Daniel sent us this one — and I've been turning it over in my head all week. MK Limor Son Har-Melech of Otzma Yehudit has advanced a bill that would permit gender-segregated studies in Israeli universities and colleges. It removes a legal obstacle for programs that want to operate this way, specifically so religious women who currently avoid mixed-gender campuses can actually attend.
The reaction has been — well, you've seen the headlines.
A bill that forces nobody to do anything, and yet everyone seems furious about it. Which is the first clue that we're not actually arguing about the bill.
No, we're arguing about what the bill represents. The surface debate is "segregation bad, access good," and everyone picks their team and goes home. But underneath that, there's a much stranger question.
What happens when the liberal state's commitment to neutrality — to letting people live according to their own values — runs headlong into a community that doesn't want what the state is offering? The religious women this bill targets aren't demanding the right to sit next to men in a lecture hall. They're demanding the right not to. And that flips the usual script completely.
Normally the argument is "let us into your spaces." This is "let us build spaces you find objectionable, and fund them publicly, and call them legitimate." And suddenly the people who pride themselves on being open and tolerant are in the position of saying no, you can't do that, your preferences are wrong.
Which is genuinely uncomfortable. If you're a liberal who believes people should be free to live according to their own conception of the good, what do you do when someone's conception of the good involves gender separation you find regressive? Do you tolerate it? Do you tolerate it but refuse to facilitate it? Do you draw a line and say some conceptions of the good are just incompatible with a liberal society?
That's the knot. Is letting people self-segregate actually the liberal thing to do — or is it the thing that hollows out liberalism from the inside?
Before anyone jumps to an answer, consider what's actually being proposed. This isn't a bill that would touch the existing university system for the vast majority of students. If you're a secular Israeli at Tel Aviv University, nothing changes. The bill simply says: if a group of Haredi or religious Zionist women want a degree program in a single-gender setting, the state won't stop them.
The stated goal, and I think we should take this at face value, is increasing participation in higher education among populations that currently self-exclude. There are religious women in Israel who will simply never attend a mixed-gender campus. Not because anyone's stopping them — because they don't want to. So the choice right now is: segregated program or no program. And the bill says let them have the program.
Yet the opposition isn't coming from nowhere. This is the same Knesset where we've seen battles over gender segregation on public buses — the mehadrin lines that the Supreme Court banned in twenty eleven. It's the same political ecosystem where there's an ongoing push to expand religious authority into public spaces. So when people hear "gender segregation in universities," they don't hear a narrow permissive bill. They hear the next front in a much larger campaign.
Which is fair to note, but it's also exactly the kind of contextual freight that makes it hard to evaluate the bill on its own terms. Because if you strip away who's proposing it and what else they might want, the core question remains: should the state permit voluntary single-gender education in public institutions? That's a question that liberal democracies all over the world have wrestled with, and they've come to different answers.
The United States, for example, amended Title IX in two thousand six to explicitly allow single-sex classes in public schools. The UK has a long tradition of single-sex state schools. So the idea that public education must be co-ed isn't some universal liberal principle — it's a choice, and different societies have chosen differently.
Those examples come with their own controversies and mixed results. Which is exactly what makes this stickier than the headlines suggest. It's not "religious extremists versus enlightened liberals." It's a genuine philosophical puzzle about what neutrality requires, what freedom means when choices are shaped by community pressure, and what happens to public institutions when we let people opt out of encountering each other.
That's what we want to trace through this episode. Not "who's right" — though we'll certainly have views — but what frameworks actually help us think about this. Rawls, Nussbaum, Walzer, the Jewish tradition itself, and then the knock-on effect that don't show up in the press releases.
I should say — Daniel's prompt got at exactly this. He said it feels stickier than the surface reading, and he's right. He asked how philosophers, political lenses, and religious traditions would see it, and what the non-obvious harms might be. So we're going to do exactly that.
