Shanti?” he asked.

I indicated that I was not familiar with it.

He placed his palm on his forehead and gasped. “Shanti is the most important thing,” he said.

“But what is Shanti?” I asked.

He placed his hand on his heart. “Shanti is this,” he said.

I was naturally confused, and he could tell.

“Shanti is peace,” he said. “People work, people are stressed, but the most important thing is to be happy and enjoy.”

I laughed. That was easier said than done.

Rajnish wanted to help me find Shanti. “Shanti is good energy. Shanti is the center,” he said, “Shanti is knowing the earth. Shanti is the most important.”

We proceeded to spend the next three hours in his shop discussing Shanti and the true meaning of inner peace. “How do I find Shanti?” I asked, as if Shanti was a missing wallet I could find at the lost and found. Shanti comes when you’ve found a balance and inner calm, Rajnish explained, and that only comes from knowledge and understanding. When I asked of what, he simply pointed up.

I was starting to understand Shanti. But, since this was a religious concept, and since I was struggling with religion in general, I had a long way to go before fully internalizing it.

***

Over the last year, Judaism and I have had some highs and lows.

I was raised in an Orthodox Jewish community in South Florida filled with charitable, warm, family-oriented people who value religion. They also find innovation downright suspicious, and regard ambition in a woman as a flaw. Nevertheless, to my parents’ begrudging credit, I was always more of a freethinker. My parents are pillars in our community, but their backgrounds are unusual. My mother was one of the first female traders on Wall Street in the early 1980s, and my father is a Gibraltarian Sephardi. Despite their relative diversity, they deeply wanted me to fit into their community. I was expected to dress according to standards of modesty, and to marry a good boy from a nice Jewish family in my early twenties.

But when my ex-fiancé abruptly ended our engagement last year, my relationship to Judaism and Orthodoxy changed. I noticed how some people in my community started to treat me differently, and for the first time I started to really feel the connections between power and gender and status—and I didn’t like what I saw.

It became painful to be in a room with people who only saw me for my relationship status; to be in a room where girls were either talking about their own marriage prospects, or gossiping about others’.

Then I took a religion reporting class at Columbia Journalism School, where I was exposed to a whirlwind of new ideas, and found myself reevaluating my relationship to organized religion.

From my community, I had learned that Judaism was social and dogmatic, not spiritual. The way I related to religion had no bearing on how I related to God. When I struggled with tzniut, the Jewish laws of modesty, it was because I wanted to fit in with my friends and make my parents proud, not because I actually believed that God cared about the length of my sleeves.

My newfound disenchantment with people who, to me, represented Modern Orthodoxy, translated to a disenchantment with other areas of my religious practice—and dress was the most immediately apparent. Wearing the uniform of a community that I felt out of step with socially and culturally was a little like walking around in a Che Guevera t-shirt: I believed in some of the philosophies, but not how they were executed. I felt like a fraud.

My dissatisfaction with communal practice and norms led me to return to Jewish texts. I had hoped to find solace in the narratives and discourses that I had once spent hours hours debating. But instead of reconnecting with religious doctrines, I felt confused. How could today’s rabbis turn to texts that display a fundamental misunderstanding of science when debating the halakhic ramifications of women’s issues?

My faith, on the other hand, came from my home, and from seeing how my parents lived and treated others. That’s why no matter what happened—no matter how angry I was with God—I always believed there was a God. Eventually, that’s what I was left with: A belief in God (if not a strong connection to him), and an underlying passion for Judaism. But what was I to do at that point?

I tried to find comfort in my community, in the theology of my upbringing. I guess you could say I succeeded in some respects and failed in others. At some point, I stopped trying altogether. That’s how I wound up in India sipping chai with Rajnish and a Hindu deity.

As clichéd as it sounds, I needed to find myself. After the year I had—with personal struggles and professional wandering—I knew that I needed to go to a place that was completely foreign to me, but charged with spirituality. I hoped that the shock of the unfamiliar would bring me back to some sort of connection to God.

***

I left northern India, where I met Rajnish, to travel south. (No Floridian would opt to spend time in a cold climate when 80-degree weather is just a train ride away.) As I travelled, I started to internalize the meaning of Shanti.

Two travelers I encountered—Isaac, a nomadic American backpacker who went to India on a journey of self discovery, and Oriel, an Israeli who was doing his obligatory post-army India stint—helped me to refocus the lens through which I view God.

