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Epilogue There are women who truly and sincerely aspire and yearn to reach levels of holiness, and closeness to God is good for them. . . . We should pull them in with love and not send them wandering, and ostracize them, and with that send them to graze in foreign fields. —daniel sperber  in nineteenth-century europe, the Jewish world experienced a bizarre gender twist when girls were systematically sent to get well-rounded educations in order to prepare for a life of supporting their future yeshiva-student husbands, but they were forbidden from learning Torah. By contrast, the boys were forbidden to learn secular subjects but were exceedingly knowledgeable about Talmud. What resulted, according to feminist scholar Dr. Debbie Weissman , was a situation in which young Jewish women understood, experienced, and functioned well in the wide world but were treated as ignoramuses, or second-class citizens, in their local Jewish cultures. By the turn of the century, many young women were abandoning religious Judaism in favor of socialism, Marxism, feminism, or any other ideology and lifestyle that would enable them to thrive as intelligent, independent beings. According to Weissman, this trend is what led Sara Shnirer to open up the first religious school for girls, Bais Yaakov, in which girls could take ownership of religious knowledge, and, Shnirer hoped, they would be motivated to stay religious.1 At the time Shnirer was considered heretical, but her vision proved to be revolutionary. When women are empowered , trusted, and well treated, they stay. Otherwise, they find the door. I have been thinking about these trends as I reflect on the impact of this research on women in general and on me personally. There are a lot of parallels between the situation for Jewish women then and now. Today, too, educated, intelligent, independent, and passionate women are stifled by Orthodox culture . They lead double lives, in which they are able to fully function in the secular world but dwell in a religious lifestyle that places them behind the curtain as if they are ignorant, incompetent, or merely bodies. I think it’s only a matter of time before we see trends among young religious women leaving Orthodoxy. 220 t h e m e n ’ s s e c t i o n There is not much research on this.2 The voices of girls’ protest are thus far muted. Women may be already voting with their feet, but we would not even know. Perhaps this explains the persistence of the argument that women don’t seem to care that much. Some do not even protest their status in the synagogue. Or as some informants argued, women don’t even show up on time to the partnership service, so clearly they are not at all interested in feminism. As much as these words seethe with misogyny, it is indisputable that Orthodox women’s protest is not taking the form of their running en masse toward the partnership synagogue. Indeed, in a recent article in Ynet, Efrat Shapira-Rosenberg, a religious columnist in the Judaism department, wrote that she only goes to a partnership service “in my dreams.” “I am of course a feminist,” she declared, “but if I’m to be honest with myself, I am happy not to have all these other obligations of praying three times a day. I don’t know if that’s what I want.” Some talkbacks responded with comments such as, “If that’s the case, you’re not a feminist,” and “What do you expect? Orthodoxy will never change.” What seems clear is that if a woman who is willing to call herself an Orthodox feminist is not going to this service, we may conclude that women are not embracing this particular form of feminist protest in droves. Nevertheless, I think there is a much deeper point here than simply writing off women’s resistance, one that became increasingly clear as I conducted this research. The relationship between Orthodoxy and feminism is more complicated than women running to minyan three times a day on time—acting like men, if you will. There is a whole slew of reasons why women do not come “on time” or perhaps at all—whether it’s that they are still doing the bulk of child care and food preparation on Shabbat, whether they are still recovering from years of alienation and a private resistance that makes reading the paper on Shabbat morning very attractive, or whether they have internalized the message and...

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