Let's get the facts of the bill itself clear, because half the arguments I've seen online are shadowboxing with something that isn't actually on the table.
MK Limor Son Har-Melech of Otzma Yehudit advanced this in the current Knesset session. And the key word — the one that gets buried in every heated take — is "permit." The bill doesn't create a new requirement. It doesn't tell any university "you must segregate these programs." It removes a legal obstacle. Right now, if a college wanted to offer a degree track exclusively for Haredi women in a single-gender setting, they'd face legal challenges. This bill would clear that path.
It's a deregulatory move, essentially. It's saying the state won't block something, not that the state will impose something.
The stated rationale is straightforward: there are religious women in Israel — Haredi, some religious Zionist — who will not attend a mixed-gender campus. Not because they're being barred by anyone. Because their religious framework says no. So their choice right now is binary: violate your religious commitments to get a degree, or don't get a degree. The bill's proponents say that's a false choice, and the state shouldn't be the thing enforcing it.
The practical effect would be programs that already sort of exist in a gray zone becoming fully legitimate. You've got Haredi women's colleges in Jerusalem that operate de facto segregated programs through creative scheduling, separate buildings, separate entrances. They're working around the law rather than with it. This bill would let them stop pretending.
Which brings us to the opposition's case. And I want to state it fairly, because it's not frivolous. The concern is that even if nobody is forced, the state permitting gender segregation in public higher education sends a message. It normalizes the idea that men and women being separated is a legitimate default that public institutions should accommodate. And once you've conceded that principle — that religious gender norms deserve accommodation in the public university — where do you draw the line?
There's a second layer. The people pushing this bill aren't exactly neutral parties who just want religious women to have options. Otzma Yehudit has a broader agenda about expanding religious authority in public life. So the opposition sees this bill and thinks: this isn't really about helping Haredi women get degrees. It's about establishing a precedent.
Which may or may not be true about the motivations, but it's a legitimate thing to notice about the political context. The same Knesset that's debating this bill is also the Knesset that's seen pushes on public transportation segregation, on military service exemptions, on expanding rabbinic court authority. So the bill lands in a charged environment.
If you're a twenty-year-old Haredi woman who wants to study computer science, and you're not going to do it in a co-ed classroom no matter what anyone says, the political context doesn't change your situation. You still face that binary choice. And the bill's opponents haven't really grappled with what they're asking her to do — which is either abandon her community's norms or forgo the education.
That's exactly the puzzle Daniel was pointing at. Both sides are claiming to defend freedom. One side says: freedom is letting religious women choose the educational setting they want. The other side says: freedom is ensuring public institutions don't become platforms for religiously-mandated gender separation. Both of those are coherent definitions of freedom. They just don't point in the same direction.
Which means we can't resolve this by asking "which side supports freedom?" We have to ask a harder question: what does freedom actually mean in a context where people's preferences are shaped by communities that have strong norms about gender? And what does the liberal state owe to people whose conception of the good life involves separation that the majority finds objectionable?
That's where the philosophy has to come in. Because "just let people do what they want" turns out to be an answer that raises more questions than it settles.
Let's start with Rawls, because he's the philosopher everyone reaches for when they want to talk about neutrality. And the Rawlsian argument for this bill is actually pretty clean. The state, in Rawls's framework, is supposed to be neutral between competing conceptions of the good life. It doesn't take sides on whether the secular liberal life is better than the religious traditionalist life. It just provides the framework within which people can pursue their own version.
And if you accept that, the logic flows pretty directly. The state already permits and funds co-educational spaces. Those spaces embody a particular conception of the good — one where men and women mix freely, where gender isn't a structuring principle of social life. That's not neutral. That's a choice. So if the state is going to fund spaces that reflect secular liberal values, neutrality would seem to require that it also permit spaces that reflect religious traditionalist values.
Otherwise you're not being neutral between worldviews. You're saying: we'll accommodate your preferences if they look like ours, but not if they don't. Which is exactly the double standard Daniel was pointing at in his prompt.
