Editors Note: This is part 2 of our 2 essays on Jewish experience in the post-Inauguration Women’s March. Part 1 can be found here.

In the weeks leading up to the Women’s March on Washington this past Saturday, an online community of Jewish women formed and pooled resources for participating in a demonstration over Shabbat, organizing ride shares to D.C., arranging Friday night meals through friends and local synagogues, and posting updates on Jewish groups and institutions offering services and/or swag in support of the March. On the morning of January 21, 2017, they met outside Sixth & I Historic Synagogue and marched toward the National Mall with fellow Israelites of every age, gender, and affiliation, claiming the pavement of the United States capital like the chasm of the Red Sea out of Egypt toward Independence Avenue, where over the course of the next few hours Michael Moore taught America to memorize the number to call the office of any member of Congress, Cecile Richards pledged to keep Planned Parenthood’s doors open, the Mothers of the Movement rallied the audience in the names of their murdered children, Sophie Cruz led hundreds of thousands of voices chanting “¡Sí se puede!” in unison, Van Jones called for a movement based on love—“that mama-bear love”—and the ground shook with Angelique Kidjo singing Sam Cooke’s “A Change Is Gonna Come.”

“This makes me proud to be a Jew,” my father—who insisted on wearing his own hot pink pussy hat the whole day—said quietly as we set out from the Chinatown Park rendezvous point, beaming at the signs quoting the Talmud, Deuteronomy, Abraham Joshua Heschel, Emma Goldman, Hillel, and other seminal Jewish texts and voices. As Orthodox Jews, my family had rushed to make our own posters Friday afternoon, before Shabbat began, checking the city’s eruv map to make sure we could carry them without violating our traditional observance, and coordinated with friends in advance to find one another at or after the march without our phones. “I haven’t come to Washington to protest since… Vietnam!” my parents’ friend Miriam, who had come on her own from the Bay Area, declared proudly as we neared the Mall, quickly making friends with the Jewish mothers and bubbes flanking our party who echoed her realization.

The skies were grey but the streets were vibrant: like a foal recognizes its mother by her stripes among a zeal of zebras, members of the assembly tracked their marching companions by the specific hue and texture of one another’s pussy hats amid a sea of pink wool, felt, and fleece. Cheers rippled through the crowd in call-and-response; strangers shared snacks from regulation clear plastic backpacks and introduced themselves by asking each other from where they had come. Volunteers handed out stickers and posters from Planned Parenthood, NARAL Pro-Choice America, and Emily’s List, and flash mobs and faith groups burst into song inspired by the movement and its historical moment.

It was a day that inadvertently celebrated the legacy of Jewish women, among others, who emblemized or at least symbolized femme empowerment and activism. The bespectacled visage of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, shlita, floated among a cluster of the faces of great women painted on large cardboard cutouts and held aloft by a group who happily chirped, “This is what happens when women puts their heads together!” when asked about the project. Another group claimed a street corner with a large banner quoting Emma Lazarus: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.” Everywhere you looked, there were enough A Woman’s Place Is in the Resistance posters to summon the Second Coming of Carrie Fisher.

Modern Jewish heroes were well represented on the stage, as well. Senator Debbie Wasserman-Schultz was a vision in pink—two different shades of it, in fact—standing by her colleagues Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth, and Kirsten Gillibrand as they each took the mic to define what “women’s issues” are. IKAR founder and senior rabbi Sharon Brous wished the crowd a Shabbat Shalom at the end of an impassioned speech delivered with Linda Sarsour’s white hijab in view over her shoulder throughout:

Sometimes it happens—maybe once in a generation—that a spirit of resistance is awakened at the intersection of love, faith, and holy outrage. And in those moments, we are reminded what we’re fighting for, what this country was built for, what our armed forces are willing to die for, what our flag flies for, and that is liberty and justice, for all. This is one of those moments.

