After writing about the situation at the Kosel last week I told myself I’d take a break from discussing that topic for a while. But since Rosh Chodesh is almost here once again and with it the specter of yet another unfortunate spectacle I thought I’d share some apparent good news on the women’s rights front inIsrael.

Susan Aranoff identifies herself as “among the founding members of the Women of the Wall” now referred to within the group as “The Mothers.” As a birthmother of WOW (BOWOW?) she speaks authoritatively about its goals writing that

WOW models to all Jewish women who pray at the Kotel that women can take control over their own religious lives.... Like it or not the sights and sounds of women leading services may initially shock them but then when they get used to it it will it has to change their world view.... And that is why WOW must win the struggle to remain at the Kotel. Our cause transcends women praying women wearing tallitot. It goes directly to the heart of Jewish women’s lives in all spheres.

Quite obviously then the deep problems in “Jewish women’s lives in all spheres” of Israeli society particularly the non-chareidi ones must all have already been resolved satisfactorily. All that’s left now is for WOW to model for chareidi women those classic sufferers fromStockholmsyndrome that they too can be just as blessedly free of discrimination subjugation and harassment as their sisters in secular Israeli society are. Poor things they have no idea just how downtrodden they really are so completely have they been brainwashed by their male tormentors. But we’ll enlighten them one way or another. Paternalism you say? Don’t you know that by definition only paters can be paternalistic not maters?

Now this is all great news since it means I can probably discard all these clippings of news items I have from recent years which are obviously outdated and thankfully no longer relevant. Let’s see… here’s a 2008 Jerusalem Post piece by Orthodox feminist Elana Sztokman writing about the Israeli academic scene:

The culture of exploitation back-stabbing self-serving intellectual theft and cutthroat competition saturates universities here frequently reaching appalling degrees. I could probably write a book about this culture based solely on my own accumulated experiences from 13 years as a graduate student and employee.

So much for the redoubts of Israeli higher education where the delightfully named “humanities” are taught to which all those bnei Torah will be redirected as soon as they can be forced out of their troglodytic caves in Mir and Ponevezh. But I digress.

Back on the matter of the status of the distaff on the staffs and student bodies in academe Ms. Sztokman continues:

But for women at the university this ruthless culture is compounded by the inherent sexism entrenched in every corner of the institution.... [W]omen have started to speak up about the most horrific forms of aggression and manipulation around.... Ha’aretz reported that following [HebrewUniversity’s] ongoing ineptitude in dealing with issues of ... harassment and the status of women the Committee on Gender issues is breaking up. Prof. Rachel Elior…resigned because she said “we feel there is no way to change the university’s discriminatory policy.” Patriarchy is so deeply embedded that the struggle is getting nowhere.... Indeed the statistics about women at universities paint a pretty gloomy picture.... [W]omen are consistently passed over for advancement at each stage of their career development.

Now now why so pessimistic? Just model for the male professors how “women can take control over their own academic and professional lives” and they’re sure to come around; maybe a nice Minchah service a little song-and-dance will do the trick. Then again since this article is almost five years old perhaps things are radically improved since then and I can send this clipping to the circular file.

Moving right along here’s a Ha’aretz piece by feminist Merav Michaeli on women and the army which hopefully I can also promptly discard as a relic of the dark albeit recent past:

[M]ilitary service is an impressive study on the subjugation and coercion of women. In the army where ... almost all key command posts... are left in the hands of men it’s quite clear who is in charge and who takes a back seat who is working for whom. Women leave army service having learned that lesson exceedingly well... men learn the same lesson well....They too enter civilian life with this same knowledge and behave accordingly. In this way the army creates a society far more patriarchal than it would have been had it not been crushed by this hierarchical steamroller. It is a hierarchy with the exalted warrior at its head and women rendering services at its tail: folding parachutes offering coffee and consolation and providing legitimacy for... harassment.... I thus join the chief rabbi’s call to the state: Don’t draft women into the IDF.

Is this 2009 essay passé? I don’t know but this October 2012 article by Yehuda Shein founder ofIsrael’s “Equality Now” movement seems to indicate that it isn’t:

This is the only army in the world which forces women to enlist when most of them do not perform duties that are directly linked to the country’s security. In essence these women are being forced to work without pay and are sometimes the victims of immoral acts.... And we haven’t even discussed how women are treated in the public sphere. This may be a by-product of the army’s “education”.... Most of the enlisted women do not gain anything from their service. On the contrary some of them leave the army with mental scars and with the sense that they were exploited and wasted valuable time.

Overall in 2012 statistics from the IDF chief of staff’s advisor on Women’s Affairs show that there were approximately 500 complaints of ... harassment or assault from soldiers.

How about the recent report in the Forward that “Israel has one of the most progressive and stringent laws in the world regarding ... harassment — and yet the law does not seem to have influenced workplace norms all that much. According to a report released this month by the Ministry of Trade and Commerce 40% of women inIsrael have experienced ... harassment at work.... Forty percent believe that their workplace is not a safe place regarding ... harassment and 19.2% believe that their work has suffered because of it.” Or this one: “The lack of financial support for girls’ cycling is ... only one part of a much larger double standard involving girls in sports inIsrael. [It is] way behind and is desperate need of some consciousness-raising about women in sports.”

The university. The army. The workplace. The sports arena. It’s rather unlikely that the thoroughgoing discrimination and harassment in these spheres is being perpetrated by chareidi men or that the primary victims are chareidi women. But the last we’ve heard only at the Kosel and nowhere else will the WOWies be persevering in “shocking” others “until they get used to it” and “change their world view.”

Interesting: Just a few weeks ago the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI) released a survey showing that a plurality of respondents supported WOW’s right to do their thing at the Kosel. The poll consisting of a single question focused on WOW’s clashes with police and devoid of any context such as a mention of the multitudes of visitors opposed to their actions or the availability of an alternative space nearby was laughable by the professional standards of American pollsters and still only favored WOW by 48 percent to 38 percent.

But the IDI also noted “the somewhat puzzling finding that support for Women of the Wall was slightly higher among Israeli Jewish men (51.5%) than among women (46%).” Hmm. Could it be that secular Israeli men would prefer WOW to keep busy modeling for their chareidi sisters how to break free of their shackles so long as they leave the deeply chauvinistic secular society alone? And could it be that the less enthusiastic secular women know something about being a woman inIsraeltoday that WOW doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know?