There's a stronger version of this argument. It's not just that the state should permit both. It's that refusing to permit the religious option effectively coerces religious women. The state is saying: you can have higher education, but only on our terms. Terms that require you to violate your religious commitments. That's not neutral — that's using state power to impose a secular framework on people who don't share it.
This is where the bus case becomes relevant. The twenty eleven Supreme Court ruling that banned gender-segregated seating on public buses. The court said: public transportation is a public service, and you can't impose religious norms on it. Which sounds reasonable until you flip it around. If a group of Haredi passengers want to sit separately by gender, and the bus company is willing to accommodate that, what's the liberal argument for stopping them?
The court's answer was that public services can't be complicit in discrimination, even voluntary discrimination. But that's a substantive moral claim, not a neutral procedural one. The court was saying: gender equality is more important than religious accommodation in this context. Which might be right — but it's not neutral.
And once you admit that, the Rawlsian framework starts to look less like an argument for the bill and more like a way of clarifying what's actually at stake. The question isn't "should the state be neutral?" The question is "which substantive values is the state willing to enforce, and at what cost to whom?
Which brings us to Nussbaum. Because Martha Nussbaum looks at this whole setup and says: wait, you're talking about choice, but what kind of choice are we actually talking about?
This is the capabilities approach, right?
Nussbaum's framework says the state's job isn't just to protect formal freedom — the absence of legal coercion. It's to ensure people have genuine capabilities: real opportunities to do and be what they have reason to value. And she draws a distinction between internal preferences and adaptive preferences. An internal preference is one you've formed through reflection and endorse. An adaptive preference is one you've developed because your options were limited and you adjusted your desires to fit what's available.
The question becomes: when a Haredi woman says she prefers single-gender education, is that an internal preference or an adaptive one?
That's an incredibly difficult question to answer from outside. Nussbaum herself is careful about this — she doesn't want to dismiss religious women's choices as false consciousness. But she does want us to ask: what shaped those choices? If you've grown up in a community that teaches you from childhood that mixed-gender settings are immodest, dangerous, or sinful, and your social world is structured to make co-ed spaces feel foreign and threatening, is your preference for segregation yours?
The uncomfortable implication is that respecting choice isn't enough if the choice was manufactured by a system that limits your alternatives. And that's where this gets tricky, because you can make that argument about almost any preference formed within any community.
The secular Israeli who's uncomfortable in a Haredi neighborhood also has preferences shaped by their social environment. Nussbaum's framework doesn't single out religious communities — it asks us to examine all preference formation. But it does mean that "she chose it" isn't the conversation-ender it first appears to be.
Which is why I find Walzer's approach more useful for this specific case. Because Walzer isn't asking about individual psychology. He's asking about the character of institutions.
Spheres of justice.
Walzer's argument is that different goods belong to different spheres, and each sphere has its own internal logic. The problem comes when the logic of one sphere — say, the market — colonizes another sphere — say, education. For Walzer, higher education isn't just a private good that individuals consume. It's a public institution that creates citizens. It has a civic function.
That function includes bringing different kinds of people into contact with each other. The university, in Walzer's framework, is one of the few places in modern society where people from different communities, different classes, different worldviews actually encounter each other as equals engaged in a shared project. When you let groups opt out of that encounter — even voluntarily — you change what the university is.
The campus becomes less of a public square and more of a shopping mall of educational options, each tailored to a specific demographic. Which sounds consumer-friendly, but Walzer would say it hollows out the civic dimension. You're not just losing the specific interactions that don't happen. You're losing the institutional culture that says: this is a place where difference is encountered, not avoided.
Here's where Walzer connects back to the Israeli context in a way that Rawls and Nussbaum don't quite capture. Israeli society is fractured — religious and secular, Jewish and Arab, left and right. The university has historically been one of the few shared spaces. Not perfectly shared — there are huge inequalities in who attends — but symbolically shared. When you create separate tracks, you're not just accommodating preferences. You're abandoning one of the few remaining sites of common life.
