Are Gender Relations Shifting to the Right?

When one YU junior showed up to a first date, he was looking forward to a satisfying meal, an animating conversation and a relaxing night out. Instead, the young woman came armed with a 70-question "test," grilling him on his ideology and family history. Unfortunately, he failed the test. Not surprisingly, neither of the two expressed interest in a second date.

Attitudes today towards dating and coed interactions in the Modern Orthodox community have changed substantially from those of the past - from issues concerning the appropriateness of coed programming for college students to the attitudes with which they approach a date to what they talk about on a date (take the above story, for example). (See "Not Your Parents' Shidduch Scene" in this issue.) A shift appears to have occurred, altering the outlooks of many young men and women in how they relate to one another - a shift that has concerned parents and community leaders alike. To what can this change be ascribed? Much debate surrounds this topic. Many attribute these changes to the nearly-standard education of Modern Orthodox students in yeshivot in Israel after high school. Mashgiach Ruchani Rabbi Yosef Blau paints the typical portrait of a student's experience there as one where kids accustomed to coed environments "go off to Israel, enter a world where interaction with the opposite sex is discouraged and they come out with the notion that they should only go out for shidduch purposes. Rabbi Blau attributed this apparent "move to right" to greater concern for the details of Halachah, which he viewed as "an inevitable result of people having a much more serious yeshivah education."

In other words, because students have had broader exposure to the nuances of Halachah while in Israel, they return home with changed perceptions of their relationship with the opposite gender, based on perceived halachic guidelines. This idea is echoed by Dr. Hillel Davis, Vice President for University Life: "I think, in general, young people are much more serious than they were about virtually everything. In particular, I think they are much more intellectually and rigorously committed to Halachah and their interpretation of Halachah and so that demands certain behaviors."

Indeed, there seem to be significant data to support this hypothesis. In a recent poll of the undergraduate student body (see "Student Pulse" on dating), 42.6% of respondents felt that his or her year(s) in Israel affected how he or she views dating and interaction with the opposite gender. 23.7% of respondents - including 14% of female respondents and 30.9% of male respondents - started being "shomer negiah" after their Israel experience. (The current online Observer poll, which is open to all voters on the site, reports that only about 4% of respondents became "shomer" after Israel.) Another 23.7% no longer date recreationally after Israel but rather date strictly for marriage purposes. 12.9% of respondents no longer talk to members of the opposite gender, except when necessary. And, perhaps most surprisingly, 5.8% of all students broke up with their girlfriends/boyfriends during their year(s) in Israel. Some of the comments that students left were quite revealing as well. One SCW student wrote that the Israel experience "made me more aware of the spirit of modesty [and] emphasized the importance of starting a family." One YC student in Mazer Yeshiva Program (MYP) said, "It deepened my understanding of the dynamics between men and women." And a different SCW student explained that "it helped me realize that there is a significant difference between frivolous co-ed interaction and healthy, normal, purposeful interaction with the opposite gender." All of this points to the significance of the year(s) in Israel in the development of young students' attitudes towards coed interaction and dating.

Still, Dr. Samuel Heilman, a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the author of Sliding to the Right: The Contest for the Future of American Jewish Orthodoxy, feels that the renewed emphasis on Halachah as a result of the year(s) in Israel has not fundamentally changed the way Modern Orthodox students date: "Yes, I'm sure the time they spend in Israel has an impact. [However,] the Modern Orthodox world is still pretty far away from the style that you find in the Charedi community. Shidduchim do occur, but not in the same kind of formalized way. The hallmark of modern dating is that the male and female choose to do it by themselves. They choose their partners themselves and evaluate them and don't have their parents do it for them. I don't think that that has changed. The subjects they talk about might be different and the idea that they might be meeting for the purposes of matrimony might indicate a slide to the right. But the fact that they still run the show for themselves is a big distinction."

Thus, even as the Modern Orthodox community has changed parts of the details of its dating experience as a result of greater exposure to or focus on halachic requirements, its basic characteristics remain the same.

