Elana Sztokman
By Elana Sztokman
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Life Queen Esther’s Agunah Story
You can learn an incredible amount about different people from language. There are, for example, 27 words for “moustache” in Albanian – including a word for what English-speakers would call “no moustache.” It seems that in Albania, moustaches are pretty important. Similarly, the Inuit are famous for having 30 words for snow – clearly they…
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Life Confronting ‘Religious Celebrities’ About Sex Abuse
It’s been an intense week for me as a parent. I’m torn between using this space to address my daughter’s experience of being verbally attacked by haredim, while she was praying at the Western Wall (and her writing about the experience on The Sisterhood) versus addressing Rabbi Mordechai Elon’s alleged sexual abuse of his students….
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Life Saving ‘Catcher’s’ Phoebe — and Other Youths
I read “The Catcher in the Rye” this week. I should say, “re-read” because I did, actually, read the book in high school, though the fact that I couldn’t remember anything about the plot or characters beyond the name “Holden Caulfield” is a reflection either of my poor reading habits or my high school English…
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Life Idea #4: Orthodox Feminist Day Schools
Feminism has no doubt transformed Orthodoxy over the past three decades. Women have gone from begging to hold a Torah on Simchat Torah to holding their own services, to creating partnership synagogues in which women take active roles alongside men in running the service. It’s not only about women learning Talmud, but also about being…
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Life Bnei Akiva, and the Efforts To Silence Women
Women can solve the world’s problems by just being a little quieter. That is the message emerging from the resolution of a little fracas in the Religious Zionist world recently. The conflict revolved around the traditional IDF event memorializing the “Lamed-Heh,” the 35 men from the Haganah convoy who gave their lives to protect Gush…
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Life Why We Need To Expect More of Men
There is hardly a topic that gets people quite as wound up as women’s home-work decisions. Many a Shabbat lunch has turned explosive when a strong view was deemed condescending, insensitive, or (dare I say it?) sexist. I confess to having been a copious part of this phenomenon over the years, occasionally accused of being,…
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Life What Makes Us Bad Feminists? Kvetching About Artificial Choices
As I was driving my daughter to school for an afternoon exam, I received a work call about a knotty issue that left me with a lot of explaining to do about power, money and some complexities of office politics. This is my life, I thought. Though I’ve long since abandoned any hope of being…
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Life The Myth of Choice: The ‘Queens’ and ‘Concubines’ of Goel’s Harem
Goel Ratzon, a 60-year-old man with long white hair and penetrating eyes, has at least 17 wives and 28 children, though the precise figure remains elusive. Ratzon, who apparently believes himself to be something of a messiah, or the modern embodiment of King Solomon, was arrested last week in Tel Aviv, as were some of…
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