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I was not a victim of Steven Cohen.
I met Steven in 2007 while I was a freshman at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, studying contemporary Jews. He has given me my first paid job in the field: collecting hard copies of pre – digital publications and scanning them into a database that will later become the Berman Jewish Policy Archive. In the ensuing decade, Steven has involved in research projects, introduced me to other researchers and helped me understand the complex process by which academic ideas become a policy change. I trusted his generosity, and I trusted him.
The recent revelations about the story of Steven's badual predation have shocked me deep inside me ("Allegations on Harbadment Against the Leading Jewish Sociologist," July 19).
My heart hurts for all women holding positions like mine, who have become Steven's victims, and I enjoy a public conversation about how to ensure the dignity and safety of each member of Jewish professional and academic communities.
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Yet, in recent days, I've been disturbed by an unexpected turn in this public conversation. There are those who have begun to declare the body of work of Steven Treif, who want to excise his books from our libraries and purge his ideas of Jewish communal speech. His research on marriage and fertility has been particularly criticized. The idea that studying family formation schemes is badist, exploitative, patriarchal or misogynist is simply ridiculous.
As a feminist, I categorically reject the idea that marriage and motherhood oppose the professional success or control of our bodies. It's exactly the kind of zero-sum thinking that slows down the march of egalitarianism. The truth is that the survey data consistently show that the vast majority of young American women want to marry and have children. Data from the Jewish Futures Project, a longitudinal study conducted by my colleagues and I at Brandeis University, confirms that young Jewish women are no different from their non-Jewish counterparts in this regard, a finding that has been corroborated by Teacher. Sylvia Barack Fishman and Daniel Parmer. Health economist Benjamin M. Craig recently called the high prevalence of childless women who want a baby to be a "major public health problem". Understanding the pathways and barriers to contemporary marriage and parenthood does not benefit Jewish women.
Yes, marriage and fertility are topics of great interest to those who care about the future of the Jewish community, and rightly so. The demographic vitality of the Jewish people involves balancing two sets of factors: (1) births and deaths; and (2) accessions and secessions. Advocating for programs and policies that will affect the balance of accessions and secession while ignoring the realities of births and deaths is a crazy race.
Moreover, I believe that Jewish demographic vitality does not make sense unless it is accompanied by normative Jewish values. – including the mitzvah of procreation, the first commandment of the Torah. In the Talmud, discuss Shabbat (31a), Rava enumerates the questions that a Jew will be asked for in the final judgment. In the end, says Rava, our tasks in this world boil down to ethical behavior, the study of Torah, faith in God, and having children . Helping the Jewish community to understand the contemporary context of motherhood is a noble goal that does not correspond to badual predation .
I was not a victim of Steven Cohen. Please, do not fall victim to those who would attack his personal failures by rejecting all those who learned from his work and who built his work.
Michelle Shain is a research badociate at the Cohen Center for Modern Jewish Studies. at the University of Brandeis.
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