The Chochmat Nashim Podcast: Women Talk Judaism · Jewish Coffee House

Is "Erasing Women" Here to Stay? (Season 8 Episode 3)

·24 min·1 clip

"Do firm women have faces?" leads into a six-foot banner with women’s names but no women’s photos.

The conversation starts with a question. They imagine a world where Chokhmat Nashim never did the slow public work of naming the erasure of women, and they ask whether women would somehow be more visible without that effort. They do not think so. Anne and Shoshana keep coming back to the idea that awareness matters, because if people are never taught to notice the pattern, they may not even realize a pattern is there. That is the point. They talk about the damage erasing women does not only to women themselves, but also to men, children, and the wider community that gets used to absence as if it were normal. Then they get specific. One example is the familiar modern Orthodox scene of a co-ed school hosting a male singer for a video or concert while the girls are told they cannot be in it or cannot attend. That lands hard. Shoshana says she finds that deeply disturbing, and Anne answers from her own co-ed school memory, where plays and performances were handled very differently and the gender question was not built into the event in the same way. Times have changed. They note that Jewish music, school culture, and communal expectations all look different now, but they still find it jarring when a co-ed school invites a singer and then excludes half the students from the room. Money complicates everything. The pair move to marketing and fundraising, where organizations will happily accept support from women and men alike even while their materials leave women out, which makes the moral contradiction hard to ignore. That tension is real. They are careful not to frame it as us versus them, because the people involved are still Jews and still part of the same communal world, but they also do not soften the critique for comfort. At some point, enough is enough. By the end, they are arguing that the conversation has already been had for years and that the next step is the awkward one: the phone call, the email, the text, the moment when someone says, politely but firmly, where is the mother, where are the girls, what exactly are we doing here. They do not stop there. The episode closes by offering help to listeners who want coaching, validation, or connection to others who see the same problem and want to push back together.

As heard by us

A grounded look at how awareness, values, and public life collide.

Anne Gordon and Shoshana Kutz-Jaskol use a simple what-if to test how much has really changed after years of calling out the erasure of women.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

If women keep disappearing from the room, this gives you language to push back.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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