Here’s what we’re reading: Orthodox men who join their wives at the mikvah; a writer who’d rather compare Trump to Henry Ford than Adolf Hitler; and a 13-year-old day school kid who knows better than the chief rabbi of Israel.
A new frontier in Jewish feminism has opened up, reports JTA.
Every month, Orthodox Jewish women must take a dip in the mikvah upon completing their menstrual cycle before they can resume physical intimacy with their husbands. But there’s now a growing movement of husbands who accompany their wives to the mikvah and go in with them, making the whole thing a family affair.
“It’s becoming increasingly common,” said Carrie Bornstein, Mayyim Hayyim’s [a pluralistic Boston-area mikvah] executive director. “When we talk about egalitarian practice in Judaism, our minds immediately go to women’s practice. I think it’s exciting and interesting to see men taking on practices that traditionally have been the domain of women.”
Comparisons between Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler
may be satisfying, but they’re not that accurate, says this Salon article. It suggests that we’d be better off comparing Trump to another famous anti-Semite, Henry Ford:
Like Trump, Ford surged to national attention in 1924 because of the country’s deep disenchantment with the “serious” candidates, a sense that party politics was just a corrupt elite trading favors with each other. Trump, like Ford, somehow managed to be an “outsider” and to represent the “common man” despite being incredibly wealthy. And, like Trump, Ford was beloved by his fans because he was perceived as a straight-talker, a truth-teller, someone insulated enough by his wealth he didn’t have to recite polite fictions.
On Dec. 1 Israeli Minister of Education Naftali Bennett
visited the Solomon Schechter School of Manhattan, a Conservative Jewish day school. On Dec. 9, Israeli Chief Rabbi David Lau complained, “If Bennett would have asked my opinion before the visit I would have said to him explicitly, ‘You cannot go somewhere where the education distances Jews from tradition, from the past, and from the future of the Jewish people.’” And now, writing in the Forward, 13-year-old Schechter student Amnon Scharia has a rebuke for the chief rabbi:
While I am not in a position to argue with the Chief Rabbi, I thought people should know more about the way my school embraces Jewish education and values. The guiding principle of my school’s approach to Judaism could be summarized in one word: menschlichkeit. A mensch is a person of honor and integrity, but to Schechter a mensch is much more than that. It is someone who goes out of his way to help others, and who believes, like the Bible says, that you should love your friends as you love yourself. It is someone who supports both themselves and others and reflects their Jewish heritage onto others.