And let us not forget Our Lady, Gloria Steinem smiling benevolently from her seat upon the stage, thanking the audience “for understanding that sometimes we must put our bodies where our beliefs are,” and commanding, “Make sure you introduce yourselves to each other, and decide what we’re going to do tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.”

But most of the crowd only witnessed these appearances later, from or on their way home, streaming the footage on laptops and smartphones long after the events had concluded. About five times the number of people expected by the Women’s March organizers crammed into streets and spaces parallel and perpendicular to the stage; visibility to even the jumbotrons was limited, and the sound was inadequately amplified to reach the ears of over half a million listeners. So great was the turnout that the march itself was all but disbanded, the planned route eschewed for the spontaneous directive to “go North,” toward Pennsylvania Avenue, nearly an hour after the scheduled departure—and the final speakers still had yet to take the stage.

Rivulets of the assembly headed for the Mall in hand-holding human chains, gathering force until the current turned with them, leaving islands of die-hards standing their ground to watch Angela Davis’s projection and hear the echoes of her voice bounce off the National Museum of the American Indian. An African American family squeezing past a rooted cluster of Jews stopped to look back, bringing me—an Orthodox Ashkenazi 20-something sporting a sweatshirt reading THE FUTURE IS FEMALE and a vivid pink pussy hat bedecked with a wreath of flowers—face-to-face with a birdlike grandmother held at either elbow by her offspring as they waited to continue passing.

“I like your hat,” the black woman grinned shyly. “I’ve been looking at it. It makes me smile.”

“It’s a day for smiling!” I answered, thanking my tiny stranger for the compliment.

“It sure is,” the grandmother’s face crinkled into a full smile as she looked at the crowd around us. “It sure is.”

Nat Bernstein is the contributing editor at Jewish Book Council, managing the organization’s digital content, media, and special projects. Nat is a 2011 Ingenuity Award recipient and an F’07 graduate of Hampshire College with a Division II in pedagogical content knowledge for English education and a Division III on the representation of modern genocide in American culture and education.  

Photo by Dan Rosen

The post Pussy Hats Galore: A Dispatch from the Women’s March on Washington appeared first on Jewcy.

As I traveled from Brooklyn to downtown Philadelphia earlier this month, I didn’t quite know what I was getting myself into. Here I was, an Orthodox girl from a staunchly Chabad family, on my way to the Muslim-Jewish Women’s Leadership Conference, the inaugural event of a growing organization, the Sisterhood of Salaam Shalom (SOSS). It would be the first conference of its kind in the Unites States specifically for women, and also my very first involvement with an interfaith program.

Growing up in a strictly observant community in Australia, interfaith work was mostly shunned and viewed as somewhat dangerous, but also pointless. My home was essentially anti-Zionist in ideology, yet vigorously supportive of Israel in practice. I attended a decidedly Zionist, right-wing school. This all left me a little confused as to my own political proclivities—and living and studying in Israel as an adult only served to further confuse me. Right-wing, with a touch of disillusionment? Left-wing, with a lot more heart and less apologetics?

But while my love for Israel has always been boundless, it hasn’t much been challenged. I tend to steer clear of political debates, and I’m usually surrounded by people who follow the pro-Israel, all-Israel line.

One thing my school did leave me with was a thorough knowledge of the history of the state of Israel and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (at least from an Israeli perspective), and, along with it, a hearty dose of skepticism about the possibility of a lasting peace in the region.

So when Sheryl Olitsky, the Executive Director of SOSS, called me a few months ago inviting me to the inaugural conference, I didn’t know what to say. On the one hand I was excited about this new opportunity. Then, as I imagined my family’s collective gasp and the closing rolodexes of every shadchan (matchmaker) in Chabad, I thought no, there’s no way I can attend. I hemmed and hawed until I got the green light from a Chabad rabbi who told me that although the Lubavitcher Rebbe had warned against getting into interfaith debates on theology or religion, he was supportive of endeavors that focused on building civil and economic goodwill across communities.

