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(JTA) — For years, two former government administrators of a pioneering group for Orthodox Jewish feminists believed that that they had been retaliated towards for elevating issues in regards to the conduct of the group’s board chair, a outstanding intercourse therapist who had been the topic of a glowing profile within the New York Instances.
That they had chronicled alleged bullying, demeaning feedback about their look, inappropriate intercourse speak and, for certainly one of them, the uncomfortable expertise of being given a vibrator unsolicited by one’s boss.
However even because the #MeToo motion swept the nation, eliciting revelation after revelation about office harassment and abuse, the ladies stayed publicly silent. That they had promised to not reveal their experiences or their criticism after they left the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance, one after being fired and the opposite after resigning unhappily.
Based on the guarantees they made of their separation agreements, generally known as non-disclosure agreements or NDAs, the ladies could be topic to authorized penalties in the event that they disparaged their former employer, even “anonymously or in any other case.”
Then, on Monday, the intercourse therapist, Bat Sheva Marcus, revealed the complete saga in an explosive essay revealed in Pill.
Within the essay, she describes a former worker named “Sarah” who, Marcus alleges, accused her of office harassment over some “lighthearted remarks” that had been blown out of proportion, prompting an out of doors investigation of her management at JOFA, and main her to resign beneath stress as board chair.
The essay has vaulted the tensions at JOFA into public view, elevating questions on whether or not a bunch based to disrupt oppressive gender dynamics ended up reinforcing them. Now, some with ties to JOFA are reconsidering them, whereas in the meantime stress is rising on a liberal Fashionable Orthodox yeshiva to distance itself from Marcus, who sits on its board and co-hosts a sex-focused podcast with its head rabbi.
As Fb crammed with crucial accounts of Marcus’ conduct and expressions of solidarity with “Sarah,” JOFA introduced that it might drop the observe of requiring NDAs for workers who depart.
“This previous week has triggered us, as soon as once more, to ask ourselves exhausting questions. Whereas it’s true that we used non-disparagement clauses inside separation agreements, we now have by no means enforced them. We now perceive that’s not sufficient,” Pam Scheininger, JOFA’s president, stated in a press release posted to the group’s web site Wednesday that didn’t point out Marcus by title. “We acknowledge that a part of therapeutic is stating unequivocally that folks have the suitable to talk their truths.”
That freed Sharon Weiss-Greenberg, who was JOFA’s government director from 2014 to 2018, to substantiate that she is “Sarah.”
She advised the Jewish Telegraphic Company that she has by no means spoken publicly about her expertise earlier than due to the NDA she signed when leaving the feminist group. However whereas she acknowledged that Marcus’ essay described her experiences, she stated particulars of the essay and JOFA’s statements had been inaccurate and emphasised that she had sought redress throughout the group for a few years, solely to be rebuffed by the board.
“I used to be attempting to assist them do the suitable factor the entire time,” Weiss-Greenberg stated. (From 2020 to 2021, she labored on The Hub, a web based occasions portal at My Jewish Studying, which like JTA is a part of 70 Faces Media.)
“There’s a #MeToo journal that JOFA did,” Weiss-Greenberg stated. “A part of me thought that if we had been writing about behaviors that had been occurring in our own residence, we’d get up to it. I used to be unsuitable.”
In an prolonged assertion that Weiss-Greenberg posted to Fb on Wednesday, she stated she hoped JOFA’s board, a few of whose members have served for the reason that group’s founding in 1996, would face scrutiny for his or her dealing with of allegations towards Marcus.
“If we can not repair these issues amongst boards that declare to boost that feminist banner excessive, we can not probably hope to repair them within the broader world,” she wrote. “We have to look squarely within the face of sure members of Jewish management and ask: are you actually, truly a feminist? Do you truly rise up for ladies, for his or her rights, or when they’re harmed? My expertise with the JOFA board was usually, sadly, a powerful ‘no.’”
JOFA’s 2017 convention drew Orthodox feminists from the world over. (Courtesy Sharon Weiss-Greenberg/Fb)
Weiss-Greenberg was not alone in reporting what she stated was abusive conduct by Marcus, who served because the board chair, with affect over her employment and the path of the group, whereas she was government director.
