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Barbara Sofer e-mail: bsofer@netvision.net.il |
Award-winning writer and lecturer Barbara Sofer grew up in a small town
in Connecticut, and moved to Israel in 1971. She is a graduate of the
University of Pennsylvania and the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Her
articles -taking on a wide range of subjects from ethnic cooking to
terrorism--have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston
Globe, Parents, Readers' Digest, Woman's Day, Hadassah Magazine and
Inside Magazine among many others. She writes a bi-weekly column
for the Friday Jerusalem Post.
Barbara has written five books and contributed to several others
EXCERPT FROM CURRENT
ARTICLE
January 13, 2012
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The Human Spirit: What
do religious women want?
By Barbara Sofer
There is no way to undercut the devotion
it takes to bring up 10 children, as is common for haredim.
I’m listening to the radio talk show discussion
of the new proposal that nursery school will be free from age three.
You’d think this might be a rare moment of national unity. Any parent
who has been paying steep preschool fees, and any grandparent who
remembers that nursery school used to cost as much as university,
should be happy about this decision.
It is a substantive response to the summer
protests’ demand for improved conditions for working couples. But
every Knesset speaker who gets on the airwaves in the morning is
griping. Each glorifies his or her sector and complains about the
others. Listening in traffic, I had the fantasy that each speaker
would say something positive about those in a different sector.
Are we so busy defending our lifestyles for secular grandparents
to admit that they would love to have 50 grandchildren like their
haredi counterparts? Would haredi parents really mind if their gifted
sons and daughters had the educational tools to become oncologists
like their secular counterparts?
Instead of making lists of what’s wrong with each other, here are
a few examples of what we might appreciate. Please excuse the generalizations.
My apologies in advance for stereotyping and for not including the
Arab sector in this column....
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