So, on the bitterly cold Sunday of November 2, with the rabbi’s blessing ringing in my ears, I traveled to Temple University where the conference was being held. As scores of spandex-clad runners braved the wind to get to Staten Island for the starting line of the New York Marathon, I headed further uptown to catch the train to downtown Philly.

As I sat on the train, I pondered my reasons for participating. Was I anxious? Not really. Hopeful? Nope. Curious? Absolutely. My curiosity is what finally swayed me, along with the excitement of participating in an event run solely by and for women.

Four hours and a Subway, Amtrak, bus and cab later, I arrived at Temple University. (The conference was organized in conjunction with the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding and the Dialogue Institute of Temple University.) When I entered the hall, the attendees—about 100 women in total, wearing hijabs, abayas, pants, and skirts—were already forming groups around tables, getting acquainted. I sat between a Sufi convert in her 60s, garbed in an intricately detailed pale green abaya and headscarf, and a more secular, bubbly, young Muslim woman on my left.

It was confronting to realize that though I’ve interacted with Muslims many times—on the light-rail in Jerusalem, in the halls of Hebrew University, haggling over produce in the shuk (market)—I’d never had a proper, in-depth conversation with anyone of the faith.

Yet, here we were, chatting like old friends, complaining about the blustering wind outside, and the commute from who-knows-where America.

Sheryl Olitzky founded the SOSS in 2011 after a trip to Poland in the early 2000s, where she was horrified to witness high levels of outspoken hatred directed at all other ethnic groups. “The hate was incredible and targeted towards anyone considered ‘non-Pole’,” she explained. “It spread to anyone gay, lesbian, Jewish, black, Muslim, Asian—anyone considered ‘other’.”

She returned to the United States, convinced that she had to do something to dispel the hate. She decided to begin close to home and turned to her local community which had fairly large Muslim and Jewish communities. While there were no overt negative feelings between the two groups, she says, there was little interaction at all.

Olitzky contacted a local Imam who put her in touch with Atiya Aftab, an adjunct professor at Rutgers University’s Department of Political Science, who now sits on the Sisterhood’s board. Together, they recruited a group of about 12 women—half Muslim, half Jewish—to get together for monthly discussions. Thus began the pilot program for what has now grown into a network of ten chapters across the East Coast and Midwest.

Linda Tondow was part of the pioneering chapter and now sits on the Sisterhood’s Advisory Board. She says that she always had an interest in interfaith work and it seemed to align with her professional work as the president of her local conservative synagogue, Congregation Anshe Emeth of Highland Park, NJ.

Tondow says the women would bond over common issues such as parenting and the practice of religion in their communities. They shared their concerns over sending their children to religious school, and the accompanying rules regarding attire and modesty. “The issues were really the same, even if the venues may have been different,” she said. She hosted the group for Sukkot, and joined the Muslim members for Ramadan celebrations.

The SOSS doesn’t recommend tackling political discussions until the groups have been meeting for a long time and are comfortable with one another. Once solid friendships have been formed, they then provide workshops to facilitate conversations around hot-button issues such as the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

But for most of the members, the goal is not to win a political debate. “I personally never went in wanting to change people’s minds on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Tondow. “I went in wanting to know what some of our similarities are… and to create bonds and relationships which are really critical for understanding.”

And if anyone has the skills to build these kinds of relationships, Olitzky believes it’s women: “Women are much more effective at forming relationships [than men], just based on how their brains are wired.” She and Aftab based the chapter model on Gordon W. Allport’s Intergroup Contact Theory, which argues that by forming close relationships with people from a different group, your views on the group as a whole can be changed.

With virtually no promotion or marketing other than word-of-mouth, these groups have proved increasingly popular. This year the Sisterhood is expanding to Minneapolis and Kansas City, and women in many more cities have expressed interest in forming local chapters of their own.

