Guest Post by: Laura

About a couple weeks ago, a blog-post about Boro Park written by Meghan, a non-Jewish Boro Park resident, was making the rounds, either via links on some j-blogs or by email forwarding. I thought the post painted a very unflattering picture of Boro Parkers, but that didn’t concern me much. For one thing, everyone’s entitled to his/her opinion, including a negative one about Boro Park people; and for another, there *are* unfavorable things one can say about Boro Park, as well as about Chassidim, which is basically what BP is comprised of. My gripe, which I voiced in my comments on this blog, concerned the obvious inaccuracies in Meghan’s story. Of course, it wasn’t merely the fact that she’d done a lazy job of reporting the facts; the post was her personal writeup and if her observational skills are seriously lacking, that’s her own concern, especially as an aspiring writer. What irked me was that her apocryphal descriptions stemmed from the general stereotype of Chassidim as a misogynistic people who ignore or mistreat women in their day-to-day lives. Implicit in this stereotype is the belief that Chassidic women are meek, subservient, submissive, under the control of their domineering husbands and/or men in general. Despite the blatant falsehood of this claim, the stereotype continues to be perpetuated, not least by innocent writings such as Meghan’s.

In response to my comments on this blog, I received a few private emails from acquaintances who wanted to know what my beef with Meghan was, and why I was so irritated by her post. All of them (Meghan, too, it seems) assumed that I’d taken the post personally for some reason. To me, this assumption was/is astounding. Can one not take issue with a topic from an objective standpoint? Would I have to be personally insulted by a remark or action or attitude in order to protest against it? Does that mean I cannot feel outraged by the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment, just because I’m white?

There would, of course, have been nothing wrong if I’d taken personal offense at what I viewed as an insulting description of a community I am part of. But in truth, that was/is not the case. I have chosen to write this post because I abhor stereotypes, particularly when they are untrue. The following, then, is my view on this issue. I welcome any dissenting comments.

Judaism, like every major religion, is patriarchal. Actually, most societies, including western society, are patriarchal. Still, when you walk on the street in Manhattan and see a jeans-clad woman pushing a double-stroller, you don’t generally think, Poor subservient woman, how repressive her life must be at the beck and call of her chauvinist husband! And if a man lets a door slam in your face, you’re more apt to think, What an idiot! than You can tell he thinks women are second-class citizens. But substitute the jeans for a skirt and wig, and make the man Chassidic, and presto! Your first thought is about sexism.

To truly understand how Chassidism (or any group, but this post is about Chassidim) functions in its day-to-day routine, you have to differentiate between theory and practice, and separate the formal (rabbinic) aspects of Judaism from its social and familial workings.

In theory, Orthodox Judaism, and by extension Chassidism, holds that the man is the master of the household. (Yes, I know wives must be accorded respect and love and sexual fulfillment, but Judaism’s premise is still that man is head.) In practice, however, Chassidic wives are as likely (perhaps “more likely” is the accurate phrase here) as their husbands to hold the reins in the household. Decisions about schooling for the kids, about when and where to spend vacations, about how household money is spent, etc., are usually made as a team, with the wife often having the bigger say. When a couple gets married, the boy usually (in about 90% of the cases would be my guess) comes to live in the community the girl grew up in, and he is expected to adjust accordingly. Families who go to bungalow colonies for the summer generally go with a group composed of the wife’s friends, not the husband’s. And if women are expected to have and raise a number of children (an exhausting job, to be sure, and a probable source of the above-mentioned stereotype), men are expected to financially support all these children.

(A note about family size: If a woman decides she wants a break from childbearing and tells a rabbi she can’t handle having another kid, the rabbi will almost certainly give her dispensation for birth control. But let a man try telling a rabbi he needs a break from having children because he can’t afford the expense, and find me a rabbi who won’t tell him, “Der eibishter vet helfen,” and encourage him to simply have more faith.)

In respect to the formal vs. social aspects of Judaism, the formal rabbinic structures are undeniably patriarchal. A female has way less halachic obligations than a male, and she is afforded no official status or “honors” in either the shuls or in the ceremonial parts of Judaism. (Personally, I do not know of a single Chassidic woman who gives a damn about this, but I know scores of men who wish they’d have less obligations.) And though feminists have used this point to condemn Orthodox Judaism, the reality is that most people are only truly affected by the social/familial aspects, by how they are treated in their day-to-day lives.

This post is already longer than I planned it to be; otherwise, I would list scores of ways in which chassidic girls/women are favored from the social perspective: their comparative freedom during their teenage years; the better secular education; the customary expectation of financial support, yet the freedom to work if they wish; and on and on. I do not have to iterate, because it’s obvious to anyone who’s been on the streets of Boro Park, that Chassidic women own businesses and shops, and deal assertively and confidently with vendors or business associates.

This is why I find it implausible that a Chassidic man would nonchalantly cut in line in front of any woman and not expect her to protest. It is also why I find the idea that a shopkeeper would deliberately ignore a female customer not a little preposterous.

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*For a basic overview of the evolvement of Orthodox Women in the workplace, check out Professor Menachem Friedman’s article on this topic. Note that the article focuses on Israeli, not American women, and was written about twenty years ago, so much has changed since then.

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