Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
About damn time! In February of last year I posted about Renee Rabinowitz’s gender discrimination lawsuit against El Al airlines for “asking” her to vacate a seat next to an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man who objected to sitting next to a woman. Rabinowitz, a retired Israeli psychologist, was upset that she had to move to accommodate religious misogyny. As the Times wrote then:
Ms. Rabinowitz was comfortably settled into her aisle seat in the business-class section on El Al Flight 028 from Newark to Tel Aviv in December when, as she put it, “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up.”
The man was assigned the window seat in her row. But, like many ultra-Orthodox male passengers, he did not want to sit next to a woman, seeing even inadvertent contact with the opposite sex as verboten under the strictest interpretation of Jewish law. [JAC: perhaps an infelicitous use of a German word!] Soon, Ms. Rabinowitz said, a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat, up front, closer to first class.
Reluctantly, Ms. Rabinowitz, an impeccably groomed 81-year-old grandmother who walks with a cane because of bad knees, agreed.
“Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” she recalled in a recent interview in her elegantly appointed apartment in a fashionable neighborhood of Jerusalem.
“For me this is not personal,” Ms. Rabinowitz added. “It is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”
Rabinowitz asked for 50,000 shekels (about $14,000 US) in damages, and was represented by the Israeli Religious Action Center, a legal and reform organization run by progressive Jews. El Al defended itself by saying it wasn’t discriminating against women because it would also ask a man to move if seated next to an Orthodox woman who objected to male cooties. But that’s still gender discrimination, and the judge awarded Rabinowitz 6500 shekels ($1800). More important, because El Al was found to violate Israel anti-discrimination laws, the airline agreed to never again ask a passenger to move seats based on a request that involved gender.
These kinds of requests, and the attempts of airlines to accommodate them, are becoming increasingly common. They’re sexist, no matter which sex objects to the other, and it’s time to stop them. I suspect this ruling will go a long way to that end, though it’s not clear whether U.S. airlines—who have also been guilty of enabling such misogyny—will now change their behavior.
This is becoming so common that it barely rates a mention, but what bothers me is the compliance of female passengers. Yes, it’s happened again: according to many venues, including Haaretz and the Jewish Chronicle (see also the Daily Mail if you want to go downscale), a group of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men (“Haredis”), on an EasyJet flight from Tel Aviv to London refused to sit next to women after they boarded the plane. That caused considerable consternation, which was resolved when some compliant women offered to move:
Eventually, after a 15 minute stand-off, where the men were said to have blocked the aisles, some of the female passengers offered to move from their seats in order for the men to agree to sit down.
The passenger told the JC: “A group of around 10 ultra-Orthodox men caused absolute bedlam on the flight.
“It was infuriating to witness both for passengers and for the stewards, who tried but failed to control them.
“At one point there were about 10 men in black hats blocking the aisles and refusing to sit down.
“It was impossible for the stewards to get these people to listen to them.
“When some of the women got up and moved seats to ensure that the plane got to take off, some of these men never even thought about saying ‘thank you’.
That wasn’t the end of it:
Another Haredi — ultra-Orthodox — passenger plugged his cellphone into a USB port on the crew control panel in the stewards’ galley area in order to charge it, causing the plane’s exit lights to illuminate and panicking the staff until they realized the problem, according to the Chronicle.
What finally happened? The cops came onto the plane when it landed at Luton, and escorted the men off the plane. There were no charges brought, and that was the end of it. But David Israel at The Jewish Press has beefed about the police, saying that the escort “humiliated the men” and made them do the “perp walk.” That article also seems to exculpate the men:
Here’s what happened next: the women next to whom the Haredi men refused to sit were nice enough (or practical enough) to move to different seats and, miraculously, the men in the black hats ended their “disruptive behavior.”
There’s no grousing that the men were trying to enforce their religious dictates on others in a secular space.
Yeah, according to author Israel, all that needs to happen in such cases is that some nice people should accept the misogyny of these men and, poof, everything will be all right!
What should have happened is that the police should have been called to board the plane in Tel Aviv and remove the men who didn’t want to sit next to women. Nobody should have to be inconvenienced because of the ludicrous fear of Haredis that they might—shudder—actually touch a woman. That could cause cooties! They can certainly practice their sexism in their own communities, but have no right to do so on a plane. Every company, including EasyJet, should have this policy: anybody refusing to sit next to a woman should just be removed from the plane, period. No woman should even be asked to move.
