By Phyllis Chesler

It is the season of short days and a life mainly lived indoors. It’s winter in New York, and the weather is savage, raw, wet and literally below freezing. It shows us no mercy. Even at home, I have to plug in a space heater to warm my bones.

But life is very good. I am an insatiable reader and am surrounded by books. Oh, books. So much documentations of daily, global atrocities and brilliant analyses–so many, too many, volumes that I’ve been asked to endorse or review–and I’ve begun to fail this rather enviable opportunity. There are so many of them, and there is only one of me. And then there is all the writing that I myself am compelled to do. Balancing everything has become a bit harder.

As I said, life is still very good. After work, after dinner, I have an endless supply of livestreamed movies–just last week I saw the movie John Huston directed of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” and it transported me to a dinner in Dublin in 1904, at a time when guests (men in top hats and galoshes, women in high-necked and long, full-skirted dresses) recited poetry, played the piano, sang, danced, and remembered the opera legends of times gone by. Understated emotions, courtly and “proper” manners lived, stoically, side by side with drunken fools, and I loved them all, every last one. Joyce ends this elegy to times gone by, and to precious people, in this way:

“It had begun to snow again…snow was general all over Ireland…it was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill…it lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones…his soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.”

It is Joyce’s version of Thornton Wilder’s equally heartbreaking play Our Town.

Joyce’s dinner party in Dublin is not at all like Frank McCourt’s depiction of his impoverished Irish childhood in Angela’s Ashes. Here, one can almost experience the unrelenting cold, the alcoholic father, the mother’s abject poverty–and how reading books saved at least McCourt from a similarly dismal, hopeless life.

A day in my life? Well, from time to time, I enjoy visits from the most extraordinary and distinguished of people. For example, one day this week, my colleague and friend, the great scholar Dr. Shulamit Magnus came to visit. We’ve known each other since 1989. She was here very briefly to launch her new book, Jewish Marital Captivity. And what a book that is!

Dr. Magnus—Shulamit—once, and deservedly, won a National Jewish Book Award for the first volume of her two volume work: Pauline Wengeroff, Memoirs of a Grandmother, Scenes from the Cultural History of the Jews in Russia in the Nineteenth Century. Wengeroff was the only nineteenth century Russian Jewish woman to have published such a record. The last woman to have done so–and in Yiddish–was Glukl of Hameln, in Germany. In order to share Wengeroff’s words with us, Dr. Shulamit translated and interpreted her memoir from Yiddish, Hebrew, German, and perhaps Russian as well.

Shulamit’s new book–oh my, what can I say? It presents what she calls the “institution” of Jewish marital captivity as an institution similar to slavery and one that must be understood and confronted collectively as well as individually in bold, even transgressive ways.

I was able to Zoom into her lecture about this book, which took place in David Roskies’s apartment. The author shared tales of individual Jewish women over millennia, and on almost every continent, who obtained their religious divorces in unbelievable ways. She exposes the corruption and greed of rabbinical authorities that continue to this day, and she also views it as a “backlash” to earlier freedoms. I have only managed to read about 75 pages of this book and find that I’m underlining quite a bit. She teaches us that this is “not an Orthodox or an Israeli problem, but a Jewish one.” Allow me to quote this book’s description, possibly penned by Shulamit herself.

“Jewish Marital Captivity is a social history of this problem from the seventh century to the present across multiple Jewish communities, (in the Jewish Arab Middle East, Central Asia, Europe, America, and Israel) focusing on the interaction of law and social reality. Magnus documents a pattern of assertive and transgressive actions by pious and rebellious women in traditional Jewish societies to escape marital captivity.”

“Jewish Marital Captivity centers on the experience of women encountering systemic disadvantage in rabbinic marriage and divorce throughout Jewish history and across the map of Jewish life. In rabbinic law, marriage is a unilateral act by the husband, making divorce, similarly, the husband’s sole prerogative…Abuse necessarily follows, and has been the case from earliest recorded history when husbands abandoned wives, perished on business trips or in war or criminal incidents, or maliciously refused wives a rabbinic writ of divorce (get), or extorted for one, leaving wives trapped in marriage, including to dead men. There is no time limit to this state. Women in such marital captivity, without a husband’s economic partnership, or divorce or death settlements, yet unfree to contract other marriages, suffered devastating social, economic, and psychological hardship, as did their children.”

Please order this book. Read it. Share it with every rabbi, every Jewish woman, and every and any academic whom you may know.

First published in Phyllis’ Newsletter