Yoni Goldstein: Canadian Jews are trapped in an October 7 mindset. The Jewish people need to take charge of their own destiny rather than play the games of their enemies.
Author of the article: By Yoni Goldstein, Special to National Post. Published May 20, 2026. Last updated 0 minutes ago. 5 minute read.
Orthodox Jewish women hold hands as they go for a swim in the Mediterranean Sea at a religious beach for women. Photo by Getty Images.
The Most Consequential Jewish Conversation
The most consequential Jewish conversation of the moment is not taking place amid screaming protesters outside synagogues and other Jewish institutions. It is not concerned with a blood libel printed in the pages of the New York Times or blatant lies on social media. It is not obsessed about whether one can be an anti-Zionist without being an antisemite. In fact, it has little, if anything, to do with Israel at all.
Rather, New Yorker Adina Sash, who goes by the name FlatbushGirl on her popular Instagram feed, has sparked a renewed debate about the Jewish concept of agunah, whereby a Jewish woman remains chained to a marriage so long as her husband refuses to issue the Jewish divorce document known as a get.
According to Jewish law, divorced women may not remarry without a get document in hand. Many Orthodox and traditional Jewish women thus remain trapped long after their marriages have fallen apart, unable to move on with their lives and build new families.
Centuries of Struggle
For centuries, rabbis have attempted to poke holes in this law, advocating for the social isolation of, and even physical violence against, recalcitrant men. Sash, herself, has been fighting for the rights of agunahs for some time now. In 2024, she publicly encouraged Jewish women to withhold sex from their husbands in an effort to bring awareness to the cause and effect change.
Her new campaign invites Jewish women to take provocative selfies for publication on her Instagram account. It is a direct challenge to the religious establishment, and the message is clear: the agunah law must be struck down by any means necessary.
Unsurprisingly, this is making massive waves in the Jewish community, especially among the Orthodox, where the concept of modesty (or at least female modesty) is a primary focus. Even if many are willing to admit that something must be done to ease the plight of agunahs, there is hesitancy about whether Sash is helping the cause or hurting it, and whether responding to one age-old law necessarily requires actively shunning another.
An Internal Debate
What has fascinated me about this controversy is that there is really no significant angle to this matter that relates to Israel or antisemitism. It is a wholly internal debate. And, as a beleaguered Canadian Jew, this fact alone, regardless of the many opinions Sash has elicited, has brought me a measure of relief.
Just as an agunah is trapped in circumstances beyond her control, the global Jewish community remains equally trapped in an October 7 mindset. For closing in on three years, we have thought about little else: the horror of that bloody day, the wars in its aftermath, the co-ordinated, relentless campaign of violent Jew hatred in our cities, the media and academia, not to mention the rash of misinformation disseminated daily on social media that is lapped up by haters and the uninformed.
Read more: Matthew Taub: Supersizing the fight against Canadian Jew hate; Marty York: Canadian Jews are fleeing antisemitism at record rates — and the numbers prove it.
