Elana Sztokman
By Elana Sztokman
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Life Why Do Men’s Voices Lend Credibility to Jewish Women’s Issues?
As a woman, I sometimes feel like I’m in a catch-22. I want to bring attention to issues concerning women, but I also want men to pay attention. When women are doing all the talking, we run the risk of marginalizing ourselves, of turning our ideas into “women’s stuff.” By inviting men to speak about…
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Life How Pesach Divides the Community Along Class Lines
If you want to be a religious Jew today, you have to have money — a lot of it. There’s no way around it, and it’s especially obvious at this time of year. Perhaps it was different way back when, but in Orthodoxy Version 2010, you need two of everything in the kitchen, including two…
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Life The Tragedy of ‘Suicide Girls’
I spent too much time the other day talking to my children about death and suicide. My oldest daughter went to the funeral of her former youth group counselor, an 18-year-old recent high school graduate who took her own life. A seemingly bubbly, optimistic and activist young woman who became clinically depressed over the past…
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Life Why Sara Hurwitz’s JOFA Speech Was ‘Retrograde’
There was an exciting energy at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance conference. Speakers in both the plenary and individual sessions, such as emerging star Lisa Schlaff, made far-reaching statements and bold suggestions about issues ranging from marriage and sexuality to halachic ingenuity. Participants responded in kind with creativity and courage, revealing what seems to be…
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Culture Israel’s ‘Most Sexist’ Ads
Sex sells. This marketing approach has become so commonplace that it is not only used to sell cars, beer, and football, but also to sell seemingly innocuous items like yogurt, laundry detergent, toothpaste, potato chips and lawn mowers. It is even used to target female consumers, for products such as facial cleanser, diet soda, perfume,…
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Life Are Wage Gaps Keeping Israel Out of the OECD?
The gap between women’s wages and men’s wages in Israel is getting wider. According to the latest annual survey conducted by Oketz Systems, men in senior management positions in Israel are making on average 29% more than women in identical positions. The survey results show a distinct widening of the gender gap in salaries. Last…
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Life Why Orthodox Girls Don’t Figure Skate
This is one of my favorite seasons of all time: Olympic figure-skating season. For me, every other sport, in or out of the Olympics, holds a very distant second place, if at all, on my scale of interest. When I read in Gia Kourlas’ New York Times piece that she is always met with laughter…
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Life When Haredi Rhetoric Turns Victimhood on Its Head
The Internet can be a nasty place. Whether due to the replacement of visceral human relationships with a cold, lifeless screen, or because people have learned to type faster than they think, something about Internet conversation seems to bring out the worst in human discourse. As my Forward colleague Jay Michaelson pointed out in his…
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