Crazy Salad and Scribble Scribble (19 page)

And I figured, what the hell.

I figured, why not leave
Esquire
magazine.

I figured there are worse things in this world than letting Clay Felker make you a star.

And here I am.

October, 1973

T
EL
A
VIV
—A number of important and unimportant things seem to fly right out the window in a country like Israel in time of war. One of them is partisan politics, which vanished about a month ago and is now making a tentative and slightly unwelcome comeback now that there is a tentative and slightly unwelcome cease-fire. Another is public transportation—the city buses take the troops to war, and most of them are still sitting out in the Sinai Desert waiting to bring them back. A third is room service—or service of any kind, for that matter. “There’s a war on” is the all-purpose excuse. It is offered by the El Al steward to explain why no one on the plane except Abba Eban is being served alcoholic beverages, and it is offered by the hotel operator to explain why it has taken her a full ten minutes to answer the telephone.

Yet another casualty of war—at least for the time being—has been the women’s movement here. The women’s liberation movement in Israel could, without too much trouble, be packed into a small suite in the Dan Hotel. But in spite of its numbers, it has had considerable impact. Publicity has helped, and there has been a great deal of it, much of it sympathetic and provoking.
And while the religious laws of Israel, which govern all family and marital matters, are not particularly outrageous in the context of life in the Middle East, there are people here who prefer to think of themselves as part of the Western world, and in that context the laws are extraordinarily backward.

One example of this has become known as the Case of the Mistaken
Mamzerim
. Under religious law, the children of a married woman and a man she is not married to are considered
mamzerim
, or bastards, and they are not allowed to marry Jews who are legitimate—are not, in fact, allowed to marry anyone but other
mamzerim
. (Significantly, this law does not apply to the illegitimate children of married men and single women.) Last year, when there was time to be concerned with such matters, the country spent several months mesmerized by a fascinating case of
mamzerism
. Many years before, a Polish-Jewish woman had eloped with a gentile. They were married and moved to Israel, and he converted to Judaism. Then they were divorced. The woman remarried, this time to a Jew, but she forgot to tell the rabbi who performed the ceremony that she had been divorced. She had children—a son and a daughter. Twenty years later, both children joined the army, and the son went to apply for a marriage certificate. In the course of going through his papers, the rabbinical authorities discovered his mother’s failure to mention her divorce. They promptly ruled the second marriage invalid, declared the offspring
mamzerim
, and said that the son could not marry his intended. Not surprisingly, there was a huge public outcry, and the case was appealed to one of the chief rabbis, Shlomo Goren, who is something of a diplomat as chief rabbis go. After holding a hearing, Rabbi
Goren managed to find a way to declare the mother’s first marriage illegal (and hence, her second marriage legal), on the ground that her first husband, although a convert, had clung to Christian ways. This fact was established conclusively in court when neighbors testified that they had seen him through the bathroom window sitting in the tub drinking vodka and eating pork. The
mamzerim
were pronounced legitimate after all.

Cases of this sort pop up with some frequency, and they have done much to help the women’s movement attract attention to the injustice of the religious laws. Before the war began, the movement had attained, if not actual momentum, a fairly constant chugging pace—it had begun to hold demonstrations, file lawsuits against employers, and organize consciousness-raising groups. Now, though, these concerns seem rather trivial against the background of crisis in the Middle East, and members of the two main women’s liberation groups in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv seem a bit puzzled as to whether their cause, which had historically done better in times of peace and prosperity, is at all relevant. And the interesting thing is not just that it is in many ways more relevant than ever, but that the war may, quite by accident, bring about substantial improvements for women here.

