Why do women leave Orthodox Judaism? Ask Miriam Anzovin

This brilliant Tik-Toker not only breaks down the Talmud for us. She also reveals what is really going on in the religious world.

Miriam Anzovin has become an overnight sensation in the Jewish blogosphere due to her unique wit, razor-sharp intelligence, artsiness, crazy talent, and uncanny ability to make the Talmud both funny and interesting. (Who knew?)

But in a recent clip, she put aside the humor in order to address a few seriously unfunny issues. In this one, she tackled sexual abuse, agunot, and mamzer, all topics of immense human suffering that disproportionately affect women and that the rabbinical system does little to alleviate.

It is quite a damning clip, even if people have been screaming about these horrors for years.

But there is one little half-sentence that she threw in there that particularly caught my attention.

It is the centering of male power and authority….that hurts the modern day Jewish community in profound ways and it’s what drove me away.

The patriarchy drove her away.

And, by the way, she also describes victims of sexual abuse as “us”.

Miriam Anzovin is not alone. There are many women who leave Orthodox Jewish life and Judaism in general, often due to “the centering of male power and authority”. I did some research on this phenomenon for Lilith a few years ago. But my two-dozen interviews barely scratched the surface.

When women leave, so often nobody even notices.

Certainly in places where women do not count for a minyan, women’s exit is obscured by things like curtains, partitions, and women’s general invisibility.

Nobody notices women leaving. There is no organization for women who dropped out of Orthodoxy because of patriarchy, sexism, and/or abuse. There is no gathering place for this particular dynamic. This type of person does not have a name, a label, an identifier, or a community. Not even a hashtag. The dynamic hasn’t been named yet, so it isn’t seen.

To wit, when Jewish policy makers create questionnaires and studies about Jewish identity and belonging, there is never a question such as, “Did you leave because of gender issues and sexism? Or perhaps sexual abuse”

Nobody creating communal policy has ever noticed or cared.

(Possibly because so much of Jewish sociology was led by the guy who was himself harassing women and ruining their careers.)

These are some of the painful and oppressive dynamics that are driving certain women away from Jewish belonging and identity in so many corners of the community, and yet nobody seems to be noticing.

And there has yet to be a comprehensive study that looks at the direct correlation between experiences of sexual abuse in the community.

But in the research that I conducted about sexual abuse, there is a clear correlation between abuse and communal alienation — especially among women.