Walzer also gives the bill's supporters a counter-argument, and I think we should be fair to it. If the university's civic function is so important, why does it only seem to apply to religious women? Nobody tells secular Israelis they have to encounter Haredim in their classrooms. The "encounter" argument tends to be deployed selectively — usually against groups the majority finds inconvenient.
That's a fair critique. The civic encounter Walzer values is almost always an encounter on terms set by the dominant culture. The religious women are being told: you must be present in our spaces, on our terms, so that we can have the experience of diversity. That's not exactly a neutral civic ideal either.
Which brings us to the Jewish tradition angle, because this is where the bill's supporters would say: we're not importing some foreign religious norm into public space. We're recovering something that's been part of Jewish learning for millennia.
They're not wrong that there's a tradition here. The concept of tznius — modesty — has structured Jewish communal life for a very long time. Separate seating in synagogues goes back centuries. The idea that men and women studying together might be problematic isn't some recent invention by Otzma Yehudit. It's a strand of Jewish practice with deep roots.
Here's the thing. It's a strand. Not the strand. Because if you go back to the Talmud, you find the academy of Sura in Babylonia, where women like Yalta — the wife of Rav Nachman — participated in legal discussions. She's described as engaging directly with the rabbis, challenging their rulings. She wasn't behind a mechitza.
There's the famous story of Beruriah, the wife of Rabbi Meir, who was so learned that the Talmud cites her legal opinions. She studied alongside men. The tradition is more complicated than "Judaism requires separation." It's more like: Judaism contains both impulses, and different communities have emphasized different strands at different times.
Which means the bill's supporters are making a choice about which Jewish tradition to elevate. They're not just neutrally applying halacha. They're selecting the interpretation that aligns with their broader social vision. And there are competing interpretations available — including from within the Orthodox world.
The counter-tradition is worth naming explicitly because it undercuts the claim that opposition to this bill is just secular hostility to religion. You can be deeply religious and deeply learned in Jewish texts and still think that gender segregation in academic settings is a mistake — not despite Jewish tradition, but because of it.
The philosophical frameworks all complicate the simple "let people choose" position, and the religious tradition itself is contested. But even if you find all of that ambiguous, there's a whole other layer Daniel asked about that we haven't touched yet. The knock-on effect. What actually happens when you implement something like this, regardless of the intentions behind it?
This is where the rubber meets the road. And the first thing I'd point to is what behavioral economists call choice architecture. The bill is permissive — nobody is forced into segregated programs. But once those programs exist, they change the default.
Right now, a Haredi woman who wants a degree has to navigate the discomfort of a co-ed campus, but she also has a clear path. The existence of a segregated option doesn't just add a choice. It changes what her community expects of her.
If the segregated track exists, the family that was grudgingly accepting their daughter attending a mixed university can now say: why wouldn't you take the modest option? The community rabbi who was staying quiet can now publicly endorse the segregated program. The social pressure shifts from "we'd prefer you didn't go at all" to "if you're going to go, at least go to the proper one.
The woman who prefers co-ed education — who wants to sit next to men, who wants that encounter — suddenly has to justify herself in a way she didn't before. She's not just choosing a university anymore. She's making a statement about her religious commitments.
This isn't hypothetical. We saw exactly this dynamic play out in the United States after the two thousand six Title IX amendments that allowed single-sex classes in public schools. The policy was framed as expanding options. But in practice, it often became a tool for communities to channel girls into "appropriate" subjects and boys into others. A Department of Education review in twenty fourteen found that many single-sex programs were operating on the basis of gender stereotypes — boys get competitive math drills, girls get collaborative discussion circles — rather than any pedagogical evidence.
The choice architecture problem is real. The bill doesn't have to force anyone to change the social landscape. The mere availability of the segregated option does that work.
