Summary of story from Sky News, December 18, 2011
Women in Jerusalem are facing discrimination because of the growing influence of ultra-religious Jewish leaders, say women’s rights campaigners.
Around a hundred women sang in the city’s streets in protest against an attempt to ban women from singing in public, based on claims made by a few extremist Rabbis that the sound was too sexual for men to hear.
Yakov Halperin, a member of the City Council, said, “It is fine for women to sing to each other but we do not want men exposed to the temptation.”
Despite laws banning segregation, self-imposed gender separation exists in some areas of the city. Women are often expected to sit at the back of buses (see WVoN story), have separate entrances to shops and are allocated different hours at medical facilities.
While such practices are generally found only in ultra-observant areas, women’s groups claim they are part of a creeping marginalisation of women. They cite the growing trend among advertising agencies to use only images of men in campaigns.
Israel has prided itself on women’s equality. In 1969, for example, Golda Meir was Prime Minister while Britain had not yet passed equal pay laws.
But recently, some religious male soldiers have boycotted events at which female soldiers might be singing.
Liberal rabbis are backing the women’s groups. Rabbi Uri Ayalon said: “What we’re fighting against is a few extremists who are trying to distort Judaism. The faith is all about equality.”
Seems like its a world wide trend of diminishing equality and reinstating discrimination against women.
I absolutely agree. But if we criticize nations such as Israel or Egypt or religions it is immediately classed as racist, and we can’t have that now, can we…….
The moral equivalency that so often goes hand in hand with liberalism drives me nuts.
Its known as discrimination, the liberals just think women are lower in the food chain than Israelis or Egyptian men.
It’s not just the accusation of racism that shuts down debate in the case of Israel. There’s a few factors at work; yes, antisemitism can come up, but the willingness to see Israel as ‘just like us’ as opposed to the ‘different’ Arab states that surround it can often blind us to inequalities within a country we often see as an unproblematic ally.
There’s a lot of myths within Israeli national identity about the place of women within Israeli society that I’m hoping to look into a bit more as part of my thesis (if anyone wants to chat more about this, find my page in the co-editors section and feel free to get in touch on twitter).
Orthodox judaism is thoroughly discriminatory, and largely gets a pass for fear of anti-semitism. The general acceptance of beth din courts in the UK is highlighted by the defenders of sharia courts, when in fact neither have any place in our legal system. If the inequality at the heart of orthodoxy is being laid bare by the actions of the ultra-orthodox themselves, that may not be a bad thing at all.