The Wed-Locked Agunot

For three decades Susan Aranoff and Rivka Haut have battled to free agunot, Orthodox Jewish women chained to dead marriages because their husbands refuse to give them a gett, a Jewish divorce. These chained women, citizens of modern Western democracies, may be civilly divorced, yet they are forced into rabbinic courts in their quest to obtain a gett. In these rabbinic courts women are subject to financial extortion, pressured to drop charges of domestic violence and paedophilia against their husbands and to concede custody and visitation rights to unfit fathers--all to induce their husbands to free them. Well-versed in the intricacies Jewish divorce law, Aranoff and Haut have counselled thousands of agunot and challenged the Orthodox rabbinate's inaction in the face of the injustices inflicted on these women. Aranoff and Haut take the reader into the rabbinic courts and their ancient, revered legal texts, onto the picket lines against recalcitrant husbands, into American civil divorce courts and legislatures that wrestle with this problem and into the lives of the victimized women and children. The agonies endured by agunot reveal the power of religious law over people's lives even when that law sharply conflicts with modern societies' moral and legal norms.