The organization wants to bring the skills acquired by members in local chapters to a larger audience around the country, and the conference at Temple University marked their first foray into a larger initiative. Panels were hosted by renowned scholars and activists such as Blu Greenberg, co-founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance; Daisy Khan, the executive director of the American Society for Muslim Advancement; and Rabia Chaudry of Serial podcast fame—who is also the president of the Safe Nation Collaborative.

The workshops and panels delved into more theoretical discussions on how to strengthen ties of communication and cooperation between the two faith groups, but also touched on practical tips such as how to use social media for peace.

While many attendees expressed great satisfaction with the event, calling it “invigorating” and “beyond fabulous,” some thought there was a concerted effort to steer clear of the more contentious topics.

Jessica Deutsch, a 23-year-old recent college graduate from New York, attended the conference hoping the conversation would delve a little deeper.

“Everyone acknowledges that with interfaith dialogue there are elephants [in the room] that need to be addressed,” she said. “I didn’t feel like these were really spoken of at all. The focus seemed to be more about learning about the other and through that creating a hopeful future, which is beautiful, but I thought we would confront the more uncomfortable topics as well.”

But as with their chapters, SOSS doesn’t encourage this sort of heated discussion on a larger scale until a strong bond has been formed. “Once you have built the trust and respect, then you can have those discussions, and they are very productive,” said Olitzky.

Internally, I breathed a sigh of relief. I wasn’t interested in getting into political debates. I’m more than happy to leave that to the experts in D.C. And while I really enjoyed meeting the other participants and learning about their lives, that came more from a curiosity about human nature than a determined belief that by doing so we’ll solve any big issues. Will I attend the conference next year, go on the peace mission trip in 2015, or get involved in the chapters that are soon to open up in New York? I still haven’t decided. One thing I do firmly believe is that there should be a stronger representation of Orthodox Jewish women in these kinds of initiatives. I was given one of only four kosher meals at the retreat, and I think it’s safe to say I was the only ultra-Orthodox Jew in the room. There seemed to be more religious diversity among the Muslim participants.

As I left the hall with a friend, we bumped into a young woman wearing a long black abaya and hijab. Israa* looked to be in her late teens or early twenties. We got to talking and she told us she was a refugee from Iraq who was seeking asylum in the United States with the help of some of the women at the event. She had come to America to study, but now her life was in danger should she return home. Her crime? Sharing pictures of her time in the U.S. online.

Traveling back to New York, I found myself reflecting on that young woman’s perilous journey. We may not have solved the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but perhaps there other, more tangible progress was being made. The women I met—Olitsky and Aftab, and all the panelists and participants—are working in their own way to promote goodwill and positivity in a political climate that can often feel clouded and despairing. When I reflect back on the event, I don’t think first of what was discussed at the workshops, but rather the people I met and the warm, friendly, hopeful atmosphere that pervaded.

*Last name redacted.

Australian native Miriam Groner is a blogger and writer living in New York. Follow her on Twitter at @Mim_G.

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If you’re a woman who frequents parties, parks, bars, libraries, college campuses, grocery stores—anywhere, really—chances are you’ve been asked by a creepy guy for your phone number at some point. What do you do when he asks aggressively, or keeps harassing you after you’ve declined? Maybe you give out a fake number, or apologize and say you have a boyfriend (which may or may not be the truth, but anyway, you shouldn’t have to say it). It’s a scary situation to be in, and one that women all over the world are confronted with every day.

Enter the Feminist Phone Intervention. Conceived by two Jewish feminists, it’s a real phone number you can give to potential “suitors”—but one that delivers automated quotes from the feminist writer/activist/theorist bell hooks. (i.e.: “If any female feels she needs anything beyond herself to legitimate and validate her existence, she is already giving away her power to be self-defining, her agency.” WORD.) It went totally viral this past weekend, but in the midst of all the buzz one of the co-creators, an anonymous Latina from the Bronx, took some time out to explain the genesis of the project to Jewcy.

