salty femme.

(this is a long one, so decide now if you want to read it. Topics: anti-religion progressive feminists aka women stuck in the 70’s, people who should STFU, the Haredi sex-segregated bus issues. The rant-y part is separated by that bold line about halfway down.)

Maybe it was the freezing cold weather last night, or the snow I woke up to this morning, or maybe it was the infuriating Jesus preacher woman who thought that 8:30 in the morning on a snowy, cold day would be just a perfect time to command all of her fellow commuting subway riders to accept Jesus as our personal savior.

Or, perhaps my morning got off to a bad start because of a bunch of “feminists” waxing self-righteous about Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Jews in comments section of a Feministe post. A decent post reporting on an awful situation in Israel brought on comments from all kinds of brilliant folks. The situation: pockets of Haredi Jewish men in Jerusalem are attacking women on buses (city, not private) who refuse to conform to the sex-segregation imposed by the men. You can also read a personal account of a woman who experienced this last November (a different woman than the one mentioned in the NPR story linked above).

Just to get this out of the way: this is totally fucked, brings up a whole host of questions about the tenuous relationship between religion and democracy there; the increasing power of the Haredim (pl. for Haredi); the ways that religion can be completely bastardized by its supposed most devout (i.e. to protest the woman’s lack of “modesty,” they kicked her to the ground and pulled off her head covering); and the general violence that seems to permeate every corner of Israeli society; among many other questions. The last time I checked, this news piece does not involve:

-How Haredi Jews in Brooklyn are weird freaks who don’t understand pets or birdfeeders and who are in desperate need of your pity for their backward lifestyle.
-How religion, as a whole, is perverse and how the women who fall victim to it are helpless and in need of our (read: white-, middle-class, and American) feminist rescue.
-Questions of are there any religions out there in the world that love the wimmins, really and truly? (nothing like a completely nonspecific question to spark some real discussion).
-And a complete and detailed response to that question: I would find it hard to imagine a sect of Dianic Wiccans with fundamentalist extremists like that. And Haredi Judaism in Israel has what, exactly, to do with Dianic Wiccans?
-How Haredi Jews are just incredibly annoying (although their payos [sidelocks] are real cool!).
-Umm…I have no response for this one: Sometimes it seems, ironically given the history of the Jewish religion, that today’s pagans and Jews have so much in common
-Factually incorrect statements like my friend’s sister’s mother’s great uncle married a Haredi, so I am therefore the expert: “they also refused to teach the kids how to read and write in English — only Hebrew.” (here’s a clue: if you can’t tell the difference between Hebrew and Yiddish, perhaps you should wonder what right you have to drop your opinion in this thread).

I could go on but I might seriously lose it. I feel like there are some basic rules that people seemed to just throw out the window here. First of all, if you do not know what you’re talking about, DO NOT SPEAK. Seriously. Ask specific questions. Second of all, stay on topic. The big underlying problem with second-wave feminism is that it lacked specificity (or should I speak in the present, lacks specificity, since sometimes I think we’re still in the 1970’s).

But I thought we were beyond that. Right? Because when you think about it, logically, a Haredi woman living in a Haredi neighborhood in Jerusalem doesn’t want your feminism, white American college-educated woman! Hello? Why is that so difficult?

“Stop taking your value system completely out of context” rant ends here. Below, for any interested parties, is my own take on this issue.

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The way I see it, we have here a situation that calls for a tremendous amount of tact and complicated thinking: two things that are, apparently, foreign to many. The problems here, as I see them, are twofold: one within the Haredi community and one with their relationship with the larger mainstream Israeli society (and a piggyback off the second question: how “religious” should Israel be as a democratic country?).

Haredi women seem to be fighting some part of this battle within their communities and their homes. It is not up to us (including me – and when I say us, I’m talking about women who live in the US, non-Jewish women, non-Orthodox women, even Israeli women who are not Haredi) to decide exactly how that battle should play out, what is at stake for these women in fighting against sex-segregation on buses. Our concern is not whether these women are oppressed in their marriages and their birthing of 12 babies or how in the world they wear those heavy black tights in 90+ degree sweltering desert heat in the summertime in Jerusalem or why they don’t just get on the train/bus to the secular part of town and see the (secular) light! If you’re all about autonomy, how about letting them speak for themselves, hmm? You may wonder about it, but it is completely irrelevant to this discussion. It starts to concern Israeli society at large if it comes to making high-court decisions regarding the permissibility of sex-segregated public buses – and indeed, it does. From the NPR story:

The bus company released a statement saying they let the ultra Orthodox enforce their own rules. The company says its own surveys show that the general public wants “to respect the Haredi-religious sector that uses public transportation and to let them behave in a way that is convenient to them.”

