A new women’s liberation movement that demands equal pay should insist on women’s rights in other realms as well. (I think that the women’s liberation movement began with Esther).
I agree with the Jessica Kessler Marshall column you published (“The Kotel belongs to all of us,” Rabbi’s Turn, Nov. 16), and I wonder how hard we try to achieve peace in our time? Israel, and by extension, Jews everywhere will continue to suffer the slings and arrows of a world which is not yet ready to accept a ‘swords into plowshares’ mindset.
We Israelis, who want peace more than anyone on earth, are portrayed in the media in a way that reminds people of other nations’ atrocities against civilians. Nowadays, we get better reporting on everything, so it’s hard to pretty up an ugly situation that makes us look like the Syrians and the Iranians and other tyrannical regimes. People might start asking how different are we from the narrow mindedness of the Ayatolas and the Taliban who will deny women their God-given dignity.
I applaud the women who defied the absurd law that had been imposed on all Israelis (against their will sometimes), antiquated notions that don’t belong in a modern land like Israel. We need a new government that can diminish the influence of the minority party of religious zealots in this cobbled-up parliamentary system of pathological politics. Israel’s image should be one associated with technological advances that would give the world a $9 ecological bike that is entirely made up or recycled cardboard and so lightweight. Wouldn’t that relieve the world’s dependence on oil, and make an effort to own up to the global warming scenario? It’s the land of milk and honey, and the promised land. We might need to cobble up something new in a new world of Arab summer, fall, winter and spring.