Why Jewish women should submit*

Thought that headline would get you in.

It’s fair to say that in today’s public conversation, female voices carry greater weight than they ever have before. The focus on “lived experience” is a prime example, and the voices of women’s lived experiences are often assigned the highest value.

In 2022, one J. Stone (a pseudonym) published a book called The Great Feminisation, which posited that one of the greatest civilisational upheavals in human history was underway.

His(?) assertion was that in the past 60-odd years, women have moved en masse into public life alongside men, ultimately achieving parity and even supremacy in many culturally influential institutions and professions. This degree of female cultural ascendancy has never been seen before. Women have brought with them into public life their distinctive ways of thinking: greater emotional sensitivity and alertness to harm, strong capacity for compassion, lesser affinity for free speech, and superior sociality – and susceptibility to social contagions. Women’s new power has thus brought dramatic social change – change that has not been all good.

Sure enough, when it comes to the public conversation about Jews, antisemitism, Zionism and Israel, things have not been all good. Notably, many of the most hostile and hateful voices to Jewish ears have been female.