The perp walk was simply at the wrong end of the journey. It should have been at the beginning.
Haredi men in flight Photo Credit: Yaakov Naumi/Flash90; from The Jewish Press piece
Dennis Prager is a wealthy conservative author, speaker, and broadcaster, who also runs a website, Prager University, featuring short “instructional” videos. For some reason I don’t understand, he manages to lure some big names to do those videos, including George Will and (as I recall) Ayaan Hirsi Ali. I suspect the $ are a lure. The videos are conservative, pro-captialism, pro-religion (so long as it’s not Islam), and pro-free-market. I avoid the site.
Last Tuesday, Prager jumped the shark, publishing on his website a screed called “How is the Godless West Working Out?” As you might guess, he thinks it isn’t; in fact, he thinks that godlessness will doom us to perdition. Prager’s screed sounds for all the world like the ravings of Pat Robertson. If you were attracted to Prager University before, have a look at these excerpts:
The West has been in moral decline since World War I, the calamity that led to World War II and the death of national identity and Christianity in most of Europe.
There has always been one exception: the United States. But now that is ending. The seeds of America’s decline have been sown since the beginning of the 20th century, and they came to fruition with the post-World War II generation, the baby boomers.
Radical and aggressive secularism and atheism have replaced religion in virtually every school and throughout American public life.
. . . The prices that we Americans and Europeans are paying for creating the first godless societies in recorded history amount to civilizational suicide. Boys and girls are not to be referred to as boys and girls; Western elites dismiss national identity as protofascism; the belief that moral truth exists has been destroyed and replaced by feelings and opinions; fewer people are marrying; and more people live alone than at any time in American history.
Seriously? Civilizational suicide? I’d suggest Prager, a practicing Jew, read Steve Pinker’s The Better Angels of our Nature, which makes a pretty strong case that hand-in-hand with the rise of secularism—and probably partly because of secularism—Western society is getting better.
And the man is obsessed with sexuality:
Western European countries have become empty, soulless places. They are pretty and appear materially secure (for now), but they stand for almost nothing (except “multiculturalism” and “tolerance”). They have replaced a Jewish population that overwhelmingly wanted to assimilate with a Muslim population that does not want to. And nearly all European countries are headed to Greece-like insolvency as fewer and fewer workers pay enough in taxes to support those who collect welfare, and as tensions with their Muslim inhabitants increase.
But the good news is that now, beginning with Italy and New York, citizens can watch each other masturbate or urinate in public.
There is no way to prove that God exists. But what is provable is what happens when societies stop believing in God: They commit suicide.
The stereotype of Jews is that they’re highly educated, but of course that doesn’t hold for the ultra-Orthodox, whose females often don’t go to college and whose males spend nearly all their time studying the Torah, neglecting any other subject. It’s a waste of time and effort, but that’s religion, Jake.
Now Israel, to its shame, has enabled this neglect of education by approving the dropping of “core subjects” in Orthodox schools, allowing nearly full-time teaching of religion. These Orthodox can now remain blissfully ignorant of math and science (most of them already are creationists). As the Times of Israel reports:
Jewish studies are more important than learning mathematics and science, Education Minister Naftali Bennett said on Monday night.
Speaking in Caesarea at a conference of the TALI Education Fund, which provides a pluralistic Jewish Studies program for public schools, Bennett stressed the importance of Jewish education over secular subjects.
“Learning about Judaism and excellence in the subject is more important in my eyes than mathematics and the sciences,” said Bennett, “and it is hard for me to say that.”
The comments come months after controversy erupted over a government decision to drop its demand that ultra-Orthodox schools teach science, math and other core subjects in order to receive increased state funding.
Bennett had originally pushed against dropping the core subjects, but later bowed to coalition pressures.
“Even though [Israel] is a high-tech superpower, an exporter of knowledge and innovation to the world, we must [also] be a spiritual superpower and export spiritual knowledge to the world. This is the next chapter of our Zionist vision,” Bennett said. “In this way we will return to be a light to the nations. ‘For out of Zion shall go forth Torah and the word of God from Jerusalem.’”
