Reply To: What Happened To the Forum I Loved so Well?

“I don’t know if that would work. You don’t make strong balei teshuvah through hashkafa battles. At most you have weak extremists.”

OK, there’s a lot of stuff between “feminism will bring about the moshiach,” and Yosef Mizrachi. People could just act like normal frum yidden, which means not being okay with femenism, but also not being a crazy pants.

I don’t even know why we’re being apologist about it here. At risk of being accused of being a Joseph alt account, allow me to share some extremely non-controversial, mainstream realities that will still somehow annoy certain people:
Frumkeit is shamelessly patriarchal and has rigidly traditional gender roles. Feminism is inherently against this.

Pretending that this isn’t the case to try to attract BT’s causes people to come in with philosophical baggage who then either frei out or stay frum but never really fit in.

Quality is more important than quality for kiruv. Having a few solid, well-adjusted BT’s is better than having a big Chabad House full of wacky, quasi-frum am haartzim clinging on to unjustifiable shittos without ever being corrected only to have children who never fit into a real frum community.

As for what CS is saying, I would call her a troll if I hadn’t spent enough time around Lubavitchers to know she’s being serious. You can’t redefine feminism as something that it completely is not, just so that you can claim that the Torah jives with feminism (i.e. your new fangled version of feminism). Feminism is not about “empowering” women to raise 10 kids, spend hours in the kitchen doing the mitzvah of challah and cooking for shabbos. It’s about empowering women to do the exact opposite of these things.

By the way, as much as I appreciate my thread becoming a Chabad-fight, I do think we should switch over to Zionism soon. Don’t want to stay on one issue two long.