Hebrew University’s Legacy of Lies

In the summer of 2024, while volunteering in Jerusalem, I began looking into a dual degree program that had just been launched by Hebrew University. Since it was Israel’s top university and ranked in the top 100 in the world, I thought it would be worth attending. I applied and began studying there that fall.

This English-language program mostly attracted Jewish students from the USA, England, and Canada, with a few exceptions. We had to choose two degrees from three options: Business, Jewish studies, and Liberal Arts. I went with Business and Liberal Arts. The literature classes required for the first semester were your typical-sounding, standard things: Fiction, Poetry, World Masterpieces. I thought I was signing up to read and study great literature to become a better thinker and writer. But it gradually became apparent that was not the main motive of the school’s agenda, nor my experience at all.

To kick off the semester, one of the first short stories assigned in fiction class was the disturbing tale of “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Gilman. In this story, a husband brings his wife with postpartum depression to a house out in the country for her recovery. Prescribed a “rest-cure,” the woman feels her abilities and creative outlets are stifled by men. Forced by a male doctor and her husband to abstain from writing, for the sake of resting, she goes mad in her lonesome room with yellow wallpaper. 

Our discussions on this work revolved around the traumatic effects on women from the oppression of men, both in society (as represented by the doctor) and at home (as represented by the husband). Our fiction professor drew a daunting picture of a world of women entrapped and repressed, women who had yet to band together and rise up against the patriarchy to gain their autonomy, and who might do so one day through writing. 

This idea of building a canon of female literary work was also repeatedly mentioned as the solution to women’s issues in another of my classes, called “Voices of Women in Ancient and Contemporary Hebrew Literature.” Contrary to the course’s name, our first reading was by the not-so-Jewish Virginia Woolf. She however, did fit right into the course content as a feminist apologist. Woolf, to give her a bit of an introduction, was institutionalized several times during her writing career for mental illness before eventually committing suicide. Never having children of her own, Woolf expressed disdain and resentment at women’s role as mothers. One of her most well-known works, “A Room of One’s Own,” states that women generally, as housewives and mothers, do not have adequate space, time, or money for writing, hindering their opinions and creations from ever making it onto paper, and much less out into the world. 

In that essay, Woolf included the fictitious tale of a woman who wandered up to the gates of “Oxbridge” university, only to be curtly turned away by the male guard, demonstrating that university was only accessible to men. Strangely, that wasn’t actually true at the time of Woolf’s writing, in 1929. By then women had already been incorporated as students at Oxford for quite some time. England’s all female college near Cambridge had also been open since 1869. Yet, women, she preached, must strive to enter every male space. At the core, Woolf pushed for women to reevaluate their traditional roles. She propagated the incredibly destructive lie that women must break free from domestic and family obligations in order to have a voice in society and achieve success.

Our professor used this text as the foundation for all our subsequent readings by a collection of Jewish writers, to build upon the sentiment that men are a main cause of women’s suffering. Since I had hitherto held a naive, but somewhat positive view of Judaism, sans Kabbalah, I expected female Hebrew literature to include knowledge of the Bible (at least the Old Testament) and stories of faith and character. Astonishingly, each and every work we read was the opposite. We had stories of neglect, rape, poverty, good-for-nothing husbands, and a societal culture that accepted only those who followed strict, often inhuman, customs and expectations. The stories were so depressing that I almost couldn’t bear week after week of them. Unlike reading the Old Testament, these writings lacked any sort of reliance on God, strength through faith, or bravery to do what was right in the face of opposition. 

In one poem that we spent a considerable amount of time on, a female Israeli writer lauded the beauty of the Egyptian gods, expressing her admiration of their superiority and power. God’s command to “…be careful not to be ensnared by their ways after they have been destroyed before you. Do not inquire about their gods, asking ‘How do these nations serve their gods? I will do likewise.’ You must not worship the Lord your God in this way, because they practice for their gods every abomination which the Lord hates” (Deut. 12:30-31a. ESV) was being willfully scorned in this poem, the same sin that ensnared the Israelites many times before. Too often, the Israelites spurned their heritage as God’s chosen people and instead conform to the culture and traditions of the surrounding nations. Serving idols and foreign false gods led to many occasions of God’s chastisement for their rebellion.

This is a recurrent theme throughout the entire Old Testament. So it shocked me to hear my professor, a Jewish woman who should know the Old Testament, call such a rebellious piece of writing “beautiful.” One Chinese classmate and I were the only non-Jewish students in the class. I looked around the room at my Jewish classmates for some sort of reaction, but there was none. That floored me all the more. 

