Elana Sztokman
By Elana Sztokman
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Life Obsessive Segregation Is About Misogyny — Not Modesty
I knew I would regret it as soon as I started typing, but I did it anyway. As much as I try to avoid getting into virtual arguments in talkback-land, this week I found myself unable to restrain myself. The language, it seems to me, is at the root of the problem, and that’s where…
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Life Israel’s Prostitution Bill, and the MKs Blaming the Exploited
A man goes to a prostitute, and then blames her for making him sin. No, this is not the beginning of a joke. Rather, it’s the argument currently being made by Knesset members from the (all male) Shas party in a current round of deliberations about the legality of prostitution. At issue is a bill…
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Israel News A Large and Lovely Beauty Pageant
‘My name is Heli Buzaglo, I’m 24 years old from Afula, a fat girl, FAAAAAAAAT but beautiful (or at least that’s what everyone says, including the mirror on the wall).” Thus opens the blog of one of the contestants in the 16th annual “Fat and Beautiful” beauty pageant in Israel. The pageant, held mid-December in…
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Life Crowning Miss ‘Fat’ Israel
“My name is Heli Buzaglo, I’m 24 years-old from Afula, a fat girl, FAAAAAAAAT but beautiful (or at least that’s what everyone says, including the mirror on the wall.” Thus opens the blog of one of the contestants in the 2009 Fat Beauty Pageant in Israel — or, what I have come to think of…
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Life Israeli Politics and a Woman’s Womb
While the Israeli cabinet has been grappling with some of the most harrowing decisions it has ever faced — from the deliberations over the release of Gilad Shalit, to some particularly stringent conditions imposed by President Obama — the religious right wing community in Israel has been engaged in its own disputations about nothing other…
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Life In Turning 40, Freedom
I turn 40 next week, and I want to celebrate. I’m not talking about a Madonna-style birthday celebration of pretending I’m still 22, or an Oprah-style event involving a car giveaway (although perhaps if I could actually do either, I might consider it). I’m thinking more along the lines of a celebration of life, of…
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Life Saying ‘No’ to the Back of the Bus
In Japan, it seems, there are some women-only buses. They were established, according to journalist Chani Luz, to protect women from “groping men.” Luz, who writes for the Orthodox publications Makor Rishon and Hatzofe, supports women-only buses in Israel because, as she recalled in a recent Ynet column, she was once molested on a bus…
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Life Beauty Myth No. 614: Manicure as ‘Basic Need’
I was so excited to see a woman on the cover of Friday’s financial section of Yediot Ahronot that I nearly spilled my nail polish all over the newspaper. The full-page headshot of Sharon Chen-Konofny — gorgeous, fully made up, and biting on a nail-polish bottle — seemed like such a welcome change from the…
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