There is, of course, a prevalent belief in Israel, as well as in the rest of the world, that this country is some sort of paradise for women. To begin with, there is Golda Meir, and her extraordinary achievements are constantly used as an argument against the need for liberation—as in “How can you say women are discriminated against when we have a woman Prime Minister?” In fact, Golda is simply Golda, and she is frequently referred to, in a line that is regarded as a witticism, as
“the only man in the Cabinet.” What is more to the point is that she is not only the only woman in the Cabinet, but also the only woman who has
ever
served in the Cabinet. Mrs. Meir has never shown any active interest in women’s rights—she is a classic example of the successful woman who believes that because she managed to rise to the top, anyone can. Furthermore, her coalition government—like others before it—cooperates with the religious party. The rabbis keep quiet about military spending, and in exchange the politicians keep their hands off the religious laws.

The second factor that contributes to the myth concerns women and the army. Israel is the only country in the world with compulsory military service for women. What is not as well known is that women in the Israeli Army do the clerical and service tasks and leave the important work—which is to say, the fighting and killing—to the men. This was not always true. Before the establishment of the state, women were routinely used as soldiers—first in the Jewish Brigade, next in the underground, and then in the War of Independence. But after 1948, the population increase and religious influence combined to push the women into minor roles—they are not even used as drivers behind the lines, a job frequently given to WACs and the like in supposedly less liberated armies. The women in the Israeli Army today are regarded with exactly the same sort of protective instincts men have always felt toward women in time of war. In the first days of the 1973 war, there was a recurrent rumor here that six women in the Israeli Army had been captured, raped, and killed by the Syrians. The Israelis who repeated it seemed far more outraged by the fate of these women, who turned out not to exist,
than by that of the hundreds of men who died fighting in the Golan Heights. It is one of the paradoxes of a male-dominated society that the price of a woman’s life is seen to be higher than that of a man’s.

The price of her work is not. In 1970, the average yearly income of a woman in communications was 61 percent of a man’s—and in just three years this figure has dropped to 42 percent. A woman working in a public service earns 67 percent of a man’s salary. Although half the university graduates are women, they are only 2 percent of the full professors in universities, 7 percent of the lawyers, and 5 percent of the engineers. (In contrast, women make up 38 percent of the medical profession.) Women in Israel tend to be employed in jobs that have always been female strongholds—secretarial work and teaching, for example. More important, barely 30 percent of the women between the ages of fifteen and sixty-five work full-time. This, in large part, is due to the widespread prejudice among both Oriental and Western Jews against working women, a prejudice that is reinforced by the rabbis and results in minimal day-care facilities and no legal abortions.

The rabbis oversee all affairs having to do with marriage and divorce—and they do this with 3,000 years of Biblical tradition, much of which would be sheer balderdash if it were not so grotesquely sexist. An Israeli woman is required to go to a
mikvah
before her wedding—and it is estimated that 90 percent of the women married in this unorthodox country comply. The
mikvah
is the ritual bath originally based on primitive beliefs about the uncleanness of female genitalia following the menstrual period; the baths are staffed by older women, some of whom persist in believing that ordinary
hygiene will not do the trick and who are notorious for passing on a series of updated superstitions about what they call “the dirty days.” One particularly common example of this nowadays is the belief that a woman who touches her husband during her period will cause him to be killed in the next war. A woman who does not want to go to a
mikvah
has two choices: she can bribe someone to sign a paper saying she has been to one, or she can go to Cyprus to be married by a justice of the peace. This practice has become so commonplace of late that the leader of Cyprus is often referred to as Rabbi Makarios.

“According to civil law, women are equal to men,” says Shulamit Aloni, the lawyer and politician who is the leading spokeswoman for women’s rights here. “But I have to go to a religious court as far as personal affairs are concerned. Only men are allowed to be judges there—men who pray every morning to thank God He did not make them women. You meet prejudice before you open your mouth. And because they believe women belong in the home, you are doubly discriminated against if you work.”

No woman may testify in a religious court: hence, no woman may be divorced without her husband’s consent. Several years ago, a woman whose husband had been jailed for child-molesting asked for a divorce; he refused, and there the matter rested. A woman without children who is widowed may not remarry without the consent of her husband’s unmarried brother or, failing that, a formal exemption from the rabbinical court. Some three hundred cases have been disputed under this law since the 1967 war, and there will be hundreds more as a result of this last conflict. But the most oppressive of the religious laws—and the one most relevant to the
current political situation—is the law of
agunot
, which holds that a deserted wife may not remarry under any circumstance. Under Jewish religious law, this prohibition is absolute. What this means is that a woman whose husband is believed dead but whose body has not been recovered may never ever remarry. (However, from time to time, a woman who appeals is sometimes given permission to become a widow.)