On a rooftop in Mumbai, Oriel, who was raised in a traditional Modern Orthodox home in Jerusalem, encouraged me not to think of religion as a series of rules. “Think of it as a way to connect to God,” he said. This, for me, was unique. Despite an extensive Jewish education, I never really learned about God. I was taught about religion, text, and laws, but not how to connect to a divine being. So it was interesting to talk to a 22-year-old Israeli with a similar upbringing about God. The fact that there were religious Jews who thought about God as a loving being as opposed to a dogmatic taskmaster was reassuring.

Nomadic Isaac, too, reframed how I envision God. At one point while we hiked along a snaking path on the side of a rocky cliff, he shared his perspective that God may or may not be an omnipotent being, but the concept could also refer to the spark of godliness in every person. Everyone is God. I didn’t realize it at the time, but walking with Isaac and exchanging ideas about God was helping me to find my own inner peace, my Shanti.

Once I started thinking about the Hindu concept of Shanti with my Jewish brain, it started to fall into place for me. In my mind, Shanti sounded a lot like a fusion between the first commandment of knowing God—“anochi Hashem,” I am the Lord your God—and the Jewish concept of tranquility, “shalva.”

In my experience, Shanti is the understanding that you’ll never really understand. I don’t know what is going to happen, I don’t know the root of everything, and I’ll never really know God. But, to me at least, Shanti is being okay with that, being able to make peace with the unknown. To quote Socrates, “I know that I know nothing.” Once I realized that, I was overcome with a sense of tranquility I didn’t even know I had been missing.

***

When I emerged from Rajnish’s shop, the sun had sunk low, and the pink city was glowing. It was beautiful. We took in the view together—a view Rajnish never tires of seeing—and then it was time for me to leave. Rajnish shook my hand vigorously and said he had truly enjoyed speaking to me. It occurred to me that I wanted something, a keepsake to remember what I knew, already, would prove to be a transformative experience.

I looked at Rajnish and said I wanted to buy the pipe. He was shocked—I had made it clear that I didn’t want to shop—but thrilled. I bought the Shanti pipe, not because of what it was (I had no use for a pipe), but for what it represented: the self-confidence and assurance that I had finally reclaimed.

Plus, he gave me a good price.

Previously: Breaking Up is Hard to Do—Especially in the Orthodox World

Rachel Delia Benaim is a freelance religion reporter. Her work has appeared in Tablet Magazine, The Washington Post, The Daily Beast, and The Diplomat, among others. Follow her on Twitter @rdbenaim.

(Image: Amer Fort, 2008. Credit: Robert Cianflone / Getty Images)

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Fortunately my eyesight is pretty good, so I managed to do just that, and can report that Mimu Maxi’s style is original, simple, chic—sort of Urban Outfitters meets Eileen Fisher, with a touch of… Gandhi? I know, it sounds bananas, but it’s great! I would like one of everything, plus the ability to look effortlessly cool in loose, unstructured garments. Thanking you in advance, universe.

The post An Inside Look at Chic, Modest Jewish Fashion Label “Mimu Maxi” appeared first on Jewcy.

In recent years, the co-mingling of the sexes has become a major source of tension on flights to and from Israel. Some very religious men are being seated next to women to whom they are not married or related, which necessitates an extended game of musical chairs before take-off. (Never mind the departure time, modesty trumps timeliness. Always.)

Now Israel’s national airline, EL AL, has pledged its commitment to its passengers spiritual safety in a new in-flight video. Never again, thank God, will a man be forced to sit next to a pesky little woman for several hours at a time. Effective immediately, every aircraft will be equipped with a “male congregation area”—and if a male passenger absolutely must sit next to a woman, he may avail himself of the use of a transparent full body protection vest to keep the lady-cooties at bay. (Added bonus: Ebola protection.) There’s even a shofar for attracting attention in the event of a safety breach. So innovative! (They don’t call Israel the “Start-Up Nation” for nothing, right?)

Read more about this ingenious Israeli solution over at our sister-site, Tablet Magazine.

The In-Flight Safety Video El Al Should Show from Tablet Magazine on Vimeo.

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I own hardly any white clothes, a fact that took me by surprise, once again, last Kol Nidre.

This is equal parts vanity and common sense: white is a color that highlights your shape; it emphasizes largeness and form. And in New York City, where I live, every surface is dusted with low-grade filth.

