Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt on Challenging the Orthodox Jewish World Through Her Writing

Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt lives in two worlds. Some may know her as a Rebbetzin at Park East Synagogue, where her husband, Benjamin Goldschmidt, serves as the assistant Rabbi, while others may immediately associate her name with candid commentary on the Orthodox community through her work as features editor at the Forward, a liberal Jewish publication.

Both roles are filled with self-expression and a lot of eyeballs. She toes a unique line in the observant world, often using her words to expose areas that need improvement within the same community of which she is a leader. 

But Avital, 28, is no stranger to standing out. As a religious schoolgirl, she had words flowing through her fingertips. She competed in national writing competitions amidst mostly secular students. “It was kind of weird,” she says. “I was showing up in a long, pleated skirt alongside a bunch of hippy writers.” You could argue that it was an early moment where she had to stand up for her work with confidence and pride.

Avital grew up in Highland Park, New Jersey, “a wonderfully small town,” with Russian immigrant parents who were baalei teshuva (returnees to Judaism). She had a base of Torah in the home and attended Bruriah, an all-girls yeshivah, but she says her Jewish journey was very much chosen. “My parents gave me the knowledge and education for which I’m forever indebted, but I do feel like I also had the bechira (free will).”

Scratching the Surface

Once she graduated from high school, Avital skipped the typical seminary gap year (her parents didn’t allow it), heading straight to Stern College in New York City. An English major, she jokes that becoming a journalist is the ultimate cure for career indecision. “You get to explore whatever interests you through your work,” she says. “If you want to learn more about mental health and psychology, you can go write a story about it. If you want to do something on nuclear proliferation, you can write something about that, too.”

She started out penning pieces for college publications, then toward the end of her senior year, got her first big break. Avital’s passion for discussing important issues in Orthodoxy manifested in a piece on chumrot (religious stringencies) for Tablet, an online Jewish magazine. “It was about how showing off how tzniut (modest) or frum (religiously observant) you are is completely antithetical to what tzniut is all about. Your piety should be modest,” she explains. “It went viral; it was a very fiery piece.”

That piece came out in March 2012, and later that year, Avital expanded her portfolio, landing pieces at the Forward and the New York Times. These were one-offs, though; after she graduated from Stern, her day job was in the marketing department at a software firm on Wall Street. “It was the most boring job in the world,” she says. 

Despite the mundane environment, Avital’s internal fire didn’t diminish in the slightest. In November that year, she channeled her energy into a letter to the editor of Haaretz, a left-leaning, liberal Israeli paper. The editor was complaining about violent comments on his article, but Avital felt it was to be expected.

“I wrote a chutzpadik (brazen) email,” she shares. “They reached out to me, though, saying they were going to run my letter, and also asked if I would meet with that editor.” Out of that meeting came a job offer to be a regular contributor for the paper, which she accepted. Though she didn’t quit her day job just yet, she reported regularly about Jewish life, mainly focusing on the Orthodox and Russian-Jewish communities. 

In 2015, after freelancing for years, she accepted a new job teaching journalism back at Stern, her alma mater. Then, in 2017, she got the opportunity to practice her passion full-time, landing the role of features editor at the Forward, a title she held until early December 2020. Her next step is to be announced. 

In her most recent position, she did a mix of editing and writing, with an affinity toward crafting personal essays. As she grew there, she shifted her primary focus to reporting, mixing her essays with interviews and pieces about the goings-on in the observant world. “I like to look at trends in the Orthodox community,” she explains. “For example, in the wake of the pandemic, a lot of American Jews are considering making aliyah. I heard about it from enough people [that] I started to reach out to experts who were dealing with the issue firsthand, like people at Nefesh B’Nefesh. When they confirmed that numbers were through the roof, we knew we had something interesting.”

Other topics come from familiar areas like hair covering—she reported on the wig industry in China—or more controversial subjects like breastfeeding at shul. “Sometimes, people will reach out to me on social media with tips on something I should look into,” she shares. “With a lot of stories, though, I just have a gut feeling.”

