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Does Girl Power = "Boy Crisis" ?
The American Jewish community never fails to worry. We worry about anti-Semitism. We worry about intermarriage. We worry about assimilation. And lately, we’ve been worrying about boys. In response to the steady retreat of boys and young men from Jewish communal life, many of us have declared our community plagued by a “boy crisis.”
An interesting word choice: crisis. I gave myself five seconds to free-associate with “crisis” and here’s what came to mind: AIDS, Ebola, Global Warming, Hurricane Katrina, Health Care. Curiously enough, “boys” did not surface as a crisis. Neither did “girls.”
After reading “The ‘Boy Crisis’ That Cried Wolf” an article by Rona Shapiro, senior associate at Ma’yan: The Jewish Women’s Project, I share Shapiro’s concern about the disproportional weight we attribute to male participation in Jewish life and her unease with the sensationalized language used to characterize Jewish gender dynamics in general.
The statistics quoted in Shapiro’s article do give us cause to worry. In the Reform Movement, boys comprise only 43% of youth group participants, 28% of campers at Camp Kutz (the Reform movement’s leadership camp for teens), and 33% of first-year rabbinical students at Hebrew Union College. And a recent study of affiliated Jewish teens conducted by Brandeis University’s Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies reveals that girls outnumber boys in youth programs 2-to-1. Yet as Shapiro points out, when four out of every five American college students were male, there was no “girl crisis.” And when women were not ordained as rabbis and not called to the Torah for aliyot or even allowed on the bimah at all, no one proclaimed a “crisis” of any kind.
Why is it that when the gender scale tips with girls’ involvement out-weighing boys,’ does the Jewish community declare a state of emergency? And perhaps more importantly, what’s the cause of this perceived “crisis” in the first place?
Some suggest that boys and men are retreating from Jewish life because women now dominate it (or so they think), and boys just haven’t found a way to adapt to shared leadership with their female counterparts. In response to this male absence, the Union for Reform Judaism recently launched a “Young Men’s Project.” Moving Traditions, sponsor of the program: “Rosh Hodesh: It’s a Girl Thing!” has also begun a major initiative for boys.
These initiatives may be addressing a need, but the reasoning behind their inception is questionable. If boys’ disengagement from Jewish life is, in fact, spawned by a discomfort with “dominant” involvement and/or leadership among girls, should we really be advocating exclusive, boy-centered initiatives as an acceptable solution? Might this only exacerbate a “Sexism Crisis” ?
Perhaps the real crisis is the Jewish community’s lack of innovation in meeting the needs of boys and girls alike. We need to work collaboratively and creatively to accommodate the ways in which our community’s needs have evolved.
Submitted by Jordan on January 26, 2007 - 5:32pm.
Helping boys is not hurting girls.
Why are you afraid of focus being given to boys when they are having trouble? Leave your grief about the status of women in the past behind you and look to now and the future.
Society changes very quickly. Since the women's movement, women have dominated society's concern for equal status while the status of men has been *assumed* to be superior. Men's superior status in society may have been true most of the time for the past 40 years, but the present does not hold this truth any longer. Women have higher enrollment rates in college, receive more bachelor's and master's degrees, there are more women in medical school, women under 30 earn considerably higher wages than men under 30, and women are starting to "dominate" the Jewish community. The gender scales have flipped, it is time to be concerned for the status of our boys as well.
"Why is it that when the gender scale tips with girls’ involvement out-weighing boys,’ does the Jewish community declare a state of emergency?"
It was a state of emergency when the gender scales were tipped in favor of boys, then should it also be an emergency when they're tipped in favor of girls? Those who want a healthy society should want a relatively equal amount of participation between men and women. When the "gender scale tips with girls’ involvement out-weighing boys" it is a sign of a problem. Society is entirely elastic enough to recreate the past with the genders flipped. We all want equality, we can never achieve equality if we cannot give help to those who need it at the time they need it. The concern about boys is not meant to disadvantage girls, it is meant to help boys who ARE in trouble.
Perhaps you realize that a predominance of focus on the status of girls and women has hurt boys (think about the effect it has on mothers who assume her sons will be better off than her daughters and then focuses her attention on her daughter. The effect of focusing only on her daughter hurts her son), and are worried about a predominance of focus on the status of boys hurting girls' status once again?
I personally don't think this situation will happen, because even with all the focus on boys starting to emerge (and rightfully so), there are still plenty of people like you who will have concerns for the status of girls. This is a good thing, we need to be concerned with the status of all people in our society, not just girls because boys have historically had it better. Society changes and it changes rapidly. Ignoring the present and the probable future while thinking only of how things were in the past is a severe error of judgment.
"If boys’ disengagement from Jewish life is, in fact, spawned by a discomfort with “dominant” involvement and/or leadership among girls, should we really be advocating exclusive, boy-centered initiatives as an acceptable solution?"
Weren't women disengaged because men dominated at one point as well? It was necessary to take initiatives to change it then, and those initiatives were girl-centered. Clearly, they worked. It is time to start helping boys again, having boy-centered initiatives is probably the best way to help boys.
"Might this only exacerbate a 'Sexism Crisis' ?"
I don't think it's sexist to focus on the needs of each sex individually. It is sexist to focus on the needs of only one sex, and it is girls status in society has been predominantly focused on for the past 40 years. Perhaps this was necessary to bring women to equal status with men, but I think we are in a position today where we need to focus on our boys again. We can focus on boys and girls individually, so long as we focus on both. Mothers and fathers focusing on both their sons and daughters, not mothers wholly concerned with their daughters and fathers wholly concerned with their sons, we don't need sexism among parents directed at their children.
When I read articles like this one it reminds me so much of the beginning of the women's movement. Women were shouting out that society is unfair and unbalanced while many men tried to contradict them and dismissed their claims. Do not contradict or dismiss what is happening to our boys. Do not dismiss help for our boys claiming it will only add to a "sexism crisis". Our boys are in real trouble, we need to acknowledge their problems in order to help them and not fear that helping boys is somehow sexist and discriminatory towards girls. We can help boys and not lose sight of our girls.
"This is something we discuss daily at my current job at a leading youth organization - where the boys are, or are not. Interesting to note that " The Jewish Community" less often asks about its young women."
The statistics from this article indicate that the Jewish Community is aware of where both its boys and girls are. The statistics clearly show a heavy predominance of girls in most activities among the Jewish Community. It is necessary to discuss the participation of boys when their participation is so much less than girls. If the situation tips in favor of boys again, I'll bet you they'll be asking about girls.
RE: "Boy Crisis"
This is something we discuss daily at my current job at a leading youth organization - where the boys are, or are not. Interesting to note that " The Jewish Community" less often asks about its young women.
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