I owned one pair of white jeans that rode too low and never came out clean, no matter how I washed them. I had one sheer jersey dress, an ill-fitting gift that I couldn’t face throwing away. So come Yom Kippur morning last year I trotted them out, cobbling together an outfit. My giant tallit covered the rest. I looked ridiculous, but that was the price I had to pay for my failure to plan, I told myself. Next year, I promised, I’d get my act together in advance. I made a lot of promises that week.

Draping oneself in humble whites on Yom Kippur has been a traditional Jewish custom for millennia. It’s also the custom of the exuberant, neo-traditional-hippie Jewish community that I gravitated towards in adulthood. While I do not own a kittel (the white burial robe that men traditionally wear on their wedding day and Yom Kippur), I like the gravity of donning a garment with the weight of death; the effacement of self-expression when approaching divine judgment. But the notion of purity—so central to the Yom Kippur prayer service—that’s harder for me to swallow.

Last month, I listened to one of my favorite rabbis singing selichot, the penitential prayers offered before the high holy days. With his studied persuasiveness, in a gravely voice that gets me every time, he offered his annual plea: Do something to prepare yourself for the Days of Awe. Don’t let the holidays creep up on you. Do the spiritual work.

I do not believe that the work he envisioned was online dress shopping, but that is exactly what I did as soon as I got home—until 1AM. I was dismayed to find scores of white dresses at full price after Labor Day. (Are no sartorial traditions sacred anymore?) I recalled my ambivalence while white dress shopping for my wedding, the appalling 600 percent markup on anything a bride might consider wearing. Same symbolism: death, rebirth, purity, humility. They are very expensive symbols.

And there were so many ways to sort and filter the results! White, of course. Not short, maybe long or mid-length? The thought floated through my mind that this was perhaps not the type of work that would best serve my most sincere repentance. But imagining myself embodied on Yom Kippur was weirdly helpful. What would it be like to slip this dress over my head or zipper it up? How would the fabric feel on my skin? I rejected outfits if I didn’t think I could move freely in them, or ones that looked itchy. With this time investment, at least I’d get to skip the nagging guilt of failing to prepare.

Except that I found nothing. I filtered until there was nothing left. Everything was too short, or too cleavage-enhancing, or made of some unearthly polyester. These dresses were not designed for a solemn occasion, for beating one’s chest or praying through tears.

I thought about the time a few years back when I tried to do the Great Aleinu—the full prostration—in high heels and a very reasonable skirt. I remembered being totally distracted by my clothes, and how I had obviously not done the work—the unglamorous, practical work—of making sure that I could pray the way I wanted to. My body’s shelter, inside my community’s shelter, was totally ill-suited for the task.

One Yom Kippur when I had just moved west, I attended a Jewish Renewal service in Oakland. One congregant in particular caught my eye. She was standing up, swaying, arms pointing heavenward, and full-throat singing literally the whole time. I don’t know what she was on, but I wanted some. Her flowing caftan housed her corpulence, and I realized that she was free to really be in her body. It was hers—and God’s—to see. I wondered if that was what it was like to be invisible and also really, truly seen and present.

With no acceptable white dresses online, I went to H&M, and was immediately overstimulated by the ritual thud of dance music. But in the clothing-to-junk cycle of seasonal fashion, there were no more white dresses. I had not prepared early enough. Thumbing through racks, I thought about how nobody seemed interested in selling women clothing for solemn occasions; clothing for simply being present in our bodies—as opposed to being gazed upon by judges, male and female. It seemed so obvious. Obviously nobody wants to sell me that.

When I was a kid, we looked really nice on the High Holidays. This was my mother’s rule, and her mother’s. No runs in stockings. Nothing scuffed or stained or ill-fitting from last year. The clothes weren’t white, but they were pristine and considered in advance. It wasn’t spiritual per se, but it was a big deal and the community custom.

I remember visiting that congregation during college. A teenager was wearing a barely-there fuchsia and black party dress with spaghetti straps. She looked miserable. I preferred to imagine that the misery preceded the dress, a spirited teenage protest. She wasn’t allowed to skip services, but she could wear that dress. Or perhaps she felt miserable because she realized she’d committed an etiquette misstep.

I was not offended by her dress or her body, but I wondered how she felt, if she was conscious of others’ eyes on her, or perhaps blissfully unaware. I wondered if her dress helped her get what she wanted out of that service or that day, if it helped her do her work.

I was never much moved by the soul of that suburban temple. But I did notice that we’d all shown up, even those of us who probably would not return for another year. The room contained a kernel of somber optimism, a desire to hold for a moment the belief that with the work, one can find in oneself a fresh heart. That our days can be renewed. God knows, we can’t do it alone.

