Classically Abby, known as Abigail Roth (or more famously as Ben Shapiro’s sister), gained notoriety on YouTube with two of her videos detailing her “coming out” as a conservative woman.
One of these videos was titled “Conservative Women It’s Our Time: Let’s Take the Culture Back” seems self explanatory.
The other –“Why You Should Dress Modestly: Get the attention you deserve!” – discusses why it’s wrong to dress immodestly and how to receive positive attention as a woman.
These videos appeared in algorithms catered to US conservatives.
Abby identifies as a “Modern-Orthodox Jew” and preaches “Jewish Values.” But she also appears to emulate many qualities of the American Christian-right and, like her brother, takes for granted the assumption that Jewish and conservative American values overlap.
Her YouTube channel includes a wide-range of videos including mommy-vlogs, makeup tutorials, opera-singing, and Q&A’s. But she is notorious for her videos discussing what it means to be feminine or, as she likes to put it, “classic.”
Being classic, to Abby, means dressing modestly, not having sex before marriage, being a good homemaker, drinking out of a champagne glass, not listening to Taylor Swift (because she’s an “SJW-social justice warrior”), and that motherhood is the greatest thing a woman can do in her life.
Abby has been called out by several YouTubers for her judgmental statements and her anti-feminist, pro-second amendment, and pro-life views.
Abby rejects modern feminism as she feels that it demonizes motherhood. She made a 4th of July video, where she told people to enjoy their second amendment right. Like her brother, she preaches a mythic “Judeo-Christian” set of values that cater to conservative Western ideals while erasing authentic Hebrew values and culture.
It’s understandable, however, that Abby feels a Jewish impulse to reject Western feminism, as it does not take into account the needs and cultural values of women coming from non-Western societies or who hold other marginalized identities. But because she buys into a “Judeo-Christian” worldview and misidentifies herself as a white woman with a Jewish religion, she finds herself championing a movement that doesn’t truly align with her people’s values.
Abby represents a larger movement of Jews in the United States embracing the political right – something worthy of a deeper dive. Despite her valid critique of liberalism and the expectations to reject or subdue parts of her Jewishness in order to conform to politically correct liberal social trends, she herself ironically does exactly that – but for the conservative right.
What Abby fails to appreciate is that by championing “Judeo-Christian values” she’s given up parts of her authentic Jewish identity. Abby frequently shares her belief that women should dress modestly, which actually is a Jewish value. But she never once mentions the word tzniut (the Hebrew term for modesty) or explains why it’s a Jewish value. Instead, she rather consistently talks about how Kate Middleton – part of a family so publicly associated with imperialism – is a perfect example of how a “classic” woman should dress.
The danger of accepting the myth of a “Judeo-Christian civilization” is that it blurs the important differences between the Hebrew and Christian understandings of the world. Even if one can argue from a Jewish perspective that the spread of Christianity has played a positive role in improving the world, it’s still important to recognize that a “Judeo-Christian civilization” is really just Christian civilization with acknowledgement that some concepts were taken from the ancient Hebrews. By perpetuating the myth of a shared civilization, Abby (and her brother) encourages Jews to delude ourselves into thinking of modern Western civilization as our own.
But one thing we often stress at the Vision movement is that the entire concept of “Judeo-Christian” anything merely seeks to erase the Jewish people into a homogenized Christian world. When Jews perpetuate this idea, they unwittingly contribute to their own people’s colonization.
Talking about modesty from a Western perspective rather than from a Hebrew liberation perspective reveals how the “Judeo-Christian values” Abby has internalized have blurred the lines between Western and Hebrew perspectives. Suffice it tp say, her concern does not appear to be rooted in a Hebrew understanding of femininity.
Abby is a colonized Jewish woman without even realizing it.
While she might describe herself as a proud Jew, she operates within a worldview that at the best of times, is ambivalent to her people. Abby’s lack of awareness of the psychological boxes that we operate in, as well as the lack of acknowledgment of the fact that we live and function in a specific ideological paradigm, is dangerous because it prevents her from understanding the Jewish people have adopted attributes of foreign societies.
In a sense, she is propagating erasure in a shallow attempt to be a proud Jew. The lines have become so blurred for her that she likely genuinely believes “Judeo-Christian values” to be authentically Jewish.
In her piece, Un/Masking the Self While Un/Braiding Latina Stories and Legal Discourse, Margaret Montoya discusses her experiences as a Latina woman in the United States. She describes having to “mask” or hide parts of her identity in order to fit in certain spaces. She describes how the racism experienced in the LatinX community “provided a rationale for advocating the complete assimilation of Latinos into mainstream culture. The wide-spread acceptance of traditional assimilationist thought fueled social and familial pressure on Latinos to abandon traditional values and lifestyles in order to achieve educational and economic upward mobility.”
The assimilation of non-white groups into Western societies is a reaction to centuries of oppression. The politics of inclusion allow representatives of oppressed groups to visibly succeed in a white-supremacist capitalist society. Being a product of the Haskalah movement, which was itself a reaction to centuries of brutal European anti-Semitism, explains why Abby panders to the Christian right.
For Jewish women living in the United States, we need to understand the paradigm in which we were raised. By doing so, we can undo the effects that Haskalah, or in other words, the impact that our oppression in Christian Europe has had on us.
But if liberal White Girl Feminism doesn’t meet the needs of Jewish women and aligning with the “Judeo-Christian values” of the conservative right also means requires diluting one’s Jewish identity, then what is the best way to address the needs of Diaspora Jewish women like Abby from a Hebrew liberation perspective?
The answer might ironically lie in some of the intellectual currents that Abby and her brother Ben see themselves fighting against.
Critical Race Feminism – based off of Critical Race Theory – seeks to understand the multiple consciousnesses that non-white women often experience in Western societies. When applied to Jewish women (which may require some struggle over questions of Jewish identity and whiteness), it provides room for us to address issues that Jewish women face from an authentically Jewish perspective. It also provides space for American Jewish women with different experiences, like myself, who grew up in the reform movement and have different perspectives on the issues that Jewish women face than Abby does.
Understanding Abby helps us understand the larger issue, which is the psychological colonization of the Jewish people. This, in turn, can help us – as Jewish women in the West – get a step closer to addressing our needs and decolonizing ourselves from the oppressive foreign paradigm in which we live.
Abby’s connection to the American right prevents her from even considering Critical Race Feminism because she associates it with the “liberal agenda” of her advisaries who don’t seek to liberate or even understand Jewish women.
The irony is that Abby’s thinking that “Judeo-Christian values” are authentically Jewish prevents her from addressing her own liberation. If Jewish women in the West were to apply Critical Race Feminism to the unique issues that we face, perhaps we could find holistic empowerment instead of driving different features of our identities into conflict.
