The list of controversies grows weekly: Organizers of a conference last week on women's health and Jewish law barred women from speaking from the podium, leading at least eight speakers to cancel; ultra-Orthodox men spit on an 8-year-old girl whom they deemed immodestly dressed; the chief rabbi of the air force resigned his post because the army declined to excuse ultra-Orthodox soldiers from attending events where female singers perform; protesters depicted the Jerusalem police commander as Hitler on posters because he instructed public bus lines with mixed-sex seating to drive through ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods; vandals blacked out women’s faces on Jerusalem billboards.
Public discourse in Israel is suddenly dominated by a new, high-toned Hebrew phrase, "hadarat nashim," or the exclusion of women. The term is everywhere in recent weeks, rather like the way the phrase "male chauvinism" emerged decades ago in the United States.
MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/middleeast/israel-faces-crisis-over-role-of-ultra-orthodox-in-society.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share
Public discourse in Israel is suddenly dominated by a new, high-toned Hebrew phrase, "hadarat nashim," or the exclusion of women. The term is everywhere in recent weeks, rather like the way the phrase "male chauvinism" emerged decades ago in the United States.
MORE: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/15/world/middleeast/israel-faces-crisis-over-role-of-ultra-orthodox-in-society.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all%3Fsrc%3Dtp&smid=fb-share