Back on the internet, I lowered my standards. I found myself considering my shopping filters and realized that they described some odd form of modesty, a concept I hold with profound suspicion. I think of modesty as a construct, a matrix of community norms—people looking at other people, and women worrying about what other people think we look like. There is so little I can do about this. I can maybe control my own feelings, and I can learn better not to project a bunch of baloney onto other people. But my tools to resist unreasonable standards—the same standards that demand me to wear clothes I can’t do my work in—are limited, because I’m a person. I wanted a modest uniform for this day of extreme humility, not to serve someone else’s needs, but to do my work. It’s not exactly that I wanted to be invisible. Rather, I wanted an outfit in which I felt safe revealing the innermost core of myself, beating my chest, shedding my tears, whatever that looks like.

I filtered the results again, optimistically. Mid-length, sure. White or off-white. Natural fibers or natural-looking. The results that popped up were mostly sheer, with peek-holes, or sundresses that would give me a chill. There was nothing left.

The part of me that wanted to look polished, like my mother would strongly recommend, that part of me was not on good terms with the part of me that would like to not be seen, to just buy the damn kittel already. But I couldn’t look good and be unseen at the same time. Wearing the men’s uniform wouldn’t solve this dilemma. It wouldn’t undo the tensions between seeing and being seen, by community, by God, by myself.

So I just bought a dress and accepted its imperfections. It’s not designed to solve my problems. No dresses are. It’s too big. It’s 80/20 cotton/polyester. It was on sale, but not by much. But it has pockets and falls to a comfortable length above my knee. It’s like a boxy house, though it looked more like a stylish and modern house on the model than it does on me. The fabric is thick and spongy, and I’ve been added to the store’s email list, from which there is apparently no unsubscribe. I’m more terrified than ever about my limited capacity to do this work—the real work under the clothes—but this feels like a durable shelter, a start.

(Image by Vanessa P., via Flickr)

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War, what is it good for? Policing female bodies, apparently.

COLlive.com reports that women in the Chabad enclave of Crown Heights, New York are organizing a tznius (modesty) contest for girls “in the merit of the safety of Israel.”

Beginning July 20, Project EDEN (which stands for “Eat Ice Cream and Defend Eretz Yisroel Now”) will encourage day camp attendees between the ages of 3 and 12 to wear modest clothing that keeps “necklines, elbows, knees and feet covered at all times.” The clothing compliant will then receive cards they can trade in for “great prize incentives,” like ice-cream and raffle entries. Why? Well, the Lubavitcher Rebbe saw a direct correlation between modesty and God’s protection, so… encouraging pre-pubescent girls to cover themselves up in the peak of summer seems like the natural next step towards a ceasefire, no? Because as we all know, there’s a causal relationship between the collarbones of 4-year-old girls and Hamas’ weapons cache.

Meanwhile, female visitors to the rabbinate in Ashdod, Israel, were initially blocked from entering the building’s bomb shelter on modesty grounds. MK Stav Shaffir told The Forward that her staffer observed a sign on the door that read “For men only.” Turns out the women’s shelter “was just a regular room, with windows and plaster walls and no indications of protection from rocket attacks.” SO NOT A SHELTER AT ALL, THEN. Writes Elana Sztokman:

In response to women’s exclusion from the bomb shelter in the Ashdod rabbinate, MK Stav Shaffir filed an urgent complaint with the Religious Affairs Ministry, demanding to put an immediate halt to the segregation. “The idea that women seeking shelter from a rocket barrage are met with a closed door is untenable,” she told Yediot Ahronot. “Discrimination against women is unacceptable under any circumstances, but when this discrimination prevents women from protecting themselves, it’s not only unacceptable but also dangerous.” Apparently the administration of the rabbinic courts was unaware of the exclusion, and responded to Shaffir’s query with embarrassment. “It was a local initiative of an employee acting without formal authority,” they responded. “The rabbinical court views such attempts at gender segregation in a very severe light and will take serious actions against those involved.”

Just keep those elbows covered, ladies.

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The latest band to perform on AOL’s ‘You’ve Got’ series is an act we can get behind. Bulletproof Stockings, a much publicized indie rock band made up of Orthodox Jewish women, played music and explained the band’s philosophy.

“We specifically want to create a space that’s just for women,” band-member Perl Wolf said of concerts, which they perform only for women. The crowd at their filmed performance is made up of mostly modestly-dressed young women who seem grateful for the exciting, lively outlet. It’s all kosher this way, Wolf explains, since Orthodox men are prohibited from hearing the singing of women who aren’t their wives or relatives.

