What's it like to be a woman working in a Jewish organization?
#MeToo is about more than sexual abuse. It's also about the cultures of discrimination, gender abuse, and the underlying behaviors that enable the REALLY bad stuff to happen.
This text is the introduction I wrote to a chapter about Gender Abuse in my forthcoming forthcoming book, When Rabbis Abuse: Understanding the dynamics of high profile sexual abuse in the Jewish community. I would love to hear your thoughts and feedback.
In September 1998, I started my very first job in the Jewish communal world since completing my Master’s Degree in Jewish education – and I was excited. I was 28 years old, a mother of three finally getting out into the world, and eager to embark on work as a research assistant at this prominent Jewish foundation, the beginning of my journey to serve the Jewish community in which I was born and bred. On my first day. I opened the door to the office, walked in, and said to the receptionist, “Good morning!”
“SHHHHH!!!!!!” The receptionist replied, in a panic.
I was stunned. I looked around, wondering what was going on. All the secretaries were sitting at their desks staring at me.
I didn’t understand. The receptionist turned to one of the women in the foyer and said, “Didn’t anyone give her the talk?”
What talk? I wondered, getting nervous.
“The talk”, it turned out, was a list of instructions of how the women of the organization were expected to behave when the CEO was in the house. The CEO, a 70-something professor emeritus and one of only three men in the building, had expectations. That included quiet at all times, every piece of paper in its place, and the women around serving his every need. The kitchen was stocked with the brand of juice he liked, the supply closed was neatly piled with the specific folders that he liked, and we all walked around without shoes when he was around. Secretaries were fired for sticking the wrong Scotch tape on the dividers in the binders used for board meetings. The wrong Scotch tape.
While everyone frantically complied – including me, so-called “research assistant” with my shiny new Master’s Degree, fretting over the correct alignment of binder dividers – we would regularly hear him yelling two floors upstairs. His second-in-command whom I’ll call Marjorie, a very well-educated and well-regarded woman who both got the brunt of his fury and also acted as his great defender to the world, would sometimes come downstairs and give us orders and instructions as per his demands. That was how the office worked.
Of course, when VIPs arrived – academics, scholars, rabbis, donors, or the Foundation’s founder – none of this was apparent. We all scuttled around serving not only the Professor – who was always charming and gracious when outsiders were watching – but also the VIPs. It was both exciting to have people around who were considered “important”, even if I personally had never heard of them, but it was also nerve-wracking. At any moment, a misstep could cost you your job. I once screwed up by answering a request of one of the VIP guests. She had asked if her hotel had a pool, and I said that it did not, which was the truth. Marjory found out and ripped in to me for not finding a way to move her to another location where she would have pool access. My position survived that error, but I was on thin ice. The whole time. Me and my fancy degree.
I kept at it, in this demeaning, scary, go-nowhere, all-fluff position in this highbrow foundation named for the guy whose name is on buildings all around the Jewish world. This was my first “real” job in Jewish communal life, the first one since I became a mother and finished my degree, and I didn’t know what to compare it to. Plus, I both wanted and needed this work. Mostly, I had no framework in which to understand how wrong this all was. Even though it was awful from literally the second I walked in there, I could not imagine quitting a job on the first day. So I stayed – for four years.
This was not a case of sexual abuse or even harassment. It was just every-day, run-of-the-mill, toxic workplace culture. And the entire place was infected with it.
Read the rest at Conversations with my Body: Essays on my Life as a Jewish Woman
I miss my friend Chaya. Women need friends like her.
It’s been exactly a month since my friend and colleague, Dr. Chaya Gorsetman died, and I still miss her. I can hear her voice in my head. When she would call me up with this urgency, “OH MY GOD ELANA!” Always when she had an experience she wanted to share. Like when the rabbi in the synagogue said, “Any person who wants to get an Aliyah” when he really meant “Any MAN…” Or when one of her kids shared a story about something the teacher said — “She said I need BOYS to move chairs across the room!” I miss her voice, I miss her ideas, and mostly I miss her presence.
I used to think that what people need to aspire to, socially, is community. I spent many years searching for a community of sorts, and for the most part failed. An essay in the Forward this week about a woman who was forced to “divorce” her synagogue because the rabbi was completely inflexible and unwelcoming to single parents generated a long thread on my FB page about people’s experiences with “divorcing” their synagogues. I have a very painful story of my own, which I have never shared publicly, but that anyone who read my book The Men’s Section can guess about. There are lots of clues in there about why I had to leave a community that I helped build, that I thought would be my home forever. But it doesn’t really matter anymore. I went elsewhere. Moved on.
I belong but I don’t belong. I no longer think that the answer to our social yearnings is community. I think about Chaya, and I think that what I really need is friends who get me, who really, deeply get me. It is what my friend Rabbi Dr. Haviva Ner-David writes about in her forthcoming memoir about the need to be celebrated for who we are. Synagogue communities are not always places where women feel celebrated. But those special friendships, where you can start a conversation with “OH MY GOD ELANA” and I know exactly where it’s headed because, well, it’s a continuation of a conversation we were having last Tuesday, or maybe last November, or maybe in 2014. It doesn’t even matter.
I miss Chaya so much. But her voice is with me, in my head and in my heart, all the time.
Look what happens when there are no women around the table…
It felt like forever when I was standing at the crosswalk near my home waiting for the light to turn red. I pressed the button. I watched cars speeding by. I saw the lights change in other parts of the
intersection. But my little section, populated only by me, kept getting ignored. I checked my watch. I wondered how long it would take. After a few minutes, the pedestrian light facing me turned green. Hallelujah! I gave the dog leash a gentle pull, and off we trotted across the street.
Well, almost. Halfway through the crosswalk, the light started blinking. I sped up. It did not help. By the time I reached the other side of the street, the light was already red and cars were revving to go.
This was infuriating. It reminded me of pretty much everything I read in Caroline Criado Perez’s book, Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, about how the world is so often designed for the needs of a 5’10” 70 kilo male speeding around unhindered. I am a 5”0’ woman walking a dog, and I could not even get across the street without risking my life. The crosswalk was clearly designed by people who have no idea that I exist.
Read the rest at Conversations with my Body blog
One of my writing students said she is afraid of writing. Well, yeah! It takes courage
One of my writing students said this week that she is afraid of writing because it can be scary to put your words on the page for everyone to read.
Of course it’s scary!
It takes courage to be a writer. Or, more precisely, it takes courage to put out interesting writing. Anyone can write the non-threatening, non-confrontational stuff that everyone wants to hear. It’s called PR. Or a food blog.
It takes courage to share what YOU really see in the world. Because often what we really see is not what other people see.
And going against the crowd can be dangerous.
Oh, yeah. This is something I’m quite familiar with. My writing makes some people go out of their minds. I have stories, boy do I have stories…. Any woman writing about her real life generates anger and strange trolls, some of whom are likely nothing more than teenage boys sitting in their parents’ basements in their underwear surrounded by old pizza boxes and game consoles.
I digress. Writing is scary. Yes. But courageous writing moves the world.
I made a little video about this. It’s part of a new video series I started with writing tips to help women find their power and their voice. Take a look and subscribe to my Youtube Channel!
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If you’d like my help working on your writing process or finding your courage, contact me at elana@lionessbooks.com
Dr. Elana Maryles Sztokman is an award-winning author, anthropologist, feminist activist, indie-publisher, and writing coach. Her forthcoming book, When Rabbis Abuse: Understanding the dynamics of high profile sexual abuse in the Jewish community, will be published by Lioness Books in March 2022