What a pile of malarkey! No, Israel doesn’t need to be a spiritual superpower, especially since many Jews there are like me: atheists that are Jewish by culture alone. And it’s not just math and science that will be neglected:
Last month the Knesset rolled back a law that aimed to promote broader education by reducing funding to schools that did not teach core subjects. Bennett had initially supported the law, which was submitted by the Yesh Atid party and would have cut funding for ultra-Orthodox schools that do not devote a minimum number of weekly hours to core secular subjects such as math, English, and science.
However, in their coalition agreements following the 2015 elections, the ultra-Orthodox parties demanded the curriculum law be dropped. Bennett’s Education Ministry was then instrumental in amending the law. Instead of requiring the Haredi schools to teach 10 to 11 hours per week of secular studies, as the Yesh Atid law stipulated, the new bill gives Bennett discretionary power in funding those institutions.
And so, we have an advanced democratic country creating a parasitic subclass of those who contribute nothing to their society or to human knowledge in general—unless you consider “shining the light of Zion on other nations.” But they don’t even do that, for the ultra-Orthodox are notoriously reclusive.
Since I’ve had a lick at Catholics and Muslims this week, it’s only fair to go after the religion of my ancestors—the Jews. Or at least one branch of Orthodox Jews, the Hasidim, a sect that started in Eastern Europe in the 18th century.
It’s a scandal among Jews— traditionally reputed to put such an emphasis on education—that some Orthodox sects often discourage any but religious education for men, and any education for women. The results: undereducated women, unsuited for many jobs, and families forced to rely on welfare since men spend their time in religious studies while women, who are largely breeding stock among Hasidim, have to stay home with the children. You can read more about the dire consequences of these practices, which of course come directly from religious tradition, in a recent New York Times article by Gina Bellafante, “In Brooklyn, stifling higher learning among Hasidic women.”
In Brooklyn, one sect of Hasidim, the Satmar, have recently made their little-education policy toward women even more regressive:
Among the Satmar in Brooklyn, use of the internet is condemned and secular education is considered of little use. In recent years, though, it became the fashion among some Satmar women to pursue special-education degrees after high school, typically online or through religious colleges. The women often go to work not in philosophically suspect places like Greenwich Village, but in schools within their community. Now, even that minor advance has been rolled back; some Satmar leaders issued a decree proclaiming that the practice would no longer be tolerated. A letter from the United Talmudical Academy, the governing body for a consortium of schools, meant for girls entering the 12th grade and their parents, stated that they “shouldn’t God forbid take a degree which is according to our sages, dangerous and damaging.”
The letter went on to say that girls shouldn’t learn college subjects and that those who refused to obey would be denied positions as teachers. Leaders, they said, had a responsibility to protect the religious educational system from outside influences. The notion is not an invention of the Hasidim, Allan Nadler, the director of Jewish studies at Drew University and a scholar of Hasidic practice, explained. The Mishna, a multivolume compilation of Jewish law that predates the Talmud, contains a prohibition against “external books.” Still, Mr. Nadler maintained, the recent decree reflects what he has observed over the years as a deepening fear of wider society.
The Talmudical Academy did not return calls seeking comment. [Surprise!]
That’s ridiculous, and they should be embarrassed that their “sages” stifle women’s ambitions in this way. It’s even worse because New York politicians cater to this enforced ignorance because they need the support of the powerful and numerous Jewish voting bloc. Here’s just one of thousands of stories in the Naked City (my emphasis in the following):
Many of [the Hasadim on welfare], Libelle Polaki, an exile from the ultra-Orthodox community in Brooklyn, told me, will resort to selling things online, which must be regarded as its own kind of sacrilege given the prohibitions against certain technologies. At 28, Ms. Polaki expects to graduate from the Borough of Manhattan Community College in December. This semester she is taking six classes and auditing two others. At a cafe in Williamsburg psychographically distant from the Williamsburg in which she spent part of her life, she spoke of the hard work it took to get where she is.
Having suffered through an arranged marriage, she said, she was forced to pay off her husband, with a sum of approximately $18,000, to get divorced; a philanthropist helped her come up with the money. She held several menial jobs after high school that made her miserable, one working for Satmar leaders doing secretarial work; one in a matzo factory; and another in a group home for adults with developmental disabilities, where she was fired, she told me, after reporting abuses by the staff.