Mixing Business and Pleasure

Even though Avital is happily married now, she used to fear her work would prevent her from finding the right guy. Essays she wrote about her dating experiences made her editor pause and confirm the young-20-something was truly comfortable moving ahead with the pieces. While Avital did occasionally have her own doubts as well, they weren’t strong enough to stop her from bringing up topics she believed were important. “Sometimes I thought, ‘Will I ever get married?’ I had many people tell me I wouldn’t because of my writing,” she shares. “It was a really scary thing to hear, especially because I was so passionate about it. I definitely worried I could be jeopardizing my future happiness.”

Luckily, Hashem was running the show, and made sure she and her husband got together (albeit, not without complications). The two were set up by mutual friends in 2012. They went on four or five dates, which went well, but then her husband-to-be got nervous that her career would interfere with his work in the Rabbinate. “He said, ‘I really like you, but I’m going to be a Rabbi and you are a journalist; I’ll have to play defense while you play offense. You’re a great catch, but it’s not going to work,’” she shares. “I was so angry. I hated him. I thought, ‘How dare you break up with me? We’re meant to be.’”

Avital handled it the way she was accustomed to—in her writing. “I promised I wouldn’t, but I ended up working on a piece that was published in the New York Times that summer about dating,” she explains. “I didn’t use his name, and it was mostly about being a single Orthodox woman, but there were a few paragraphs about our breakup, so that created a little drama.”

The pair went on to date other people, and then two years later, both ended up at a conference in Parsippany, New Jersey. “He was speaking, and I was interviewing someone for a story,” she says. “We ended up talking all night and then a week later, he emailed me a quote from that same New York Times piece where I referred to him, saying, ‘Maybe he saw something restless in her eyes.’ In the email he wrote, ‘Want to discuss?’”

Eight months later, the two were married. Although their fears about conflict in the relationship regarding their careers did come to fruition—something she’s writing conflicts with the shul’s stance, for example—they have found a way to work through them. “It’s not a daily issue,” Avital says. “But there will be moments where he is uncomfortable with something I’m working on. We just have to live in that discomfort.”

As in any good marriage, they also make compromises. If something is really important to Avital, she’ll say so, and concerning her husband, she will take into consideration their work at the synagogue if something is really controversial. “We serve in a very prominent shul, where there are major players in American politics. I don’t agree with some of them. Can I tweet about something that I don’t like when they’re our members? That’s a really complicated question,” she says.

Between the Lines

Avital’s pieces are often provocative, with topics like sexual abuse and feminism at the forefront, so they can be met with heated debate in the comments section. She’s had to train herself to avert her eyes at all costs. “Something I learned early on and had to explain to my parents and in-laws, is that we do not read the comments,” she says firmly. “Whether it’s on the article, Facebook or Twitter, I don’t even check them.”

She also knows that sparking debate means she is doing her job well. “I’m not here to anger people, but they say that a journalist’s job is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable,” she explains. “I really feel like that’s the only way to create change. My husband always reminds me that at the end of Megillas Esther (The Book of Esther), it says that Mordechai was loved by most of his brothers, not all of them (Esther 10:3). The Gemara says that no true leader is going to be loved by all his followers (Megillah 16b), so there will be feathers ruffled.”

Avital’s Russian roots also inspire her. Discussions of prosecutions and censorship throughout the Soviet Union were very present in her childhood home and had a profound effect on her during her formative years. “I was really fascinated about all these stories of authors who were killed for writing a poem,” she explains. “That affected me; it gave me a certain confidence to write what I think at all costs.”

Her Soviet roots inspire her at home as well. While she hasn’t written so much about motherhood yet, she has an immense pride in being able to pass a Torah lifestyle down to her two children. “I find it momentous and deeply inspiring to be able to give my children a Torah education from day one,” she says. “It’s something that my side of the family never could have, thanks to years of Soviet oppression erasing whatever Yiddishkeit [Judaism] we had. Every little moment—saying Shema at night, practicing davening and brachot [blessings], learning the parasha [weekly Torah portion]—feels a tiny bit historic to me.”

Wearing the Rebbetzin Hat

When she’s not home or at her day job, Avital is immersed in her role as Rebbetzin. Every Rebbetzin is unique, of course, but the title frequently connotes an image of a woman in the home, cooking, baking and hosting, and offering her words of advice and wisdom to community members. If a Rebbetzin doesn’t fit that mold, she might feel out of place, but Avital redefined what that role means to her.

