Avrom Tomer, who boasts the title of "Education Policy Researcher at the Ecclesiastical Forum", came out on this site (16.03.22) with a major attack on modern feminism, giving him terrifying adjectives such as "Neo-Marxism", as part of a gathering to protect the lost fifties, When men were men, women were women, and sheep lived in constant anxiety.
I want to start from Tomer's point: a comparison between a critique of family roles is equivalent to a critique in a religious school of the degree of religiosity of the student's parents.
This is a classic example of deception.
First, in quite a few religious schools, those that see themselves as highly regarded, a student can not be accepted at all if the institution's opinion is uncomfortable with the level of religiosity in which he grew up.
It is no coincidence that this "providence" is especially important for religious students.
School principals allow themselves to threaten at a distance the students who wear pants in their homes.
This comparison deliberately confuses personal criticism of the students' parents with criticism of the traditional structure of the family, just what worries conservatives like Tomer.
It is important to mention that Tomer does not want us to return to a series of traditional family institutions - for example, those where the husband may take more than one wife or the father may sell his daughter into slavery, or one that incorporates slaves at all (the latter two are still legitimate religious law).
He assumes the nuclear family of the 1950s - man, woman, boy, girl - as the basic institution of the family, even though it did not exist before.
There is no less conservative imitation here.
The law in Israel, which is based on halakhah, still considers a woman a type of property.
Women in Israel can be anchored by their husbands, and the rabbinical courts - which allow a man to marry a second wife in such a case, if he seeks the signatures of 100 men with a rabbi's certificate - shrug their shoulders: there is nothing to do.
And this is exactly the problem that feminism, especially in Israel, is facing: women are not yet equal.
They receive 70% of a man's salary, and suffer from a low salary in relation to their status in the high-tech sector as well.
And as Margaret Atwood well pointed out, men are afraid that women will laugh at them - and women are still afraid that men will kill them.
Women still can not divorce as men can.
At the heart of all these problems stands the traditional family.
It states, structurally, that women are subordinate to men, that the man is the breadwinner and the woman should mess with the house.
It means denying a woman the ability to live her life as she pleases and develop herself as she pleases - things that for men are self-evident.
The path to the liberation of women is through a change in the traditional family structure: an understanding that women's rights are human rights, and that we have no right to give them up because it scares men.
And men's fear is exactly the point here.
If women want to be liberated, they must remove from them thousands of years of male propaganda, forced by fire and blood, on the "right" structure of a family and their place in it.
The things Tomer laments about are not new: they have been a feminist position for 50 years or more.
Why is it valid now?
Because he's scared.
Because things are finally starting to change.
And we are not going to stop.
Were we wrong?
Fixed!
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