“They didn’t teach us anything in high school so I didn’t know anything, no Shakespeare or anything like that, no science,” she said. “I felt like a loser and I felt I wanted more out of life.” Growing up she was told not to go to libraries but she sneaked away to them anyway and at home read anything she could, including cereal boxes and junk mail because there was little else. At 26, she got her high school equivalency diploma and began her college studies. Over the summer, she studied philosophy in Greece. Two of her grandparents speak to her; two don’t. The friends she left behind, she said, are jealous of her freedom.
Ms. Polaki plans to apply to four-year colleges and hopes to attend an Ivy League school.
Libelle Polaki, 28. Credit Nicole Craine for The New York Times
Polaki, at enormous financial and psychological expense, managed to free herself from this repressive community. But most other women are trapped, shackled by religious dogma and the passel of children mandated by that dogma. The story of Polaki reading cereal boxes and junk mail because she was denied education almost brings me to tears.
All the Abrahamic religions repress women’s ambitions to some degree, but we usually think of Islam as being the most repressive. Don’t forget, however, about some sects of Orthodox Jews, whose denial of education to women is ignored to nearly the same extent as are the restrictions imposed by Islam. I can think of few worse things in life than to have your ambition smothered by blankets of scripture.
Pious Muslims and hyper-Orthodox Jews share one tendency: various sects of each faith see men as hand grenades of of lust, ready to undergo a seminal explosion should they see an uncovered ankle, rosy mouth, or stray wisp of hair. Women are to be covered to retain their “modesty,” which means to avoid inciting the ubiquitous and uncontrollable concupiscence of the male.
Devout Muslim men can’t shake hands with women; neither can hyper-Orthodox Jews. In neither group can men dance with women, for that could incite lust. Many Muslim women can’t go out without a guardian, while hyper-orthodox Jews won’t sit next to women on planes. (There are of course exceptions.)
But in one way the Muslims are savvier than the hyper-Orthodox Jews. As we see in this video in which Oprah Winfrey experiences a Sabbath in a Hasidic Jewish home, the Jewish women, like hijabi Muslims, cover their hair. And they do it for the same reasons—for modesty!
But what do the Jews do? They cut their hair short and then cover their hair with—more hair! Wigs! Wigs undoubtedly made from the hair of other women! Not only that, but many of them, like this one, are attractive wigs! Even Oprah notices that.
Now tell me, if you’re covering your hair for modesty, and to avoid attracting men who aren’t your husband, why on earth would you cover your hair with an attractive wig that could attract even more men?
Such is the silliness of faith, and its tendency, since the days of Eve, to cast women as temptresses. In the case of Hasidic Jews, it’s a big FAIL.
Thanks to several readers, staring with Greg Mayer, for sending me a link to this story from yesterday’s New York Times. It involves, as we’ve seen several times before, an Orthodox Jew refusing to sit next to a woman on an airplane, for that might lead, G*d forbid, to touching, which is forbidden (see the religious explanation here, which is based not on pollution but sexuality).
The twist on this story is that it is about a Jewish woman, retired psychologist Renee Rabinowitz, 81, suing an Israeli airline, El Al, for sex discrimination: being removed from her seat next to an Orthodox Jewish man. The complainant:
Renee Rabinowitz at her home in Jerusalem. Photo: Uriel Sinai for The New York Times
The details:
Ms. Rabinowitz was comfortably settled into her aisle seat in the business-class section on El Al Flight 028 from Newark to Tel Aviv in December when, as she put it, “this rather distinguished-looking man in Hasidic or Haredi garb, I’d guess around 50 or so, shows up.”
The man was assigned the window seat in her row. But, like many ultra-Orthodox male passengers, he did not want to sit next to a woman, seeing even inadvertent contact with the opposite sex as verboten under the strictest interpretation of Jewish law. Soon, Ms. Rabinowitz said, a flight attendant offered her a “better” seat, up front, closer to first class.
Reluctantly, Ms. Rabinowitz, an impeccably groomed 81-year-old grandmother who walks with a cane because of bad knees, agreed.
“Despite all my accomplishments — and my age is also an accomplishment — I felt minimized,” she recalled in a recent interview in her elegantly appointed apartment in a fashionable neighborhood of Jerusalem.
