Lysistrata, revisited, in the U.S., seems an unlikely occurrence even in the bizarre state of the nation at the moment. Most people will have heard of Aristophanes’ play in which a young Greek woman persuades the women of warring Greek states to deny their men sex until they stop fighting. In the play, a bitter conflict erupts between the sexes as a result of this decision, with an angry chorus of men declaring that there is no wild beast harder to tame than a woman.
More than two millennia later, women in Kiryas Joel, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish enclave an hour outside of New York City, are carrying out a similar strike. According to their leader, Adina Sash, 800 women refused to sleep with their husbands during one night, specifically designated for the protest. It was a Friday, chosen because it is a time when intimacy is considered especially holy in the group. Unlike the Greeks, the women were not protesting against war, but rather against a religious system in which men can shackle women to unwanted marriages.
Under Jewish law, a divorce is not finalized until a man gives a woman a “get”, a 12-line letter, written in Arabic, that declares her no longer bound to him. Three rabbis must sign off on it. That has led to a global scandal, where abusive men leverage, or withhold, “gets” or money or custody of children, to force chastity and singlehood on past partners.
In Kiryas Joel, an insular place where a woman must ask permission from her rabbi to report domestic violence to the cops, 29-year-old Malky Berkovitz had begged for a “get” for four years. Her husband refused despite petitions from within her religious community. The term used to describe these “chained” women is “Agunot”.
Advocates for these women, together with advocates for other groups of women similarly abused by religious law across the world, have tried to get secular courts to address this issue. In Britain, in 2021, an amendment to the country’s legal code deemed the practice of “gets” criminally coercive. One year later, the first man was jailed for it, for eighteen months.
In the United States, however, change is coming much more slowly. As a woman, you have to also be prepared to be expelled from your community if you take legal action, and that is a frightening and economically dangerous prospect for most. Recalcitrant Jewish men, including many rabbis who have accused the women of violating Jewish law, are also working the system in the U.S. to their advantage, according to the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot. These men and rabbis are also responsible for a sharp rise in the number of nuisance lawsuits claiming that women demanding “gets” are harassing or defaming them. They absolutely deserve to be harassed and defamed, in my humble opinion.
The intractability of it all made the American wives in Kiryas Joel finally go for the nuclear solution – 800 of them in one small community. Although the internet is banned among ultra-Orthodox Jews, the women managed to organize their protest using illicit cell phones. In a community where women are required to shave and cover their heads for modesty, and to marry near strangers when they are teenagers, some are saying “no” to sex for the first time they can remember.
In Aristophanes’ play, Lysistrata and her cohorts of Greek women quickly win their battle because the carnal deprivation is just too much for their husbands to bear. An end to the war between Sparta and Athens is rapidly brokered, just as the women demanded. Adina Sash hopes for her own sort of peace deal – that Malky Berkovitz be freed before another “Friday of holy intimacy” is forced on her.
Adina says she does not intend to incite more feminist terror on the male members of her community. She claims she only wants to teach the next generation of young religious girls that if conventional methods of protest fail, they can find new, more effective, methods.
More power to them.
I am tempted to add that, despite what Adina Sash claims, once she and her community realize the power they have unleashed, the recalcitrant husbands in Kiryas Joel, and other similar communities, better watch out. They deserve all they “get”, or, in this instance, don’t “get”. Lysistrata would be proud!
