The “Jim Crow Laws” remind us of one of the most shameful chapters of American history, a time when many Southern states enacted laws designed to keep Afro-Americans from enjoying the same civil liberties and rights that blacks enjoyed in the Northern states.
Intimidation tactics were routinely carried out for several decades until the last of the Jim Crow laws were banned once and for all by 1971, In 1971, the Supreme Court, in Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education, upheld desegregation busing of students to achieve integration.
Of course these laws also affected poor and illiterate Americans. Jews, blacks, and Asians could not purchase homes in certain restrictive neighborhoods until 1948, when the Supreme Court outlawed some forms of private discrimination in Shelley v. Kraemer 334 US 1 (1948).
Who would ever suspect that Jim Crow Laws would find a comfortable new home among the Haredim? But this time the Haredi Jim Crow Laws target women. Consider the following examples:
Over the past few months, Israeli society has witnessed a whole series of newly constructed practices for what are undoubtedly extreme views of the need for gender segregation:
• Separate sides of the street designated for a Sukkot holiday public festival in Jerusalem.
• The corpse of a woman removed from its burial place because it was next to a man in Tiberias
• Separate cashiers at the supermarket for men and women in Ramot.
• Separate public buses for men and women in Bnei Brak, Jerusalem, and more
• Separate El Al airline flights for men and women
• Separate offices for men and women in Modi’in Illit (some companies will not hire women in a company where men work)
• Separate exit times from synagogue in Safed (women were locked inside until all the men left)
• Banning of women from cemeteries in places including Elyachin, and silencing of women’s cries of mourning.
• The removal of all pictures of women from public advertisements – even women politicians, like Kadima head and former prime ministerial candidate MK Tzipi Livni Continue reading “Tales of the Haredi Zone: Resurrecting “Jim Crow Laws””