More Women Please!

by: Mik Moore

Fri Jun 26, 2009 at 11:03:48 AM EDT

As JFSJ's gets more involved in the green jobs movement, equity and diversity are central priorities. The NRDC, which is a great organization doing important work, underscores (and perhaps exacerbates) the problem when it put up something like this.

Twelve examples of green jobs, only one held by a woman. Of the eleven men, ALL appear to be white guys. 

Seriously? Seriously?

How about these guys:

Also basically no women, but a bit more diverse...

The Caveman Study Returns!

by: Hannah Farber

Thu Sep 11, 2008 at 00:25:08 AM EDT

It never fails to amaze me how many science dollars are being poured into the Research Field that Most Resembles Bad  Comedy Routines:

"Men are more like this, and women are more like this!"

Yep, you guessed it, it's evolutionary biology time! Here's a brand spanking new study, which crunches data on 40,000 men and women from six contents to conclude, and this is a direct quote from the NYT article,

"The more Venus and Mars have equal rights and similar jobs, the more their personalities seem to diverge."

It's... it's... Wow! Venus and Mars, you two just can't keep from expressing your basic caveperson identities! It's so funny... I mean, really! Women! The more rights you give 'em, the more they just want to sit in the cave and nurse their cavebabies! 

Here are the things that irritate me:

Gender and age: a report from the National Havurah Committee Institute

by: Rabbi Jill Jacobs

Mon Aug 18, 2008 at 11:02:14 AM EDT

I just returned from the National Havurah Committee's summer institute, a weeklong learning/davening/singing/chatting, etc. experience. 

The major themes of the week were gender and social justice.  (that's "gender" and "social justice"--not "gender and social justice.")  

The folks at Jewschool have written pretty extensively about the gender conversations, so I won't reprise it all.  As mentioned there, one of the major issues revolved around the different understandings of gender identities/possibilities for gender identities among folks of different backgrounds and generation.  What I found even more surprising, though, were the similarities in the gender concerns of the thirtysomethings and the sixtysomethings.  (the 40s & 50s were, by and large, the missing generation at the Institute, but more on that later.)

Gender and the Sacred

by: Kerr

Tue Apr 01, 2008 at 14:59:06 PM EDT

Events in my congregation have stirred up some feelings among community members about transgender people's participation in services, as it relates to our progressive Jewish understanding of the Divine.

At a Kabbalat Shabbat service recently I heard one congregant say something like "How can he (referring to a transgender man) lead prayer? He has rejected the Divine feminine by becoming a man!"

I couldn't, in the moment, interrupt my prayer to turn to this person and be a force for education, but I very much wanted to. Are all men inherently set apart from Shekhina? Are all women inherently more in touch with Her? Survey says no. Even if that were true, you'd think a man who has been a woman for some portion of his life would understand women's experiences and feel closer to feminine manifestations of the Divine than one who is not, not the reverse.

The sorrow and anger I felt about that comment temporarily shook me out of my communion with the Divine (masculine, feminine, or otherwise). I don't want to hear that my relationship with the Divine is limited by my experience of my gender, especially not while I'm enjoying a prayer service skillfully led by someone, no matter what gender, who is obviously in touch with Holiness in a form that is working for me. Much of the rest of my experience of that service had to be taken up struggling to forgive my fellow community members and myself, for being so caught up in klippot, and in judgment, that we attempt to circumscribe each others' relationships with the Holy One.