Member-only story
It’s an Airplane, Not a Shul
A Tale of Flying While Female
So a man boards his El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv, but when he sees that Elana Sztokman is in the seat adjacent to his, he refuses to sit next to her.
Did she have a hacking cough? Covid?
No. The problem, simply, was that she was a she.
The man, an ultra-religious Orthodox Jew, was so certain that God didn’t want him to sit beside a woman that he demanded a seat change. Other Orthodox men onboard took up his cause, and the ensuing brouhaha delayed take-off until, finally, another seat could be found for him.
Sztokman just happens to be the author of The War On Women In Israel: A Story of Religious Radicalism and the Women Fighting For Freedom in which she calls for an end to “the religious extremism that is hurting women” in that country.
Proving? God has a sense of humor. Or, at the very least, a sense of irony.
The outraged essay that Sztokman wrote about the incident quickly went viral.
Will this help Sztokman sell books?
I certainly hope so.
Seating flaps like this aren’t unusual for El Al. It happens often enough that instituting gender-segregated seating on their planes has been discussed. (And dismissed…
