This panel explores how gendered inequalities in Jews divorce practice play out in rabbinical accounts of Jewish divorce, but also in contemporary religious courts and civil legal contexts. The first paper analyses rabbinic constructions of women’s financial independence as an entry point for thinking about women’s vulnerability to abuse in Jewish divorce. The second juxtaposes ethnography and recent court cases to trace the historical development of the strategic framing of get abuse as a distinctly Jewish form of domestic abuse in US and UK legal contexts. The third explores how the theme of dignity/indignity reverberates through interviews with rabbis, lay women and men, lawyers and activists to uncover how concerns for correct practice trouble Jewish divorce across denominations. We conclude with a final reflection by a senior scholar and activist who theorizes her own journey self-transformation as she traces the history of get abuse activism in Canada.
How do rabbis in the Talmud construe women’s economic independence in marriage and divorce? This paper examines different instances where women claimants in the Talmud seem to merit sympathy or legal protection, yet rabbinic decisions may not protect the women or even penalize them. Women’s claims are often taken in bad faith and their responses seem to lend husbands legal protections against their wives’ hypothetical abuses, ultimately magnifying the existing power imbalance between the genders. How does rabbinic legislation and legal interpretation, even when attempting to assist individual women, reinforce existing structural inequalities and ultimately how does the rabbinic response replicate and institutionalize abusive practices and dynamics in marriage and divorce? This paper will consider the types of legal arguments employed, either in ways that impede or thwart women’s financial autonomy or benefit it and how these reinforce existing gender dynamics, affecting women’s economic vulnerability during the marriage and divorce.
This paper will consider how communal discourse describing abuse of the Jewish divorce process as a form of domestic violence has resulted in the creation of new remedies under secular criminal and family law and new responsiveness in rabbinical courts. These changes will be considered in light of legal theorist Robert Cover’s notion of jurisgensis, a framework that has been adopted by Jews feminist legal theorists to draw a link between changes on the ground in Jewish practice wrought by 20th and 2st century feminists and new, more egalitarian interpretations of Jewish law. Drawing on the work of Rachel Adler, Tamar Ross, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion Waldoks, I argue that the work of agunah activists in creating and popularizing new ways of understanding Jewish laws of divorce that discriminate against women have paved the ways for the deployment of remedies which were previously viewed as illegitimate.
How does the inherent gendered asymmetry of Jewish divorce contribute to women's experience of Jewish divorce as a violation of their human dignity? What do these experiences reveal about Jewish divorce as a highly gendered legal process that is both rooted in history and tradition and challenged by contemporary cultural expectations around human dignity? Ethnographic interviews with lay women, men, rabbis, lawyers and activits expose how rabbinic and communal concerns for correct practice (orthopraxy), trouble Jewish divorce across denominations in particular ways which are always pushing and pulling on Jewish religious legal practice within the larger socio-legal context of Jews in Canada. As a trope that is rich in legal, religious, and popular signification, dignity invites us to explore how concerns for dignity drive Jewish religious practice at the communal level while also providing a conceptual framework for individuals to reflect on their own experience.