The War on Women

´Feminism is starting to have its day in Israel, and on a certain level, this is invigorating´.

 There is a war on women in Israel and Elana Maryles Sztokman is documenting its major fronts. 

Women are sent on the back of the buses, women faces are erased from the public space and publications, women voices are cut shortly. Women bodies are under control either it has to do with conversions, dress code, divorce or fertility. There are modesty patrols in the religious neighbourhoods, not only in Israel, but in other religious neighbourhoods around the world as well, such as in the USA or London. There is erasure of women´s faces from Holocaust artifacts - ´a new low in the world of religious misogyny´. 

Although the situation emerged in the 1990s, only in the last five years there is more awareness about the extent of the problem. Most of the turns do not have anything to do with the religious law - for instance, in the case of women voices, the prohibition is for men to hear it, not for the women to stop singing - and in the rest, there are completely out of context rulings. 

The War on Women in Israel documents all those situations, in the smallest details, but also offers insights about the turn that was taken among the women themselves, including the religious ones. There is more pressure against the establishment - religious, state´s - towards reclaiming a safe and respectful space. This is the only way to keep the radicalism in check over and over again. 

Democracy and individual freedoms are not to be taken for granted. Critical voices are needed to maintain the awareness about the need of any power - laic, religious etc. - to respect women. The fact that more and more women refuse the second-class condition they were assigned by men, gives hope. But it is not enough. Never will it be enough.