How did you come up with the idea for the Feminist Phone Intervention?

In the last couple of months, we’ve been shaken by the Boko Haram kidnappings, the mass disappearances of Canadian First Nations women, the murder of Islan Nettles and other transwomen, and the Elliot Rodgers killings in California. Each of these tragedies was an act of misogynistic violence on a mass scale, and in the cases of Rodgers and Boko Haram, female students were specifically targeted.

Compounding the horror of the Rodgers shooting was its media coverage: for example, the New York Post printed bikini photos of a woman who had “spurned” Rodgers under the headline “Killer Crush.” This is one example of how the press sometimes sympathizes with misogyny, by exposing an innocent woman and portraying the murderer’s experience of “romantic rejection” (the woman was 10-years-old when they met).

In addition, a number of close friends have experienced stalking and harassment in their daily lives and in the workplace.

In the wake of these issues, I wanted to design a project that would usefully and creatively talk back to sexism in daily life.

How does it work, technically? What are the costs involved in running such a service?

Twilio, the service we chose, charges one cent per call—so for a $1 donation, you just blocked 100 creeps and/or helped spread some feminist inspiration! I think that’s a pretty good turn-around.

We are paying the phone bill ourselves, and since we had no idea that it would receive this much attention, we would very much appreciate any donations to keep it running. Money donated beyond the cost of the phone bill will be donated to the National Latina Institute for Reproductive Health.

The main creative issue for me was balancing its practical usability with its larger artistic/protest concept. For example, it would be safer to design a code to delay text message auto-reply, so that a person has time to leave the scene after giving out the number. But how long do we wait? Is twenty minutes enough? If we set it up to reply four or six hours later, well, you just got someone a booty call from “bell hooks.” So in order to mitigate the safety issue, we removed the text service, since it was the most provocative aspect of the project. As a result, phone calls have spiked.

This choice changes the experience for people who want to interact with the bot themselves and easily receive bell hooks messages for their own inspiration. But we had to prioritize the safety function over the artistic possibilities. Eliminating the text service also saved money, so we can buy more phone lines in other area codes and countries.

Are you surprised by how popular the concept is? (This post on The Hairpin post has over 45,000 shares already!) How did you get the word out?

So far, we’ve been contacted about 100,000 times! I am absolutely surprised by how quickly it spread and how powerfully people responded to it. I sent a note about my project to the feminist website The Hairpin because I always liked their work, and then it spread from there.

I am proud that it was able to travel so quickly, requiring very little explanation. I think it’s important to engage intellectually and theorize about gender, power, and society—but keeping specialized vocabulary out of the messages allowed it to work for a much wider group of people.

You don’t need to identify as a radical feminist to want to enjoy your life and move more freely in the world. We had to ask ourselves: are we interested in contributing to a better feminist movement, or a better world? If it’s the second, then feminist tactics need to be able to move out of academic and activist spaces with limited readerships.

Why have you chosen to remain anonymous?

The Feminist Phone Intervention is meant as a reminder that we don’t owe strangers our time, our names, our bodies, or our contact info, so the choice of anonymity fits with that.

In a larger, tactical sense, choosing anonymity also makes room for more collective action. We are setting up open-source versions, to make it easier for people to adapt our project to their own needs or regions. Not having a “face” associated with it will hopefully empower more people to make their own versions.

In U.S. history, fame is often used as a destructive force against activist communities, a way of singling out one person and making her a spokeswoman, which erases collective efforts. Well-known examples include Kathleen Hanna and Gloria Steinem, both of whom were selected by the outside media to represent a much more complex feminist community.

Several journalists who contacted me about this project were primarily interested in discovering and disclosing my own identity, rather than engaging with questions of sexism and activist tactics. For a project concerned with protecting women’s privacy, the irony is striking!