“It was not simply ‘Sarah’ who was abused by Batsheva [sic] Marcus. There’s a complete line of ladies who she has mistreated along with her anti-feminist bullying and toxicity through the years. Together with me,” wrote Elana Sztokman, who led the group in 2013 and 2014, on Fb Monday. In an prolonged essay on Substack, Sztokman stated she had been fired the identical day she wrote a letter to JOFA’s board saying that Marcus “had been emotionally abusive for over a yr.”
She stated Marcus had given her a vibrator after asking her a sequence of invasive questions on her intercourse life.
“It isn’t good, or empowering, or feminist,” Sztokman wrote in regards to the incident. “It’s invasive, controlling, and sexually violating. As a result of there was no consent.”
Marcus’ perception that vibrators are a necessary software for ladies has been core to her attention-grabbing profession as a intercourse therapist working with many Orthodox ladies. In 2000, 4 years after she helped discovered JOFA, she co-founded the Maze Ladies’s Sexual Well being clinic, which operates places in New York Metropolis and upstate and claims to deal with greater than 1,000 ladies per yr, lots of them Orthodox.
Marcus describes her work as treating “feminine sexual dysfunction,” which frequently entails introducing Orthodox ladies to the idea of sexual pleasure and serving to them discover their very own sexual wants throughout the contours of Jewish legal guidelines about intimacy between husbands and wives.
She’s additionally the writer of a e book, “Intercourse Factors,” and a frequent public speaker on points of ladies’s sexuality. (Her many public appearances included a Fb Dwell and podcast episode with Kveller, the Jewish parenting web site that can also be a part of 70 Faces Media.)
Marcus is a licensed scientific social employee whose credentials embrace a Ph.D. in human sexuality, which she obtained in 2007 from the Institute for Superior Research of Human Sexuality, an unaccredited San Francisco-based establishment that shut down in 2018 after receiving a sequence of fines from California’s larger training bureau. For her nine-page dissertation, which is posted on Maze’s web site, she supplied vibrators to 17 ladies who had by no means used them and monitored their utilization.
Handing out vibrators is one thing Marcus has finished outdoors of her analysis with frequency — together with, by her personal admission, to her skilled associations who don’t ask for them. In her essay, she describes giving the toys to “various senior board members who had expressed curiosity,” with out asking first: “That they had liked the shock reward, and one advised me she couldn’t cease laughing when she opened the field.”
Marcus says within the essay that she thinks it will be important for ladies to have the ability to speak freely to one another about sexual issues and that she believed “Sarah” had welcomed and inspired their conversations. She additionally says she agreed to go ahead with an impartial investigation after being advised of the allegations towards her and, finally, agreed to resign to be able to save JOFA’s status, though she believed that “to provide in was to capitulate to extortion.”
Marcus didn’t reply to requests for remark from JTA. Neither did Scheininger, who on Wednesday advised the Ahead, “The Pill article was revealed with out our data or endorsement, and JOFA doesn’t help its content material in both substance or tone.”
Rabbi Dov Linzer, the president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical College, additionally didn’t reply to a request for remark; nor did his predecessor and the yeshiva’s founder, Rabbi Avi Weiss. Linzer is Marcus’ co-host on a sex-focused podcast, “The Pleasure of Textual content,” that the influential liberal Orthodox seminary within the Bronx has produced for a number of years. Final fall, Chovevei Torah introduced Marcus on as a board member.
Weiss-Greenberg’s husband, Ben Greenberg, was ordained by the yeshiva and is main a push to have Marcus faraway from the board. He stated he had been attempting to get the college to acknowledge Marcus’ historical past of allegedly troubling conduct since November, when her appointment was introduced, and that he had been annoyed by an absence of responsiveness.
“It was time to publicly name out the establishment after attempting privately,” Greenberg advised JTA. He stated he was advised that YCT board members met on Tuesday night time to debate Marcus and her essay however that no choice had been made there.
“Typically the locations which can be closest to you want those that are invested in it to have an intervention, and to face up and say, ‘Hey, you’ve been doing one thing unsuitable. And also you’ve been doing it for a very long time,’” Greenberg added.
Asher Lovy, an advocate for survivors of kid intercourse abuse within the Orthodox group, advised JTA he first came upon about Marcus’ conduct in 2018, whereas working with JOFA to cross the Youngster Victims Act within the New York statehouse.
