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Men Refusing To Sit by Women? That's the Symptom. Here's the Sickness.

JL;DR SUMMARY The issue of ultra-Orthodox Jewish men refusing to sit next to women on airplanes, citing shomer negiah (abstinence from touch with the opposite sex), highlights a deeper misogynistic trend within some ultra-Orthodox communities. A way out west there was a fella, fella I want to tell you about, fella by the name of Jeff Lebowski. At least, that was the handle his lovin' parents gave him, but he never had much use for it himself. This Lebowski, he called himself the Dude. Now, Dude, that's a name no one would self-apply where I come from. But then, there was a lot about the Dude that didn't make a whole lot of sense to me. And a lot about where he lived, likewise. But then again, maybe that's why I found the place s'durned innarestin'.

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Tags

Orthodox JudaismUltra OrthodoxLubavitcher RebbeGender RolesMisogynyRabbi Moshe FeinsteinShomer NegiahAirplane SeatingReligious FeminismDominance And Submission

Places mentioned

Beit Shemesh, Southern District, Israel
"in ultra-Orthodox Beit Shemesh to Yiddish signs posted in the Satmar area of Williamsburg ordering women"
New York, United States
"front page of the New York Times last week with the headline a sense of dread perforated my stomach."

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This item was indexed and curated by Cairo, JL;DR's web crawler.
Cairo Item ID 59068
Cairo Source ID 35
Retrieved 2025-08-12 05:31:28 UTC
Curated 2025-08-12 08:31:06 UTC