You’re currently studying the Yiddish radical press. What influence has that had on this project, and your political activism generally?

I am a researcher and historian of the Yiddish radical press in the United States, and so I think a lot about the role of media in social movements. I am interested in the social life of newspapers and how the press of a minority language group can create community.

One aim and practice of Yiddish anarchist culture of the early 1900s was the cultivation of comradeship in everyday life, not just within the movement but in all human interactions. We can see this expressed in letters to the editor and in the extent of their social practices, such as setting up schools and mutual aid societies. A very popular book at the turn of the last century was Alexander Harkavy’s American Letter Writer and Speller, which taught immigrants how to write letters in Yiddish and English. The letter templates are not neutral documents, but shape the readers’ responses: for example, a woman is advised to marry a worker for love, not to break the engagement for lack of money.

Harkavy was a linguist and author of a trilingual English-Yiddish-Hebrew dictionary, and he also contributed to the anarchist press though his translations and editorials. I was always struck by their efforts to teach comradeship through the press and the books of letter templates, usually without the explicit vocabulary of anarchism or socialism. It shows a real attention to the particularities of life before abstract ideology, and it rejects the view of human nature as inevitably selfish. I think there’s also some quality of mussar practice there, in terms of the intense focus on individual ethical behavior.

So I would say that this project has in some sense been inspired by the media of the Yiddish anarchists of the past century, who labored to develop a method of mutual aid that would transcend their own social groups. I think we could learn a lot from their investment in cultivating a radical etiquette, and especially in using language that speaks to people outside of gender studies or a small group of activists.

What would your response be to men who respond to the Feminist Phone Intervention with confusion, even dismay? (Like, “I’m not a creep! Most men can handle rejection! Just say no!”)

I haven’t seen men responding that way, but I have seen quite a few comments from women saying, “Be mature and just say no!” I am very glad that they have not received the kind of harassment we are addressing. However, there are many occasions where a person must exercise judgment and may choose to share a fake number. It’s for those situations that we hope to provide another option.

The primary weight of scrutiny should be on disrespect towards women, not on the tactics women use to respond. So we should try to be generous when considering the strategies women use to make ourselves safer in public.

People who have been assaulted, harassed or hounded in public often become hyper-vigilant in their daily lives, or develop other strategies for maintaining their personal safety. It’s a natural protective response, but often the heightened awareness of threats which develops after trauma can constrain our freedom of movement, narrowing the fullness of our lives and interactions. There’s a great quote about the difference between getting by and getting free by Mia McKenzie: “Because the things we learn to do to survive at all costs are not the things that will help us get FREE. Getting free is a whole different journey altogether.”

What do you hope to achieve with the project? What do you hope other people get out of it?

I hope that it will contribute to the expansion of our political imaginations. Just because something happens all the time, doesn’t mean it’s inevitable or that we have no choice in how to respond. Just knowing that our feminist phone line has been contacted 100,000 times makes me realize the mass scope of both harassment and potential everyday resistance. I am moved to know we are confronting the same struggles; that cyber-comradeship is heartening to me.

Right now we are working on adding more languages and quotations from feminists specific to the region where the area code is located. We recognize the ways in which racialized violence combines with misogyny to target women of color. It’s a small gesture, but we are working to get the Feminist Phone Intervention messages to also be read in a native language for our Canadian numbers. In Canada, indigenous women (Inuit, First Nations, and Metis) are five to seven times more likely than white women to die from violence.

For those who want to set up their own similar feminist intervention phone lines outside the reach of our servers, we are developing open-source programming, which will allow people to create their own versions and address sexism in more local ways. [Ed. note: lines have been set up in Mexico, Canada, the UK, and Israel.]

I think this project has really touched a nerve. Hopefully it will make people examine whether their everyday behavior is threatening or aggressive, and for others, to remember that they need not feel alone when facing harassment.

Image: Shutterstock

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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.

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)

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