But I Want to Sit in the Back of the Bus: Struggling with Elective Segregation

by Sarah Imhoff

Earlier this month, the B110 bus route raised hackles. The bus, which runs between Williamsburg and Borough Park, serves a largely Hasidic Jewish ridership. On the bus, as in Hasidic communities more generally, physical contact between men and women is considered immodest and impious. Men, therefore, sit in the front while women must sit in the back of the bus. (Placing men in the back and women in the front, many have argued, would violate the rule in the canonical Shulhan Aruch which states that a man should prefer to walk behind a lion than behind a woman.) The practice became news not because Hasidic bus segregation is anything new (it isn’t), but rather because the bus company leases the route from city. The aptly-named Private Transportation Company is therefore required to follow the city’s anti-discrimination laws. After receiving several complaints from non-Hasidic women who had ridden the bus, the NYDOT sent a sternly worded letter to the company, which read, in part: “Please be advised that a practice of requiring women to ride in the back, or allowing passengers to harass women who choose to ride in any part of the bus, is not permitted on franchise buses, [and] would constitute a direct violation of your franchise agreement and may lead to termination of that agreement.” (You can read the whole letter here.)

The most interesting facet of the story is not the existence of the practice—it is common on private Jewish buses catering to Hasidim in both the US and Israel—but the way the news coverage confronts the issue. Two aspects are particularly notable: first, the struggle to situate the Hasidic women within a political tradition of individual choice and liberalism (in the Enlightenment sense, rather than contemporary partisan sense), and second, the implicit comparison of sexism and racism.

The reflexive reaction to the story is that the women bus riders must be against the policy. The woman who filed the initial complaint certainly falls into this category. Later, CBS sent one of its female correspondents to test the reactions of the B110 bus riders and drivers, and the coverage expressed similar assumptions. But  the coverage generally ignores the fact that the vast majority of these bus riders are Hasidic, and most of the Hasidic women who ride the bus say that they do want to segregate  themselves. One woman commenter on Matsav wrote: “As far as I am concerned, it ALLOWS us to sit in the back, separate from the men. I wish there was more available so I could be in New York more comfortable.” Her perspective is typical of most of the women in the Hasidic community; they prefer sex segregation even if it means having to sit in the back because it allows them to conform more closely to religious ideals of modesty.

The Jewish non-Jew and the non-Jewish Jew in America

by Shaul Magid

Originally delivered as a sermon at Fire Island Synagogue on Rosh-ha-Shana 2011.  Find other sermons and essays by Shaul Magid at his personal website, Radical Banjo.

Throughout history human beings have marked their lives by public events. This is one reason pilgrimage festivals remain such operative religious categories, as do anniversaries, birthdays, and other annual commemorations. In some way the cyclical nature of human commemoration is particularly endemic to a summer community such as ours. We see one another for a few months, sometimes a few days, and then disappear into our lives until the next moments of reunion.

As I write this, a live radio broadcast of the tenth anniversary of 9/11 whispers gently in the background. Names waft from the cracked voices of bereaved loved ones as they recite the seemingly endless names of those who, ten years ago in one horrific sun-splashed morning, disappeared from our world. Sometimes single moments seem to change everything. But more often, time conceals its intentions. The quotidian lulls us into believing what was will always be, and what is, is as it should be. Or must be. We believe in human freedom but there is a part of all of us that is a historical determinist. The more crucial fight is then not against the enormity of the tragic moments, those moments are duly marked for us to remember and consider. Those moments never let us forget. The harder fight is against the seemingly invisible passage of time that changes us so slowly that, like the rotating planet we live on, is never seen and rarely felt.

Religious communities have the potential and even desire for serious introspection but that need is often glossed over to fulfill another need: the need for continuity. Every generation is afraid to be the last in a chain of tradition. Every individual wants to view themselves as a carrier of something to be bequeathed to another generation. We are individualists living inside a Jewish community of collectivists. We want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. But in doing so, we sometimes miss the opportunity to face the changes that stand before us in the present. We worry so much about the future, the present gets overlooked.

Over the past two years I have had many conversations with members of the synagogue regarding our future and reassessing our identity as a Jewish community. Not just here on Fire Island but as part of the American Jewish community more generally. We have changed and the American Jewish landscape in which we live has also changed in the past two decades. I think it is time we initiate an open and frank conversation about who we are and what kind of community we want to be. And, as important, what do we want to leave behind for our children and the generations to follow. To have this conversation we have to resist feelings of nostalgia that invariably creep into our collective conscience. The past, however we imagine it (and the past is by definition a product of our imagination) is gone and will not return nor, I would add, should it. The Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig once remarked that he had no tolerance for those nostalgic voices that lamented how terrible things are today compared to 150 years ago because had they been alive 150 years ago, they would have said the same thing.