When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture by Elana Sztokman (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture by Elana Sztokman Michal Kravel-Tovi (bio) Elana Sztokman When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture Lioness Books and Media, 2022 When do rabbis abuse? Potentially, at any given time. What kinds of social structures and cultural tenets unfold on the occasions when rabbis abuse? Ones that facilitate the exploitation of power and the manipulation of otherwise valuable Jewish and human values. In When Rabbis Abuse: Power, Gender, and Status in the Dynamics of Sexual Abuse in Jewish Culture, Elena Sztokman asks these and other important questions, illuminating in a sincere, sensitive and lucid narrative the dynamics of abuse by rabbis, a phenomenon that is both pervasive and overlooked. This is the raison d'etre of Sztokman's book, and also its merit: It is an empirically solid, comprehensive and well-informed account of sexual abuse in Jewish communal and institutional settings. The ethnographic grounding of this account is all the more significant, given the relatively thin availability of reliable quantitative data on abuse in Jewish contexts, and the apposite research tools offered by ethnographic methodology, relying upon rapport, nuanced analysis and inductive ways of thinking. The book is based on an impressive collection of testimonies, gathered from a variety of platforms and encounters. Brought together, they present an unflattering portrait of the malaise of sexual violence and trauma in Jewish spaces and of the too slow, too late responses to it by stakeholders in Jewish organizations and communities. Given the thick silence that clearly saturates the issue of sexual abuse in Jewish and other settings, Sztokman's book performs an important service to the Jewish public at large, which, like many other publics, would rather not know about the horrifying things happening in its midst or, even worse, knows about it but chooses nevertheless to remain silent. Writing against the grain of silence, denial and a culture of cover-up, Sztokman insists on bringing the voices of victim-survivors into the public sphere and on listening to them without searching suspiciously for gaps in coherence and validity. In so doing, she is attuned not only to these critical and suppressed voices, but also to what sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel calls "the social sound of silence."1 [End Page 188] The book is framed as a prod for a collective demand for justice and accountability. It is an expression of engaged scholarship, urgently fusing activist and academic perspectives, claiming and demonstrating their synergetic force. In fact, Sztokman's interest in abuse developed from her lifelong activist, feminist engagement with mesuravot get—Jewish women denied divorce by their husbands—her anthropological sensibilities and skills deepening her understanding of this particular phenomenon. Both these elements, the activist and the academic, are intimately woven into the threads of the book, shaping and animating Sztokman's attempt to explain how a collective that prides itself on doing good can first enable such evil and then ignore the massive suffering of its members. Unsurprisingly, the author does not—cannot—offer answers to the almost existential philosophical puzzlement that pushed her to undertake this research in the first place. But she does manage to identify some of the communal, linguistic and religious mechanisms at play across a variety of sociological contexts of abuse. Ultimately, this text of engaged scholarship is offered as a tribute of critical love by a caring Jewish author who has mobilized professional expertise alongside evocative first-person stories of herself as a survivor to expose the intolerable disparities between ideals and realities, between the use and the abuse of power. The book is intentionally expansive in scope, in the wide attention it gives to the dynamics at play in what the author describes as Jewish culture or a Jewish community, extending across Judaism's denominations and legal-geographical contexts; and in its attention to all kinds of sexual violence, all capacities and designations of rabbinic leadership, and all profiles of abusers. It aims to shed light on the causes, dynamics and impact of sexual abuse on bodies and souls, individuals and collectives, and it embeds sexual...