(one aside: Egged’s supposed “live and let live” attitude here is a total farce: Egged buses don’t run on Shabbat, for one – what about “live and let live” for all the secular Israelis who can’t travel on Shabbat?)

What I find really interesting is that Egged (the bus company) has some weird notion that the buses in question move between Haredi neighborhoods, never entering anyplace else, which is not true. The Haredim can’t live their lives isolated from the rest of Jerusalem 100% of the time, and we see the disastrous consequences of this fact when they react to gay pride parade in riots (and the riot police, who are quick to pull out rubber bullets in Bil’in, are strangely nowhere to be seen, but I digress). Egged, like many other bodies in the state of Israel, are completely scared of Haredim, and for good reason: they vote in blocs and they have tremendous political pull.

Religion is tricky – it pushes the public/private boundaries like nothing else that I know of, and in Israel this debate has a tremendous amount more weight. All Israeli Jews have complicated relationships with Judaism (not to mention Palestinians and Palestinian-Israelis, who have a differently complicated relationship with Judaism!); with negotiating their secular identities and the religious country that governs so many parts of their personal lives. I just beg that we keep the discussion in the context where it belongs: in Israel, on the topic not just of religion but of Judaism, and not on Judaism generally but its relationship with the (mostly secular) Israeli mainstream and the laws that govern the state of Israel. Just a little specificity is all I ask.

I’m feeling very mixed about the airing of dirty laundry. I’m talking specifically about the airing of dirty Jewish laundry. I think depending on how you go about it, sometimes airing dirty laundry is the only way to actually make some change.

A story has been coming out over the last month or so about an incident that occurred on a Jerusalem bus last month, where a Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) woman was harassed and then beaten up by a pack of Haredi men who were angry that she refused to move to the back of the bus. (Read the personal account here and also check out the coverage in Ha’aretz.). To sum it up: apparently there are some Egged buses that are mehadrin buses (Egged is the national government-funded bus company in Israel, mehadrin means that men and women sit separately and no music is played), this woman was not riding on one of them. She was asked to move to the back, she refused, and a group of men kicked her, pushed her, spat on her, pulled off her head covering, and generally left her physically and emotionally bruised.

Issues this brings up: where do you draw the line when it comes to what religion can dictate in a government-funded system? I’m not going to say that Egged doesn’t have rules mandated by Jewish law, because Egged buses do not run on Shabbat. In a Jewish state, who gets to define tzniut (modesty)? Is this an issue the Haredi community should be dealing with internally? My main point is that this issue is that like many questions, it requires a tremendous amount of context to understand both the incident itself and the gravity of the incident. And when I see posts on mainstream non-Jewish blogs (blogs that I respect, I should add) that don’t really delve into any context or even any details, I feel very frustrated – and not because I think that what the group of men did was OK or excusable in any context, but because it can’t really be understood in a two paragraph news clipping with the subject line ‘woman beaten for existing.’ (it has been changed since its initial posting).

And then we have the infamous video of the Hevron settler (a woman) taunting her Palestinian neighbor: “sharmuuuuuta!” (sharmuta = whore). I don’t even want to get into the grossness of a woman calling another woman a whore, especially with a culprit who is supposed to be some sort of “pious” religious woman. Beyond that, it’s interesting to note that the settlers in this particular neighborhood of Hevron called Tel Rumeida are notorious for abusing their Palestinian neighbors. (yes, this article is written by Gidon Levy, another writer criticized for airing dirty laundry). The video to which I linked above was taken by the Palestinian woman’s 16-year old daughter, who gave the video to B’tselem. And then it made its way to YouTube. And now, suddenly, the media and the police are paying attention (click here, here, and here). Palestinians living in this neighborhood say that their complaints over the years have fallen on deaf ears. Through the propagation of this video, perhaps their fate is changing.

I worry about people making generalizations about Jews, about Israelis, etc. And I conclude that I believe in a broad exchange of information, in the power that we access through the internet to raise voices that have been silenced and to question things that we take for granted. And I will take the chance that issues will be raised without context and void of nuance if it means that people will start talking and that change is somehow possible (in a world that feels more and more hopeless). If internet coverage means that the Israeli public will have to wake up about the dangers of letting settlers run amok, about not allowing religious people to think that the way that they practice Judaism is the *only* way, then great. Hopefully there will always be the few who will write the context, and perhaps even more who will be interested enough to read it and engage with it. And I continue to think that through the internet and blogs, concrete change can be made. Maybe the only way we can do our laundry is if people are watching.

tags: Judaism, Israel/Palestine, feminism