Reply To: Can women talk about Gemara?

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#1077409

“This policy of discrimination between the sexes as to subject matter and method of instruction which is still advocated by certain groups within our Orthodox community has contributed greatly to the deterioration and downfall of traditional Judaism.”

That’s an interesting comment as it was written 40(?) years ago. Time has proven that comment wrong as it is in fact the communities that continue that discrimination between the sexes as to subject matter and method of instruction that have grown by leaps and bounds and enormously prospered over the last 40 years whereas the communities that have broken those barriers down and no longer discriminate in the educational realm have witnessed several phenomenons: many of their members have moved their affiliation to the right into communities that continue the tradition of treating male and female religious educational subjects very differently (notably regarding Talmud study and Torah she-be-al peh), while another portion of their communities have deteriorated towards the edges or beyond of Orthodoxy in adopting practices from the non-Orthodox movements, especially but not exclusively in areas relating to gender and Judaism. Overall, though, the Orthodox communities that liberalized girls education in the last 40 or so years while remaining Orthodox have significantly shrunk as fraction of the Orthodox community.