“The general assumption is that we’re cutting out half our audience, which I suppose is true,” Dalia Shusterman added. “But there are only what, 3 billion women in the world? I think we’re good with that.”

Bulletproof Stockings [Reverb Nation]

***

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Over at Vox Tablet, Daniel Estrin reports on one of the more unlikely cities to organize a No Pants Subway Ride this year: Jerusalem. The No Pants Subway Ride, an annual phenomenon that started in New York City in 2002 and now takes place in 60 cities, basically entails a bunch of people getting on the subway at a selected time and date, in various predetermined locations, all wearing no pants—and acting completely normal.

Estrin was naturally curious about how this would going to go over in the Holy City, where visitors have been assaulted for perceived immodesty, and decided to tag along for the ride. “We are a nation craving to have fun,” one participant told him, and for the group of around 30—mostly guys, mostly in their twenties—excitement, not politics, seemed to be the order of the evening. Surprisingly, though, when they dropped trou on the Jerusalem light rail, no one seemed to notice, or care.

Have a listen to Estrin’s podcast, and then check out this hilarious slideshow from the ride:

Want more? Here’s a glimpse of the most recent No Pants Subway Ride in New York City:

Jerusalem of Pale (Slideshow) [The Scroll] Pantsless in Jerusalem [Vox Tablet]

(Photo by Ada Broussard)

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Hanukkah is coming up—or at least it’s the next Jewish holiday on the calendar—and if you’re wondering what to get for the six to 10-year-old girl in your life who has a penchant for laughing and eating inappropriately in public, then look no further. The ultra-Orthodox community in Lakewood, New Jersey, has devised a game that teaches young girls the truly important lessons in life: that their bodies are hyper-sexualized and practically anything they do in public can be construed as inappropriate. At least the antiquated Victorian notions about young girls and women allowed them to be seen, if not heard.

The rules of this game seem to be simple—a scenario is presented on two different cards, one pink and one green, and players need to choose which is the appropriate action for a “Bas Yisroel” (Daughter of Israel, spelled for proper Ashkenazis emphasis).

The cards with the “bad” actions are pink because the game creators couldn’t make them red. (Duh!) This would make them very difficult to read. And as I was taught in camp, red is a slutty color. Wearing it is like waving a big red flag in front of a bull/man and basically asking him to look at/gore you. But they couldn’t choose a color for the “bad” card that was gender-neutral cause girls need to associate their sex with inappropriate actions. Hence, the choice of pink. It’s the favorite color of most girls (and the U.S. women’s gymnastics team).

Now onto to the scenarios. Girls are given a choice between, say, yelling from a school bus when they see their teacher on the street or telling her in school the next day so as not to create a scene. Or laughing out loud so that everyone stares or doing so quietly until someone asks you why you’re turning beet red. (Wait, wouldn’t it be bad for a girl to turn red? Wouldn’t that attract the male eye?) Or eating ice cream on the street instead of indoors. Or dancing as if no one is watching (because you’ve drawn the shade). Or undressing properly since ostensibly God is watching? This game makes God sound like a creeper. Also, the “bad” choice in this situation is undressing as though no one is watching, since you’re alone. The pink option here actually sounds more reasonable and modest.

Since when in Judaism, or life, are there only two choices? How about eating the ice cream with your left hand instead of your right, with a shinui? Why aren’t we searching for loopholes in true halachic fashion?

The scenarios presented on these cards seem fairly ludicrous if you were raised outside of the ultra-Orthodox community or have watched one hour of television in your life. You might even be tempted to think they are barely tethered to ultra-Orthodox reality. But you’d be wrong. Even though I was not raised in Lakewood or anything approaching its fundamentalism and I watched television while doing chumash homework, I have firsthand experience with one of the games’ scenarios. As a 16-year-old working at a very religious sleepaway camp in the Catskills, I used to walk back from the swimming pool in flip flops (Crocs had not yet been inflicted on us), sans socks or tights, but in a long robe that covered my knees and elbows easily. More than once, I was taken aside and told I was being a bad influence on the campers under my charge for not putting my socks back on after a swim. (Did I mention that this was an all-girls camp? The only men around were workers. Rabbis and their sons kept their distance from the pool and lake areas.)

