An online campaign led by Adina “Flatbush Girl” Sash, encouraging Jewish women to expose erva (parts of the body normally covered) in solidarity with an aguna (woman “chained” in a marriage because her husband is withholding a divorce), reveals something deeper than a mere disagreement over tactics.
It reveals how profoundly the basic assumptions of liberalism – the current ideological paradigm of Western civilization – have influenced the contemporary Jewish moral imagination.
This is especially true for Diaspora Jews in North America – even amongst those who self-identify as “Torah observant” – but also for many Israelis to a certain extent. Without even realizing it, many of our sociopolitical conversations take place on the moral and cultural playing field of another civilization and can, at times, cause us to see our own people’s values as primitive and/or unworthy.
The logic behind Sash’s #FreeAdeena campaign to obtain a get (divorce) for Adeena Kohn from Raphi Stein appears to be this: because one woman is being deprived of the ability to enter a new relationship due to her inability to receive a get, other women should respond through acts of online bodily exposure, transforming their own bodies into symbols of protest and solidarity.
But body politics is itself profoundly foreign to Jewish social and cultural norms, as well as to the ancient prophetic worldview and value system of precolonial Israelite civilization.
Why should bodily exposure function as political speech?
Why should revealing erva become the language through which solidarity is expressed?
Why is the female body treated as the primary canvas upon which communal pain is argued?
The assumptions at the base of Sash’s campaign aren’t neutral. They emerge from a specifically Western cultural grammar shaped by both Christian propriety and its liberal feminist offshoots.
From Christian Propriety to Liberal Exhibitionism
Victorian era morality reduced women to vessels of purity, demanding modesty through shame and repression.
Contemporary liberal feminism often responds by simply reversing the polarity. Instead of demanding concealment, it glorifies exposure.
But both of these approaches remain trapped within the same Western binary in which womanhood is mediated through the politics of sexuality and the female body functions as an politicized object.
The tragedy of this Esavian colonial influence on so many Jews is that many of us can no longer imagine any forms of resistance outside of Western categories.
So when confronting injustice, activists like Sash – who champion a uniquely Jewish manifestation of white feminism – instinctively reach for the symbolic language that modern liberalism has taught them: bodily transgression as protest.
The Hebrew Understanding of Tzni’ut (Modesty)
Hebrew notions of modesty predate Western civilization and operate completely outside of its various frameworks.
“Tzni’ut” is not rooted in shame, nor in sexual provocation masquerading as solidarity or empowerment. It doesn’t understand dignity through either repression or exhibitionism. The Hebrew body is not a political billboard upon which societal arguments are projected. It is kadosh – sacred, integrated, human.
In the Hebrew worldview, the body is neither shameful nor performative. It’s not hidden because it is “dirty” nor exposed in order to generate political meaning. Modesty is not repression, but resistance to the reduction of human dignity to spectacle.
Even the framing of tzni’ut itself has become colonized in many Jewish spaces.
White feminism pasted onto Jewish issues frequently misreads tzni’ut as merely another patriarchal technology of control because it cannot conceive of modesty outside the Christian framework of shame. But authentic Hebrew tzni’ut was never about erasing women from public life or treating the body as dangerous. It has always been about dignity, inwardness, and resisting the reduction of human beings into consumable visual objects.
Ironically, campaigns like #FreeAdeena deepen rather than dismantle objectification.
The female body once again becomes spectacle. Once again, womanhood is flattened into visibility. Once again, value is mediated through public display.
This is not liberation but rather the further entrenchment of our psychological subordination to the ideological paradigm of the dominant civilization.
Colonized Consciousness & the Collapse of Jewish Civilizational Confidence
Perhaps most revealing was Sash’s response when asked why traditional Jewish communal pressure tactics (physically beating a get refuser until he relents) are not being utilized against Raphi Stein.
She responded by encouraging her supporters to follow the law.
But whose law?
Historically, Jewish communities – even in the Diaspora – possessed autonomous systems of communal coercion precisely because Jewish civilization understood itself as independent and self-defining. Centuries of exile, layers of colonization, and the wounded desire to be accepted into host societies (largely due to the traumatic persecution Jews experienced when othered in those societies) weakened those structures and allowed them to be replaced by the authority of the liberal nation state.
Now many Jews instinctively accept the legal and moral frameworks of liberal ideology as neutral and absolute, while treating traditional Jewish communal mechanisms as primitive or embarrassing relics. At the same time, however, they feel entirely comfortable importing Western activist aesthetics directly into Jewish communal life, even when they openly violate Jewish legal and value norms.
This is the psychology of colonized consciousness. Native frameworks become viewed as barbaric while the imported frameworks of the dominant civilization become viewed as enlightened.
The fact that Sash is unwilling to support authentic Jewish mechanisms for coercing a get for fear that this would violate US law but has no trouble encouraging her followers to transgress Jewish law says everything we need to know about which law she sees as truly sacred – which value system she accepts as inviolable and whose ideological paradigm she lives in.
The tragedy is that many Jews no longer even recognize Western frameworks as foreign. Psychological colonization succeeds most deeply when imported values cease to feel imported at all.
The Crucial Difference Between Resistance & Assimilation
Some might point to the legend of the daughter of Matityahu ben Yoḥanan HaKohen (and sister of the Maccabim), who exposed herself to shock her brothers into confronting the Greek violation of Judean brides. But the comparison actually highlights the difference between a Hebrew act of resistance and a protest operating within modern Western symbolic frameworks.
Matityahu’s daughter was not using bodily exposure as identity expression or political theater. Her act was a direct confrontation with Jews who had become desensitized to foreign domination.
“You are scandalized by my temporary immodesty,” she argued. “Yet willing to normalize the systematic violation of Judean women by an occupying power.”
Crucially, her act was aimed at restoring Hebrew civilizational boundaries, not symbolically transgressing them. Her protest emerged from within a Judean moral universe resisting Hellenistic colonization.
By contrast, contemporary body-centered protest movements, even when initiated by sincere Jewish women, often unconsciously adopt a modern Western political grammar in which the body becomes the primary medium through which solidarity and moral outrage are communicated.
That symbolic framework is not native to Hebrew civilization. It reflects the extent to which even Diaspora Jewish activists that self-identify as “Torah observant” have absorbed post-Christian assumptions about the relationship between the body, identity, and political expression.
Embracing a Hebrew Worldview
None of this is meant to suggest that the suffering of agunot isn’t real. It’s real and it’s deeply problematic.
But when Jewish pain becomes utilized to justify the erosion of Jewish civilizational values, something profoundly unhealthy is taking place.
A truly Hebrew response to injustice would emerge from within our own people’s value system and worldview, from ancient Jewish conceptions of justice, dignity, communal responsibility, covenant, and legal authority. Not from imported liberal scripts that transform the female body into a politicized tool for the further erosion of our people’s identity.
The choice before us is not between patriarchy and exhibitionism. Nor is it between repression and provocation.
The real choice is whether Jews will continue filtering themselves through a Western lens, or whether we will recover enough civilizational confidence to think as Hebrews again.
