Are Orthodox Feminists the agents of change in the Israeli Orthodox World?

New Republic [...] But Haredi men continued to harass women in Beit Shemesh. Less than a year later, in June 2012, Vered Daniel, an acquaintance of Philipp’s, went shopping in a Haredi neighborhood. In a special effort to respect ultra-Orthodox sensitivities, she wore a long skirt and blouse. Although modest by modern-Orthodox standards, Daniel’s outfit marked her as someone who was clearly not Haredi. When she left her car with her infant daughter in her arms, Haredi men screamed at her for dressing immodestly and spat on her. Alarmed, Daniel ran back to her car, locking herself and her baby inside as the mob battered the vehicle with sticks and stones, shattering a window.

For Philipp, the attack on Daniel was “beyond the beyond.” “Attacking a mother with a young child in her arms—” recalls Philipp, her eyes filling with tears. “She was completely helpless.” The incident drove her to do something she would previously never have contemplated. Like most Orthodox women, there was little about the word “feminism” that spoke to Philipp. She did not consider herself political. But as tensions grew in Beit Shemesh, she had started to follow the debates in online women’s groups, “deep debates,” she says, “about pluralistic society, tolerance.” It was, she says, “my first real exchange with secular and non-Orthodox Israelis.”

The day after Daniel’s attack, Philipp filed a police complaint over the city’s failure to remove the modesty signs. But then, rightly sensing that this would result in little change, she reached out to a woman from a world completely different than her own. In doing so, she became a pivotal figure in a clash between the ultra-Orthodox and a widening coalition of women to determine the core values of Israeli society. [...]

Haredim have sought to drive “corrupt” elements out of their neighborhoods by making them inhospitable places for those who are not ultra-Orthodox. The victims of this strategy are usually women, whose bodies have become the battleground in what is essentially a religious turf war. And as Philipp and Vered Daniel learned, the harassment can easily become violent. Miriam Friedman Zussman, a modern-Orthodox friend of Philipp’s, says: “I never considered myself a feminist. I didn’t think I had to be. Then suddenly, you start to say, ‘You want me to wear what? You want me to say what? You want my daughter to wear what?’... It’s the boiled frog theory."

And so, for the first time, women like Nili Philipp have started to cross the secular-religious divide. [...]

Nili Philipp had briefly met, and liked, Erez-Likhovski when she had testified before a Knesset committee on religious women’s issues. And when she decided to fight back against the Haredim, it was Erez-Likhovski she called. She knew she was doing something new. Most Israelis would “never think that religious women would align themselves with those radical feminist women from the Reform movement,” says Philipp. “They would just assume we’d be good girls and listen to our rabbis.” [...]