Gender Trouble

Suddenly, it seems, gender segregation is everywhere in Israel—buses, army bases, Jerusalem sidewalks, Beit Shemesh schoolyards and, above all, the front pages.  What is going on here?  Why is all this happening now?

Let's begin with the second question.  "This"—that is, efforts by some sectors of Israeli Orthodoxy to set terms for the public presence of women that are very different from those of the secular majority—has been underway for years.  Indeed, the better question is, what has taken mainstream Israel (if there still is such a thing) so long to take notice?

There are various trends at work here, but we can make one large assertion: The center no longer holds, and one of the most volatile seams along which the fault lines run is gender.

Let's start with the buses.  In the late 1990s, at the request of some Haredim, the Transportation Ministry created bus lines, serving ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods and cities, on which women would enter from and sit in the back, on an officially "voluntary" basis.  The lines were called "mehadrin" or "beautified," the talmudic term for religious practices combining special piety with an aesthetic touch.  They were deemed legally permissible because Israeli law allows discrimination when it is necessary to provide access to public services and does not harm the common weal.  All the fundamental questions (necessary? common weal?) were left wide open. 

The lines grew to number around 50.  Their biggest problem was the violence, verbal and sometimes physical, regularly meted out to religious and secular women who, for whatever reason, entered and sat in the front.  In 2007 one victim—Naomi Ragen, a well-known Orthodox novelist who is, not coincidentally, American-born—went to court, represented by the Reform Movement's Center for Religious Pluralism.  Under orders by Israel's High Court to issue a formal report, the Transportation Ministry concluded in October, 2009 that the segregated buses were illegal.  The Transportation Minister tried to distance himself from the report and, for months, pleaded for more time.  The Court finally ruled that the segregated lines could proceed—on an entirely voluntary basis, with clear signs to that effect.  The lines still run, at times through force.

Next, Beit Shemesh.  Situated near ultra-Orthodoxy's holy cities of Jerusalem and Bnei Brak, it has attracted growing numbers of Israeli Haredim.  They have joined the traditional but religiously moderate Mizrahim who arrived when it was a hardscrabble development town and the American Modern Orthodox, who began arriving in the 1980s.  Many Haredi arrivals were from Jerusalem's Meah Shearim, a venerable and veritable nuclear reactor of Haredi ideology, zealotry, and occasional violence.  Ultra-Orthodox cities have been growing in Israel since the mid-1990s.  But in Beit Shemesh, the ultra-Orthodox urban space abuts dissenting populations, religious Zionists as well as American Haredim who are changing Israeli ultra-Orthodoxy, both anathema to the zealots.

Religious zealotry has a long history in Israel.  In the 1920s and 1930s, Abraham Isaac Kook was dismembered in effigy, denounced as a Christian missionary, and doused with buckets of water in the streets.  Rhetorical violence is a staple of Haredi discourse; indeed, it has become an art form.  But the mounting violence against women, no doubt reflecting sincere conviction (not to mention the need for enemies and the bored young Haredim unsuited for yeshiva life), also seems to bespeak increasing internal tensions.

Israel's Haredim are increasing (some predict they will be in the majority by 2030) and are no longer an enclave.  Though traditionalist, they have internalized modern aspirations to remake society and strategies of ideological mobilization. Far from monolithic, they have they have their own internal kulturkampfen.  Haredi singers perform before mixed audiences.  Haredim serve in special military units—and often face community ostracism.  Haredi women have made extraordinary educational and occupational strides.  The response by some has been to send them, literally, to the back of the bus—and push them out of view elsewhere. 

The Haredi-controlled Health Ministry has forbidden women to appear at ceremonies honoring these same women.  Female community board members have been forced to sit behind mehitzot (partitions) at meetings.  There have been attempts to enforce separate hours for men and women in government offices. It took a petition to the High Court to get women candidates' campaign posters onto Jerusalem's buses.  Egged and its advertising firm were sued last week because of the onerous security deposit they require—a guarantee against likely vandalism, they say—from companies that use women's faces in bus advertising.  Other lawsuits (including one co-filed by this writer) have challenged separate sidewalks for men and women.  In conversation and on Haredi websites, many Haredim oppose forcible segregation and the accompanying violence.  But they have almost no collective voice and no support from Haredi leadership.  

The recent furors over women's singing in the Army come from a different, less obvious direction.  Increasing numbers of IDF soldiers and officers are so-called "Hardali" (Haredi Dati Leumi).  Unlike Haredim, they participate in the military and favor the idea of the Jewish state—but reject its integration into Western culture.  One element of their program is sexual modesty, or tsniut—partially for Haredi-like aims of male-female separation and the repression of public expression of sexuality, but also as a marker of national identity and a means of channeling romanticism in the direction of the sacred.

Both Haredi and Hardali countercultures seek to maintain the crucial gender divide while dissolving Israeli society's boundaries between the religiously public and private, between religious and mundane.  Indeed, the surrounding Israeli society has been a key, if silent, player here.

First, Haredim and Hardalim seeking an ideology and identity distinct from the surrounding society find in gender a powerful source of difference.  Second, their excesses are in part a reaction to the freewheeling sexuality of secular Israel, whose socio-cultural norms are more European than American.  Third, secular politicians and secular Israel at large have until just recently been thunderingly indifferent.  These battles have been waged, in court and elsewhere, by lonely groups of feminists, Reform Jews, and moderate religious Zionists.  They have been met with incomprehension by journalists, politicians, and other secular elites who see the mehadrin bus lines simply as political spoils and who, from the Prime Minister on down, have buried their heads in the sand for the sake of coalition politics.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton changed all that when she talked about the situation at the Brookings Institution.  The Prime Minister and the political class now understand that they have a problem.  Yet they may not understand that it is more than a public relations problem. At stake here is the constitution of Israeli public space and civil society.

In Israel's early decades, for better or worse, the Mapai Labor Zionist establishment constituted both the state's ruling body and society's symbolic and civic-religious center.  Mapai, with its flaws, offered a governing ethos and a plausible interpretation of Jewish history and identity.  Its political eclipse beginning in the 1970s, then its fissile social and cultural collapse in the ensuing decades, left Israeli society increasingly fragmented.  One casualty has been the idea of a public, civic space, open to and shared equally by all.  Major political parties lay less claim than before to representing the entire public and avowedly sectoral parties are growing.  The creation of entirely Haredi cities, largely in the territories, has further eroded the idea of neutral civic space.

In that respect, the public outcry galvanized by the broadcast of ultra-Orthodox thugs tormenting Naama Margolese is of a piece with last summer's economic protests.  In both cases, many people, particularly in Israeli middle-class society, who could choose to live elsewhere but who serve in the army, pay taxes, and still feel Zionism in their bones, have shown that they feel the common weal has been sold off in pieces—and that they want it back.

Americans may be astonished that we need to debate whether women should sit in the back of the bus.  But in Israel, this debate, unwelcome as it is, can still be a good thing.  Proponents of Israeli civil society, religious and secular, must demonstrate that they can mount a principled defense of their core values and their conception of the public sphere. 

In this brave new networked world, passively following MacWorld's dictates du jour is as demoralizing and useless as a return to an imagined Haredi idyll in the shtetl that never was.  Faced by a flood of emails, images, videos, status updates, and tweets, which may reshape not only our communications but our inner worlds, we—not just Haredim or Hardalim—should renew the indispensable Jewish value of tsniut.  It teaches that I must contain some of my own presence, not to erase the others but to let them, him or her, be and flourish.