Cases arising under the law of
agunot
are often incredibly complicated. After World War II, a Jewish woman who had been in the concentration camps with her husband emigrated to Israel. She believed that her husband had been killed in the camps, and after seven years he was declared dead under an exception to the law of
agunot
. She remarried and had children; thirteen years later, her first husband arrived in Israel, and the children of the second marriage were ruled to be
mamzerim
.

This law accounts in large part for the unusual concern and energy the Israeli Army brings to the often dangerous task of recovering the bodies of its soldiers. Until two years ago, when an Israeli submarine carrying over seventy men sank without a trace, no blanket deviation from this law was ever tolerated. But Rabbi Goren, obviously caught up in his role as a demi-Solomon, went into action and managed to provide a true measure of relief by ruling that the wives of the missing could remarry. The good rabbi will undoubtedly be forced to do something of the sort again: at this point, the discrepancy between Israeli and Arab estimates of the number of prisoners of war held by the Arabs is so vast that it is altogether possible that some four hundred Israeli soldiers’ bodies may never be recovered. This will result
in some four hundred not-quite-widows, and that is too many not-quite-widows for the law of
agunot
to stand up to. None of the women in Israel in or out of the movement want to go through a war to weaken an oppressive law; in a coalition government of this sort, however, that seems to be the only way.

Another and more far-reaching irony that may result from this war is that the status of women in the work force may improve substantially. The general election, which is now scheduled for December 31, is expected to produce at least a slight shift in favor of the right-wing, or more hawkish, political parties—and this in turn may lead to a situation where far more Israeli men are kept mobilized. Whether or not this occurs, a large number of men will be kept at the front simply to hold the cease-fire lines on the West Bank: in the short run, at least, the Israeli government will probably find it necessary to lure some women out of the home and into the factories. (The Israeli G.N.P. is off 40 percent since the beginning of the war.) If more women are needed in the labor force, the government will have to do something about day care for the middle-income women. There is even some talk now about the possibility of setting up a special reserve force for women—not to fight in the army, but to take their husbands’ places in the economy during war.

“One of the reasons women’s lib isn’t catching on as much as it should,” said Ruth Rasnic, a translator who is a member of the Tel Aviv women’s liberation group, “is because of this great military myth we have here. The myth is essential—only I think women should take a much more active part in it. Whether women want
to work in peacetime is up to them, but they should be made to take part in the economy during a war, because war is inevitable.”

And so war and an increased mobilization—which Israeli women do not want—may lead to a situation that improves the status of women here. It is the kind of twist of logic that seems entirely fitting in a country whose citizens take so much delight in calculating every possible consequence of every situation. Besides, like everything else that has flown out the window of late, logic has been in short supply, and for the moment, at least, all is confusion.

November, 1973

She comes down the aisle, and the clothes are just right, Kimberly-knitted to the knee, and she walks in step with the government official, who happens to be H.E.W. Secretary Caspar Weinberger, and her face is perfect, not smiling, mind you—this is too serious an event for that—but bright, intent, as if she is absolutely fascinated by what he is saying. Perhaps she actually is. They take their places on the platform of the Right to Read Conference at Washington’s Shoreham Hotel, and he speaks and she speaks and the director of Right to Read speaks. Throughout she listens raptly, smiles on cue, laughs a split second after the audience laughs. Perhaps she is actually amused. On the way out, she says she hopes she will be able to obtain a copy of the speech she has just sat through. Perhaps she actually thought it was interesting. There is no way to know. No way to break through. She has it all down perfectly. She was raised for this, raised to cut ribbons, and now that it has all gone sour, it turns out that she has been raised to deal with that, too.