“I don’t totally shirk that side of myself; [pre-Covid-19], I hosted big Shabbos meals,” she says. “I don’t always bake the challah—sometimes I have a bakery do it, but I definitely invest a lot of time into the traditional things a Rebbetzin does.”

At the beginning of her marriage, Avital did labor over the challah. “I had to make everything from scratch,” she says. “It just had to be perfect.” Now, she has her own system. “I know what I do well, and I know what others will do better.”

The point is that a Jewish woman often feels pressure to fit in based on the established social construct of the community, Avital explains. “Instagram and traditional publications show me a … very perfectly curated view of what frum womanhood should be. I don’t think our community has really figured out how to intellectually or spiritually engage frum women outside their school years.”

She explains that post-seminary, a woman’s focus often shifts to getting a degree quickly in order to work and help support a marriage and then to have children. With all the responsibilities that come with that, “there is little room for intellectual, spiritual growth.” Conversely, she says men are encouraged by the system to continue learning through daily minyanim, Daf Yomi [a daily regimen of one page of Talmud] and other regular sedarim [scheduled learning sessions]. “For women, socially, the expectation is that we focus on our homes and families, with a dash of soft inspiration to keep us ‘connected.’” 

Avital doesn’t criticize women who enjoy a more domestically focused life. Such scrutiny is also antithetical to her point. “There are so many women who love it and find fulfillment in it,” she says. “But I really worry about women who don’t and want something else from life and their Judaism. … Not all girls want the same thing.”

The journalist is noticing a bit of a generational shift in women pursuing these other life passions. At a recent Rebbetzins conference, she noticed that some of the older women were in that domestic Rebbetzin role full-time. They were very involved in their communities, did a lot of chesed (acts of loving kindness) and focused a lot of energy on the home. But the younger contingent seemed to have an additional career alongside Rebbetzin-hood. Avital attributes that to potentially needing a second income in the household, but also suggests that perhaps these younger Rebbetzins might just want to do multiple things. “There is so much pressure to be a domestic creature,” she says. “I work to find a balance.”

The work of balancing it all goes hand in hand with clear communication at home. When it’s really important that she attend something at shul, her husband will let her know, and she’ll be there without question. “If you’re not clear, the expectations seem really daunting and honestly impossible if you have a career—and certainly if you have children,” she explains.

Furthermore, her work is key for a whole new generation of Rebbetzins. “Women’s empowerment is extremely important,” she shares. “Girls and women need female leaders and thinkers. Our community is very much segregated—men and women have totally different experiences in Yiddishkeit (Judaism)…I think women want to be engaged in a fresh way and need different types of role models.”

Staying Focused

In Avital’s breakout 2012 Tablet piece, she writes mindfully about herself at the time, discussing how difficult it is to navigate a life in both the secular and religious worlds, yet explaining how the pursuit of that balance is what makes her who she is. It’s prose that still seems to hold just as strong today. 

“I don’t want to be that girl: the aspiring writer who has broken free of the tightly knit Orthodox community or school system and then proceeds to write about her love-hate relationship with said background. Because the truth is, I’m not that girl who’s broken away. I pray daily, recite benedictions before and after food, study Torah (but not Talmud)… But I also wear stilettos. I also study Tennyson, Nabokov, and Joyce; I read the New York Times avidly, attend film screenings and art galleries.”

Now, her goal is to continue creating more spaces for important conversations to be had, where people who don’t fit into just one mold of chareidi (strictly Torah-observant Jews) right or liberal left can feel at home. There are some stories she says she shouldn’t have to write for a publication like the Forward, and would prefer to pen for a publication closer to where she falls on the religious spectrum, but that place just doesn’t exist. “We need more people doing this work,” she says. “We need media that is not afraid to look at problems within our community and say, ‘How can we fix this?’ That’s the only way to create change.”

“I don’t think the current landscape in the community allows for honest discussion,” she explains further. “It’s a rough place to be in. I do think the market will become more diverse over time…The point is not to besmirch anyone; the point is to wake people up.”

It’s clear that if anyone is going to make that happen, she will.

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You can reach Avital by sending her a message on Twitter or Instagram at @avitalrachel.