Posts Written by sotah
By sotah • 14 years ago

The Modesty Erotic

Cross-posted from sotah

A New York Times article, Rabbi’s Sound Alarms over Eating Disorders, highlights the prevalence of eating disorders in the Orthodox community. Why is there an article about eating disorders in the Orthodox community and why is it one of the top ten emailed articles? It continues to make the news when modest and chaste girls have eating disorders. According to the article “Orthodox women are famously expected to dress modestly, yet matchmakers feel no qualms in asking about a prospective bride’s dress size — and her mother’s — and the preferred answer is 0 to 4, extra small.”  While the community’s desire to treat eating disorders is admirable, enforced modesty is at the root of the decease. The vigilance over the body which characterizes both modesty and eating disorders is not antithetical to the problem, it is contributory. The modest young woman is self-watching over her body. Modesty transforms her body, which is many things, into a body which one thing – a source of the erotic and an object prohibited to the male gaze. According to the orthodox interpretation of Jewish law, a man cannot pray while seeing a woman’s less than meticulously covered body. She is erva – nakedness.

The claim of what modesty can do for women (aka covering up leads to women not being objectified), has fundamentally bought ...
By sotah • 14 years ago

In search for inclusive egaliterian children’s books for my daughter’s first Passover

cross-posted from sotah.net

Books enter the lives of children from infancy, often first in the form of “board books.” Their hard, shiny pages are impossible to rip and make a delicious chew toy in the early years.  Recently, my daughter received a few Passover board books.  In the Passover books, the father prayed and the mother baked; all the couples consisted of a man and a woman; all the people were able bodied.  Infancy and early toddlerhood is when children gain a sense of the normative.  In presenting tradition gender roles and tradition families structures, these books are not mirroring the narrative of ...

cross-posted from sotah.net

Books enter the lives of children from infancy, often first in the form of “board books.” Their hard, shiny pages are impossible to rip and make a delicious chew ...
By sotah • 14 years ago

What would a feminist Chanukah Midrash look like?

There is the Hebrew School Chanukah, where the Macabees are guerrilla fighters leading an uprising in the name of liberty (kind of like George Washington) and then there is the other Chanukah, the civil war Chanukah, where Jews killed other Jews for religious reasons, but also for political ones.  There is also the Rabbi’s Chanukah, where the oil  lasted for eight days.

Against the background of Chanukah-as-civil-war, there are stories of two women – Judith and Hannah – both women are extreme models of virtuous womanhood under the patriarchy. Judith manages to get an important general to trust her, she gets him drunk, and cuts of his head, puts it on a ...

There is the Hebrew School Chanukah, where the Macabees are guerrilla fighters leading an uprising in the name of liberty (kind of like George Washington) and then there is the other Chanukah, the civil ...
By sotah • 14 years ago

Sister-wives: a review

My last year of college I wrote a rather lengthy thesis, where after many interviews and  much reading,  I came to believe  a rather simple idea:  many women who practice patriarchal forms of a variety of religions, understand their practice in terms of particularity within  universality. The women see their practice as incumbent only upon them, either as a personal preference, or a manifestation of God’s calling the them – and not universally applicable to either women in general, or even to other women of faith, who may be called to practice differently.  This is significant because it undermines a widely held understanding of fundamentalist practice, as by its very definition, ...

My last year of college I wrote a rather lengthy thesis, where after many interviews and  much reading,  I came to believe  a rather simple idea:  many women who practice patriarchal forms of a variety ...