You might be thinking that my defiance of the sock rule was a sign of early rebellion, but it wasn’t. I wasn’t making a statement about modesty and ankles. My concern at the time was my precarious laundry situation. It seemed ludicrous to me to put a clean pair of socks on my damp feet and into flip-flops after a swim because wet socks would gather more dirt as I walked back to my bunk through the forest. I didn’t want to dirty extra pairs of socks unnecessarily.

I tried explaining my concerns to the staff member who took me aside, but she was not sympathetic. This conversation would repeat itself several more times throughout the summer—she’d catch me and tell me that I wasn’t fit to be seen by young impressionable girls while I tried to make her understand that I simply didn’t have enough clean socks

I can’t be certain that my socklessness was the cause, but at the end of the summer when assignments for the following year were handed out, I was left high and dry. I would not be returning to work next summer. (A small confirmation of my suspicions—when I posted the link to these playing cards on my Facebook wall, a camp friend wrote that she had been similarly admonished for not wearing socks to and from the pool and was demoted to shittier jobs over the course of the summer as a result.)

By choosing socklessness (and clean laundry) above ankle modesty and the young hearts and minds in my charge, I suffered real world consequences far graver than losing a game to a friend on a Shabbat afternoon. I lost the $500 dollars I stood to earn the following summer as a camp employee and had no choice but to spend that time doing gymnastics in a leotard and little else.

If the game fails you, allow my experiences to act as a cautionary tale. If you don’t wear socks, you’re nothing more than a hop, jump, and cartwheel from unemployment—and spandex.

Lakewood ‘Modesty’ Game Cards For Young Girls [Failed Messiah]

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I have no idea why the powers-that-be at the Gap and other stores decided that season that covered elbows were “in.” But my friends and I were grateful that, for once, we could shop in the same chain stores as the rest of the country and be part of what, in retrospect, was a really ugly moment in fashion history.

Another such moment is now upon us. As this BuzzFeed article observes, it has never been a better time to be a fashion forward Orthodox Jewish female. Decreed by designers, retailers, and trend-setters—reality TV star Olivia Palermo, stylist Rachel Zoe and the regal Kate Middleton among them—modesty (or tznius, as Ashkenazic Jews are wont to say) is officially back in style.

The necklines are higher and the hemlines longer. The fabrics are less clingy. It is finally possible for an Orthodox (or Mod-Ortho) Jewish girl to walk down the street and not be immediately identified as such, blending in with the rest of the young, hip set.

(I’ve got an internal chip that is like one of those police scanners but instead of picking up on the presence of a cop car, I can distinguish a skirt-wearing Orthodox girl from the general skirt-wearing population. Same goes for sheitels, the wigs that married Orthodox women wear. No matter how expensive they are, I can pick them out from a mile away. I’m like a bomb sniffing dog for wigs.)

Unlike many in the ultra-Orthodox and Hasidic camps, some more mainstream Orthodox folks do wish to be able to slip into the wider society every once in a while. Many go to secular colleges and are avid consumers of pop culture. They live tantalizingly close to the mainstream and though they put religious priorities above all else, they are still greatly affected by Madison Avenue. When congruous with religious law, they want to be part of American culture.

But designers are probably not responding to Orthodox girls’ deep seated desire to blend in. So this begs the question—what exactly is driving this current mainstream fashion trend to cover up?

I like to (wholly and unoriginally) call this the Brooklyn Hipster Effect. Though hipsters are much maligned and the term itself has practically become a punch line, certain fashion sensibilities of the Williamsburg kids have taken root and started to influence threads not found in a thrift store. Their sartorial challenge: I’m going to pilfer the racks of this secondhand shop for other people’s cast offs and layer practically to the point that it seems like I’m wearing my entire wardrobe all at once—and dare you to not find it sexy and alluring. And so far, it’s been working. No need for cleavage and knees here.

But can the influence of Brooklyn hipsters last forever? Odds are, no. Fashion is nothing if not constantly evolving. Some day real soon those aspiring artists will decide that overt is sexy and the plunging necklines and tight fitting clothing will return. And failing that, I’m sure that the spandex-loving 80s trend will reassert itself in, say, 2018. (Just a guess.)

So, frum girls, do as my circle of friends did all those years ago—stock up. Buy those skirts and blouses in every color and texture, because this too shall pass.

Dvora Meyers is a freelance writer based in Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, Slate, Salon, Tablet and several other publications. She is the author of the essay collection Heresy on the High Beam: Confessions of an Unbalanced Jewess and blogs at Unorthodox Gymnastics. You can find Dvora on Twitter here.

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