Sins of Omission: The Jewish Community's Reaction to Domestic Violence (review)

Abstract

Boulder: Westview Press, 2003. 238 pp. $26.00 Domestic violence remains a problem of staggering proportions. According to data from the National Violence Against Women Survey, approximately 1.5 million women are raped and/or physically assaulted by a current or former spouse, cohabiting partner, or date at least once annually; if repeat victimization is taken into account, this number increases to almost 4.8 million.(1) Victims of intimate parmer violence are not restricted to one racial, ethnic, or economic group or, as this important and thought-provoking book makes clear, to any one religious group. While data on victims of abuse in national studies do not include information about religious affiliation, Kaufman presents statistics suggesting that rates of abuse in the Jewish community are comparable to estimates in the general population (p. 46). This abuse, and the lack of response of the Jewish community to its presence, is the focus of Kaufman's book. Kaufman, an industrial and organizational psychologist by training, approaches the issue from an organizational perspective. She notes: In this book I looked at the structure and processes of one specific organization -- the Jewish community -- in order to analyze it as a living organizational system. I wanted to study how that system impacts its members by looking at how it responds to the scourge of spousal abuse; its acknowledgement of the problem, its method(s) of dealing with it, and the funds it allocates to education, victim treatment, and prevention. (p xvi) Toward this end, Kaufman conducted in-person interviews as well as archival research with Jewish lay leaders, rabbis, community professionals and victims of domestic violence primarily from three areas in the state of Massachusetts: the western and middle part of the state and the Greater Boston metropolitan region. She also spoke with persons representing key national Jewish organizations. Persons who participated in the study represented all denominations of Judaism. The result of her work is a comprehensive overview of the community's beliefs, interventions (or lack thereof), reactions, and misperceptions of the problem of spousal abuse. Kaufman carefully documents how denial about the existence of abuse, as well as the lack of knowledge or misinformation about the best way to intervene, prevents many rabbis from responding to the issue. She reveals how the work of many national women's organizations in the Jewish community to seriously address the problem of domestic violence fails to translate into extensive community action at the local level because of factors such as declines in membership among voluntary Jewish organizations (both men's and women's) and the failure of existing organization to collaborate in addressing the problem. …