RantCrush Top 5: June 22, 2017

An 83-year-old Israeli woman has won a landmark lawsuit against the Israeli airline El Al. The airline can no longer ask women to switch seats because a man wants to avoid sitting next to a woman. This has become an increasingly complicated problem, as some strictly Orthodox Jewish men who want to avoid accidentally touching women ask flight attendants to move the women from their reserved seats, sometimes causing delays. This happened to the plaintiff, Renee Rabinowitz, in December 2015. Rabinowitz is a retired lawyer, who escaped the Nazis in Europe as a child and also has a Ph.D. in psychology. “For me this is not personal,” she said last year. “It is intellectual, ideological, and legal. I think to myself, here I am, an older woman, educated, I’ve been around the world, and some guy can decide that I shouldn’t sit next to him. Why?”

An Israeli court orders El Al not to ask women like Renee Rabinowitz to change seats just because of their gender. https://t.co/j5t89C0B6q pic.twitter.com/7aCAvZ03Cx

— New York Times World (@nytimesworld) June 21, 2017

Yesterday, a court in Jerusalem ruled that flight attendants are not allowed to ask a passenger to change seats just because another passenger makes the request based on gender. Anat Hoffman, the director of the advocacy group Israel Religious Action Center, which represented Rabinowitz in court, compared her to Wonder Woman. “Like Gal Gadot, Renee has superpowers,” she said.

Emma Von Zeipel

Emma Von Zeipel is a staff writer at Law Street Media. She is originally from one of the islands of Stockholm, Sweden. After working for Democratic Voice of Burma in Thailand, she ended up in New York City. She has a BA in journalism from Stockholm University and is passionate about human rights, good books, horses, and European chocolate. Contact Emma at EVonZeipel@LawStreetMedia.com.