Over the subsequent few years, he stated he tried to stress the group to distance itself from Marcus and undertake a brand new anti-harassment coverage. However he stated the NDAs had been an impediment to mounting the type of marketing campaign that his group, Za’akah, has led towards different folks within the Jewish world who’ve been accused of abuse.
“I attempted to discover a strategy to expose JOFA in a manner that may defend the individuals who had signed non-disclosure agreements,” Lovy stated.
In 2019, in response to Lovy, the SRE Community, a bunch of round 150 Jewish organizations searching for to create workplaces which can be protected, respectful and equitable within the wake of the #MeToo motion, requested him if Za’akah would be part of. As a result of JOFA was additionally a member, Lovy stated no — and commenced pressuring SRE to undertake a brand new coverage to pressure members to decide to not use NDAs or confidentiality clauses.
Such clauses are commonplace in lots of sorts of employment agreements, however they’ve develop into more and more controversial in recent times amid rising consideration in regards to the prevalence and prices of office harassment and abuse, and a few states have banned them. In 2020, after a number of ladies accused Mike Bloomberg, then a candidate for president, of sexual harassment, it was revealed that NDAs had shielded him from having to account publicly for many years of allegations.
Sztokman, Weiss-Greenberg and Lovy believed that the identical phenomenon had taken place at JOFA. Final week, following what Sztokman stated was a troublesome however cathartic expertise talking with a consultant of the SRE Community, the group made JOFA an “inactive” member, eradicating its brand from its web site. It additionally introduced a brand new coverage requiring member organizations utilizing NDAs to not use them “to forestall victim-survivors from coming ahead to report previous or current abuse or misconduct by way of the suitable channels.”
It was at that time that Scheininger issued a primary assertion, which Lovy revealed, defending the usage of NDAs however acknowledging concern about their results. She emphasised that JOFA had by no means gone after a former worker for violating the agreements “though we now have heard a number of stories of violations.”
Six days later got here Marcus’ essay, beautiful the group of Orthodox feminists during which she had been a towering determine for many years. (The writer of this text has collaborated on a podcast with Pill Studios, a division of Pill, the place Marcus’ essay appeared.)
Expressions of help for Weiss-Greenberg and Sztokman have been sturdy from throughout the group, at the same time as some say they wish to know extra about what occurred earlier than assigning blame.
“Organizations are a posh net of people,” Rabba Rachel Kohl Finegold, a member of the clergy staff at Montreal’s Orthodox Congregation Shaar Hashomayim, wrote on Fb, in a put up asserting that she was stepping again, for now, from the casual board the edits JOFA’s journal.
“I count on that within the coming weeks and months, there shall be extra readability concerning which people are to take duty and for what piece of the issue, in addition to how JOFA and different organizations are being implicated right here, as a complete, will reply,” she wrote. “Till then, I’ll wait, with the victims’ experiences in my coronary heart, however withholding additional public conclusions.”
The saga is a low second for JOFA, whose first convention, in 1997, was a landmark second for Orthodox feminists at a time when ladies had few alternatives for management in Orthodox congregations and communities. However it comes at a time when its function is unsure: in recent times, the group’s significance has waned because the area it initially carved out has grown extra crowded.
“When JOFA was based, they had been virtually the one ones representing a collective voice for Orthodox feminism,” Kohl Finegold, a number one voice in Orthodox feminism and the primary Orthodox girl to function synagogue clergy in Canada, advised JTA by way of e-mail. “Now, there are fortunately many establishments in North America, Israel, and elsewhere, who’re doing this work. JOFA was one of many first (alongside Drisha and a small handful of others), however the panorama of Orthodox feminism has expanded dramatically since then.”
Sztokman, who is predicated in Israel, continues to work on problems with feminism in Jewish communities however stopped figuring out as Orthodox throughout her time working at JOFA. Weiss-Greenberg additionally now lives in Israel and is working in a area unconnected to Judaism.
Marcus stays a clinician at Maze Ladies’s Sexual Well being, a receptionist on the clinic stated on Wednesday. However she might also be starting to department out on her personal. 4 days earlier than Marcus revealed her essay, she launched a primary video on her personal YouTube channel, unconnected to Maze. It was an introduction to Jewish views on intercourse.
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