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Prof. Sam Lehman-Wilzig – Reversing Israel’s Feminism?
The two-state officials most in the government’s line of fire during these trying times of Judicial Reform are women: the President of the Supreme Court, Esther Hayut, and the Attorney General, Gali Baharav-Miara. A coincidence? Not at all.
As if Israeli society is not divided enough, a new-old issue has again reared its ugly head in several recent examples: misogyny – or to put it in simpler but opposing terms: male chauvinism/anti-feminism. But first, a personal disclosure – humorous but quite serious.
As one can guess from my family name, I am a long-standing feminist. The short story behind this is quite funny, but unfortunately all too representative of today’s attitude among “alpha males.” Before marrying my soon-to-be wife Tami in New York, we decided that we would both combine our family names into one “couplet.” However, to make it easier for her I would do so in court before the wedding. That way, she wouldn’t also have to go to court, because she would be marrying a “Lehman-Wilzig” and “automatically” taking on my (new) family name.
So off I went to a Boston court (while doing my PhD at Harvard) and filled out the paperwork. Then I had to appear before a judge. Almost everyone then in Boston civil service was Irish, so I was surrounded by the Irish cop, the Irish court stenographer etc. – except that I surprisingly found myself standing in front of a Jewish judge. On the form, I had to provide the reason for my family name change. There I wrote: 1- Feminism; 2- My wife is an only child. The judge took the form, and after reading it picked up his pen – and while signing it he looked at me sternly and started declaiming the famous saying: “Mine is not to ask why, but… [here I was expecting the usual: but to do or die]…but you’re meshuggah!”
He wasn’t joking. Unfortunately, sentiments like his continue to be rampant among large swaths of the population in America (the Equal Rights Amendment still hasn’t been ratified; the U.S. Supreme Court recently pushed abortion a major step backward), and perhaps even more so in Israel, if the past several days are any indication. Some examples:
1) A busload of ultra-Orthodox Bnei Brak residents refused to get on a public bus because… the driver was a woman!
2) The government is pushing legislation to transfer authority over alimony decisions from the (secular) Family Court system to the Rabbinical courts (https://www.timesofisrael.com/bill-seeks-to-strengthen-rabbinical-courts-jurisdiction-on-alimony-child-support/). Given the ongoing, systematic discrimination against women in the latter court, one can easily imagine how “alimony” would be used as another cudgel against divorcing wives.
3) The Civil Service Commissioner, Prof. Daniel Hershkovitz (a former professor of mathematics, and also an Orthodox Rabbi), gave an order to his hugely important Department overseeing all government civil servants that henceforth all official, government communications would be couched exclusively in the male gender (as is well known, Hebrew is not a gender-neutral language).
4) Most egregious of all (this one is hard to believe): in 2016, Likud MK Gila Gamliel initiated a draft law to prevent economic violence in the family against women. The law was voted on this past Wednesday — and she voted against it, along with all the other eight female, coalition MKs!!
Those are but a small sample of the direction Israel’s “traditionalists” are trying to push the country. However, the pro-feminist pushback is equally strong. Two of Israel’s court rulings in that direction (this is only a representative sample): Mea She’arim Street, where the most extreme haredi community (Neturei Karta) lives, cannot be segregated by sidewalks (women on one side, men on the other); public transportation cannot be segregated, with El Al part of that ruling. Independent of the court, during the election campaign of 2022 three different political parties were led by women!
Nevertheless, the “street” is resisting such rulings. Women’s faces are being defaced on billboards; their picture is never shown in the haredi newspapers (indeed, even their first name becomes a mere first letter to hide their gender); army units have been known to ban female singers in order not to disturb the religious sensibilities of Orthodox soldiers (strict halakhic rulings prevent a male from hearing a women’s singing voice).
In the political sphere, the situation is still up in the air. For example, the ultra-Orthodox parties used to have a stipulation in their charter prohibiting women from becoming party members, and certainly from running on the party list. In 2015, the Supreme Court forced the cancellation of those stipulations de jure. However, the situation hasn’t changed any de facto – even when twenty haredi women attempted to sign up as members and were “ignored” by the haredi parties. The Supreme Court is now once again trying to deal with this “hot potato” – in a political context where it is already under attack as “too activist.”
All of this might be surprising for those still “recalling” early Zionism’s “feminine equality” – and Golda Meir as one of the world’s first female prime ministers. However, Zionism was never in fact really gender egalitarian, not even on the kibbutz where they were shunted to traditional women’s work: the kitchen, the children’s communal house, etc. And Golda? The famous Ben-Gurion quote that “Golda is the only man in my Cabinet” is a pure fabrication, as she herself noted. But the fact that it has become part of Israeli lore only reinforces the point: as a “woman” she couldn’t be effective, but if she acted like a Man, then that explains how she got as far as she did. Hardly a feminist attitude.
In sum, as with several highly divisive issues in Israel between Left/Center and Right/Extreme Right (settlements; judicial reform), the “place of women” in society has also become a serious fault line. Stay tuned for future battles in Israel’s war of the sexes.
