Susan Berrin, Editor, Sh'ma: A Journal of Jewish Responsibility

“White slavery,” or trafficking — the coerced movement across borders of mostly women for sexual work — has a long, unseemly tradition and a surprisingly prominent place in Jewish life in past, and present. During the last decades of the 19^th century, many vulnerable Jewish women from Eastern Europe were sold by Jewish mobsters into sexual slavery. Sholem Aleichem wrote one of his most famous stories about a Jewish pimp, and Bertha Pappenheim — the German-Jewish feminist — spent much of her life fighting it. The early years of the Jewish community of Argentina were indelibly shaped by this trade. Though its pervasiveness was often denied, or relegated to a back burner, Jews have worked in and fought against trafficking for more than a century. Now in present-day Israel, where trafficking grew since the early 1990s as young women were brought from the former Soviet Union, it is a significant, darkly disturbing phenomenon.

In October, Sh’ma explores how trafficking of women is a Jewish issue through the following essays:

• Ruth Messinger on Why Trafficking is a Jewish Issue
• Bonna Haberman on “selling” women, culture, society, and profitability
• Karyn Gershon on Vulnerability in Eastern Europe
• Rachel Gershuni on Trafficking in Israel—and using this issue as a laboratory for social change
• Juhu Thukral on economic, justice, and immigration issues
• Gail Lobovitz on early rabbinics and sex slavery
• Phil Miller on Jewish slavery texts
• Nancy Schwartzman reviewing trafficking in recent Israeli films

Sh’ma offers an accessible tool-kit for understanding how our Jewish history of enslavement, our social justice values, and our global networks can help us address trafficking in the 21st century — its economic, legal, and societal ramifications. Request copies for your chapter by sending your contact information to Lindsay at LHarris@JFLMedia.com.