Others, however, argue that it is not greater emphasis on Halachah that has caused the shift; it is rather the concerted effort on the part of instructors in Israel to distance the genders that is to blame. Rabbi Jeremy Wieder, a Rosh Yeshivah in MYP, explained in a Kol Hamevaser interview as follows: "I do not know what implicit messages are being sent, but in some cases I know that negative attitudes are explicitly encouraged. Some young women are taught that young men see them only as sexual objects, and the very same messages are being sent to young men - that young women are dangerous sexual objects who are there to tempt them. I think that this has had detrimental consequences and contributes significantly to the current shiddukh/dating crisis." Sarah Weinerman, a recently married Stern grad, agrees: "I think that a major contributor to the shift is the year spent in Israel, when people who may have gone to coed schools and spent much time with people of the opposite gender spend all of their time with their own gender and hear from their teachers how that's the way things should be."

Rabbi Wieder, in that same Kol Hamevaser interview, explained that another factor in the changing attitudes of Modern Orthodox youth towards the idea of relating to the opposite gender may be the community's growing emphasis on separate education without corresponding emphasis on extra-curricular interaction: "We should consider the possibility that the rigid separation that is enforced during the prior educational stages does not allow young men and women to relate to each other as human beings when they are actively searching for a spouse. They will not know how to relate to each other or interact properly. Coeducation is not necessarily the answer to this problem - maybe part of the answer is to promote mixed activities within the context of communities committed to single-sex education."

Rabbi Kenneth Brander, Dean of the YU Center for the Jewish Future (CJF), observed, similarly, that encouraging these interactions outside of school will help to alleviate the tensions between the genders later on: "While there are studies that show that there are often educational benefits for students who attend single-sex schools, nevertheless they should have the opportunities...to interact with the opposite sex in a healthy environment. I think that bodes well for their future ability to date properly without being socially inept." In fact, he mentioned, a major part of the future goals of the CJF's new YUConnects dating services program is to create more venues for students to interact and confront issues of social awkwardness: "The whole idea behind YUConnects is not just to create more opportunities for people to meet; it is to begin to create means through which our students can start reflecting on these issues." In the meantime, however, until such changes are made and take root in the community, students are liable to feel uncomfortable around each other and avoid interaction.

Another approach maintains that the Orthodox community as a whole has become much more ideologically divided than it used to be, creating problems for youth looking for spouses. "Small differences have become major," said Rabbi Blau. "There's a much greater stress on ideological positions. People at a relatively young age are somehow asked to define themselves: 'Am I "yeshivish," "modern," "modern tending right," "charedi lite," etc?' - as if everyone has to belong to a camp." And, once they have defined themselves hashkafically, they are unwilling to compromise on their principles. "How can a couple get married [or even start dating] if they can't agree where they're going to send their children to yeshivah when they have them?" Rabbi Blau asked rhetorically.

Still a different approach points to broader society and its perceived moral degeneration as explanation for the changes in attitudes among Modern Orthodox youth. Rabbi Blau elaborated: "The fact that American society is much more open to sexual, physical contact and sexual expression has made it more difficult for someone who is Orthodox to simultaneously identify with that society. There were people opposed to going to movies when I was a teenager, but it's difficult to say that that was based on the fact there was so much nudity and sexual promiscuity in the movies, because there wasn't."

As a result, Rabbi Blau observed, it is not surprising that the perceived acceptability of socializing with members of the opposite gender among today's students has changed significantly. (Indeed, one might hypothesize that the reason educators in Israel have begun emphasizing the importance of gender separation is their perception of the deleterious effects secular society's sexual openness has had on Modern Orthodox youth.)

Finally, Rabbi Blau points to the changing role of women in society as an explanation for the shift in gender relations over time. "Women are playing a much more active professional role in society, which introduces complication in terms of Jewish life in general, but has particular implications in terms of the expected roles of husband and wife in marriage." Without a model with which to work, young men are left confused about how to relate to their female peers whose professional goals may complicate their choices of when and whom to marry.

All of these factors appear to combine in the minds of young men and women into one big mess. Students have little direction or experience in how to navigate all of the new societal constructs they encounter. The influence of their time in Israel only serves to further confuse their conceptions of themselves and of the opposite gender. Feeling pressure from every direction, these students have to figure out for themselves how to relate to one another, resulting in a shift in gender relations on both a communal and personal level, often to the right. Perhaps with time and experience, and as the number of parents who are graduates of Israeli yeshivot increases, the community will be able to begin to formulate proper responses to the seeming imbalances that exist today. Until that time, however, much of the confusing realms of shidduchim and gender relations will be left in the hands of the younger generation, for better or for worse, to independently determine their own attitudes to these critical areas of social interaction.