The misogyny in general and gross views of single Jewish moms are too much for me here.

A couple of weeks ago, a single mom from Oakland posted asking for leads and suggestions to help her unwilling/uninterested son with various mental-health problems have a bar mitzvah; in one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, with the boy’s dad bounced, she and the boy were living with her father. The dad was insisting on a bar mitzvah. Their housing depends on not pissing off her dad so hard that he tells her to leave. She cannot afford a bar mitzvah, barely has money for basics like shoes, but will borrow to get it done; the boy however has behavioral issues and finding a way to make him go while keeping peace at school and working had her back up against the wall.

So she came here looking for help.

Instead what she got were a lot of men, many of them apparently childless men, attacking her as a mother and blaming her for her situation. Almost no one offered practical help. In response she was as polite as any woman trained to be polite to people being horrible to her so that worse things don’t happen.

I reported multiple abusive posts. Nothing was done about them. She thanked me for trying to have her back, and soon after that she deleted her post and left.

I went and scoured her area for a shul that might be a good fit, and after some communication with them found one. I came back here to offer her the info and found her gone. So I posted a “hey, if you’re out there, please contact me” post The first comment on my post is from a sub mod sexualizing my post and making jokes out of it. When I called him out, he dug in, insisted it wasn’t about single moms (despite the “single mom” in the hed) and his friend/partner came in to go to bat for him, defining the problem as “single moms” has “single” in it (so apparently that must mean moms who are looking for dates/sex).

Someone else who was actually helpful, and much more responsible than this mod, found her deleted post and contact info, and I have contacted her to bridge her to the Bay Area shul offering to talk with her and try to help her out.

At no point did the mod either shift to talking about “how do we help this family get the kid bar mitzvahed or otherwise deal” or explaining why the abuse reports went ignored, leading to her deleting the post and leaving the sub.

It’s not a secret that misogyny, discrimination against single adults, and wild discrimination against single moms are rampant throughout Judaism. I live in a relatively remote place, Jewishly, and had come here looking for community. However, I’m a grown woman and mother, and I’m not so desperate for your company that I’m willing to hang around for this kind of ugliness.

As I mentioned, I will get in touch with ADL about this episode, since they’re going to bat for Jews on Reddit. Casual misogyny in Judaism is not their beat, but they should be aware that it’s part of what they defend through silence about it, and that it’s this overt on a main Jewish sub on Reddit.

Gut vach, goodbye, and think harder about how you see women, single women, single mothers. At the moment, for some of you, it stinks.