In the stories we read in the female Hebrew Literature class, I was disappointed to find little to no mention of God or the Old Testament, except for, like in the poem mentioned above, in blasphemous ways, including misconstruing passages and rewriting them. As I later came to learn, one of the main missions of select female Jewish writers was rewriting the Bible to fit the feminist narrative. 

We covered one of these rewritings in the course. It was the Biblical account of Rachel when she stole her father’s idol and lied about it. In the Biblical account, Rachel showed a lack of faith in God’s help and provision by taking things into her own hands, resulting in a confrontation between Jacob and Laban. Instead of acknowledging Rachel’s sin here, Jewish writer Wendy Zierler claims Rachel was forced into stealing her father’s idol because women did not have the authority to directly confront men in those days. Ziegler praised Rachel’s theft, naming it women empowerment. Ziegler went on to call all women to take Rachel’s rebellion as their example to continue “seizing the tradition” away from their fathers and male contemporaries.

Ziegler ignored the many powerful examples of true women’s empowerment, such as at other points in Rachel’s life, or in the lives of those such as Deborah, who was a judge over Israel, or Hannah, or Abigail, women who feared and obeyed God and were used in awesome ways. Rachel’s fear and sin only created a lack of trust and division. It did not win her any empowerment. Just like Woolf’s claim that motherhood limits a woman’s potential for fulfillment and success, this too was a lie.

It is true that women in both former and modern Jewish societies women have been ignored and disregarded and, in many cases, horribly abused by men and a system that did not support them. The vulnerability women faced if their husbands ever left, divorced, or mistreated them was huge. A reaction of anger towards this injustice is natural. God’s perfect design for men and women has been distorted in our fallen world, causing an abundance of pain as a result.

This is why it is all the more disappointing to see women turn away from the only One who redeems women and lifts them up. To see women instead paint the label of victim on themselves, believing and spreading the destructive idea that women must be against men, and “subvert,” to use feminist language, “the male patriarchy” simply leads further in the wrong direction. 

In God’s order, men were created as protectors and providers. When men fail to fulfill their role, suffering does ensue. Yet we can see from the effects of fatherlessness on children, removing or subverting the authority of men is not the solution. And neither is removing or denying the position of women as helpmates and nurturers.

A pattern I noticed in the feminist writings was never allowing women to take responsibility for their choices or wrongdoings. The same goes for feminist rewritings of the Bible, including the story of Adam and Eve. That account was also grossly twisted to fit the narrative by 19th century American feminist writer, Percy Shelley. He analyzed Genesis 3 and wanted Eve to become the heroine. So rather than saying Eve was tempted and fell, he, using ideas from John Milton’s poetry, rewrote the chapter to make Eve a receiver of divine knowledge, some kind of sacred wisdom. 

Shelley’s biography includes a string of broken women and dead children. At the time, he was also well-known for being thrown out of Oxford University for writing on atheism and for being an overall low-life human being. If feminists believe Shelley to have championed women’s rights in his writings, he surely did not do so in real life. He was deeply involved in the occult. According to occultists, the family unit is the number one enemy. The more you trace it, the more clearly you find thatfeminism’s origin stems from the occult. 

Members of the occult found some old Jewish literature that claimed a woman named Lilith was the first wife of Adam, not Eve, and brought it into modern American society. From the story of Lilith came Lilith Fair, a feminist music movement in the late 90s and early 2000s in the USA. Percy Shelley was also the first to create the notion of the “idealized woman” who doesn’t need a husband or children. In one of his poems he created just such a character named Cythna that became an icon for future feminists. This led to today’s widely held notion that women should prioritize themselves and a career over family.

But why does the story of Eve in the Garden of Eden matter so much to the occultists and feminists? It must be because this account tells us the true, God-designed roles for men and women. The Bible tells us that in the beginning of creation, the woman was deceived in the Garden of Eden, not the man (1. Tim. 2:14). God built Adam to handle deception. Men and women were created as equal, although not the same. Adam failed to protect Eve from deception in the garden, yet it is still the God-intended role of men to protect women, including from deceptions. The Bible is very specific in mentioning this difference. Satan didn’t want to approach Adam. He instead went alone to Eve, the one that could be influenced to influence. 

Women are very influential. Convincing women otherwise, that they have no power or sway, stirred up women into the “consciousness raising” movement. Our literature professors introduced this second agenda in the latter half of our semester readings.

For those interested, check in again soon for part two!

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