“For me this is not personal,” Ms. Rabinowitz added. “It is intellectual, ideological and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”
This phenomenon is increasingly frequent (see this article in last year’s Times). And now for the first time, the Israeli Religious Action Center (IRAC) is suing El Al airlines for sex discrimination. The airline denies discrimination, but uses weasel words:
“We needed a case of a flight attendant being actively involved,” explained the group’s [IRAC’s] director, Anat Hoffman, “to show that El Al has internalized the commandment, ‘I cannot sit next to a woman.’ ”
An El Al spokeswoman said in a statement that “any discrimination between passengers is strictly prohibited.”
“El Al flight attendants are on the front line of providing service for the company’s varied array of passengers,” the statement said. “In the cabin, the attendants receive different and varied requests and they try to assist as much as possible, the goal being to have the plane take off on time and for all the passengers to arrive at their destination as scheduled.”
Translation: we need to cater to the sexist request of male Orthodox Jews because they’ll delay the plane if their requests are denied.
The question, then, is whether Ms. Rabinowitz was forcibly moved, against her will, and whether she was clearly told why the move was taking place. According to Rabinowitz, the move was not completely voluntary, though the reason was given—but only when she asked. (I love her comment at the beginning of the second paragraph):
By her account, the flight attendant had a brief conversation in Hebrew with her ultra-Orthodox seatmate-to-be, which she could not understand, then persuaded Ms. Rabinowitz to come and see the “better” seat, at the end of a row of three.
“There were two women seated there,” she said. “I thought, ‘Oy, if they are going to talk all night I am not going to be happy.’” She asked the flight attendant if he was suggesting the switch because the man next to her wanted her to move, she said, “and he said ‘yes’ without any hesitation.”
. . . Still, Ms. Rabinowitz said she felt further insulted because the attendant had tried to mislead her.
And so Rabinowitz sued:
A lawyer for the religious action group wrote a letter to El Al last month saying that Ms. Rabinowitz had felt pressured by the attendant and accusing El Al of illegal discrimination. It argued that a request not to be seated next to a woman differed from other requests to move, say, to sit near a relative or a friend, because it was by nature degrading. The lawyer demanded 50,000 shekels, about $13,000, in compensation for Ms. Rabinowitz.
The airline offered, instead, a $200 discount on Ms. Rabinowitz’s next El Al flight. It insisted that there was no gender discrimination on El Al flights, that the flight attendant had made it clear to Ms. Rabinowitz that she was in no way obligated to move, and that she had changed seats without argument.
I suppose, then, that the case turns on whether Rabinowitz was indeed told that she could stay in her seat, and whether she was clearly given (without asking) the reason she was being asked to move. Still, although requests to changes seats are made all the time so that family members or friends can sit together, to me this falls into a different class: it is catering to religious sentiments and is discriminatory against a class of people.
If anybody should have been asked to move, it would be the man, but presumably there were no seats available that weren’t (G*d forbid) next to women. I am on the fence about whether such requests should even be made by El Al flight attendants, but in general think not. Would a flight attendant cater to a racist by asking a black person to move because the white person didn’t want to sit next to him? I suppose requests for voluntary movement are legal, but when those are based on sexism or bigotry, perhaps they should be banned, or the complainer told to move.
At any rate, I like Rabinowitz’s attitude, which shows the idiocy of Orthodox Jewish law.
Ms. Rabinowitz has since had time to ponder. She said her son told her that “this whole idea that you cannot sit next to a woman is bogus.” She cited an eminent Orthodox scholar, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, who counseled that it was acceptable for a Jewish man to sit next to a woman on a subway or a bus so long as there was no intention to seek sexual pleasure from any incidental contact.
“When did modesty become the sum and end all of being a Jewish woman?” Ms. Rabinowitz asked. Citing examples like the biblical warrior Deborah, the matriarch Sarah and Queen Esther, she noted: “Our heroes in history were not modest little women.”
It’s time for Orthodox males to suck it up and stop being asses. Inadvertent touching of a woman sitting next to you is under no circumstances a sexual act, and almost certainly not the precursor to one. The religious principle of “no touching” is not supportable when it inconveniences someone in a public situation, and in so doing discriminating against half of humanity.
Weigh in below: should El Al even try to accommodate such requests?