Then there's the separate-but-equal problem, which American history has made impossible to ignore. I know the phrase lands with a thud, and I'm not equating this bill with Jim Crow. But the mechanism is the same: when you create separate tracks, they don't stay equal.
The Israeli higher education system already has a hierarchy. You've got the elite research universities — Hebrew University, Tel Aviv, Technion — and then the colleges, and then the peripheral colleges. Resources, prestige, and outcomes flow unevenly. If you add segregated programs into that mix, where do they land?
Almost certainly at the bottom of the resource distribution. The programs this bill would enable are going to be small, they're going to serve a niche population, and they're not going to attract the kind of research funding or faculty prestige that the flagship universities command. The Haredi women's colleges that already exist in Jerusalem operate on shoestring budgets compared to Hebrew University down the road.
The degrees from those programs will carry less weight in the job market. Which means you've created a system where religious women get credentialed, but the credential is worth less. They're included in higher education, but on inferior terms. That's not a solution to inequality — it's a reorganization of it.
The third effect I'd flag is the spillover question. The bill is narrow. It's about third-level institutions. But legal principles don't stay in their lanes. Once you establish that public institutions can accommodate gender segregation for religious reasons, you've created a precedent.
The mechanism for expansion isn't some slippery-slope paranoia. It's actually quite specific. If a university can offer segregated classes because religious women request it, why can't a hospital offer segregated waiting rooms? Why can't a government office have separate service hours for men and women? The principle — that religious gender norms deserve accommodation in public services — is the same. The only difference is the institutional context.
We've seen this movie before. The mehadrin bus lines started as a voluntary accommodation on a few routes serving Haredi neighborhoods. Within a few years, it had spread to dozens of routes, and women who refused to move to the back were being harassed. The Supreme Court stepped in precisely because the voluntary accommodation had become a de facto norm.
Which is why the twenty eleven ruling is so significant as a precedent. The court drew a line and said: public services cannot be segregated by gender, even voluntarily. This bill would effectively legislate around that line in the education sphere. And once the line is breached in one place, the legal argument for holding it elsewhere gets weaker.
The fourth effect is the one nobody in the Knesset wants to talk about, but it's real. Israeli universities are already under international pressure. The BDS movement has spent years building academic boycott campaigns. Israeli researchers face exclusion from conferences, joint projects, and funding collaborations. It's not fair, and it's often antisemitic in practice, but it's the reality.
A law that permits gender segregation in universities — even voluntary, even well-intentioned — is an absolute gift to those campaigns. The headline writes itself: "Israel legalizes gender apartheid in universities." It doesn't matter that the headline is misleading. It doesn't matter that the bill is permissive and narrow. The international academic community, which is already inclined to view Israel through the worst possible lens, will have a new cudgel.
The practical consequences aren't just reputational. They're material. Joint research grants get harder to secure. Exchange programs get canceled. Israeli students studying abroad face a chill. The "brand" of Israeli higher education — which is world-class in many fields — takes a hit that takes years to repair.
This is the thing about knock-on effect. None of them are arguments about the morality of the bill itself. They're arguments about what happens downstream, in the real world, given how institutions actually work and how political dynamics actually play out. And you can't evaluate a policy like this without weighing them.
The UK learned this the hard way with faith-based schools. The "Trojan Horse" scandal in Birmingham in twenty fourteen — where religious accommodation in state-funded schools was exploited to push a hardline Islamist agenda — showed exactly how a permissive framework can be captured. The schools weren't required to do anything. They were just given latitude to accommodate religious preferences. And that latitude was used to impose gender segregation, remove progressive content from curricula, and marginalize staff who pushed back.
Now, the Israeli context is different. This isn't about Islamist infiltration of schools. But the structural lesson is the same: when you create space for religious accommodation in public institutions, you're not just accommodating individuals. You're empowering the most organized, most ideological actors within those religious communities to define what accommodation means. And they will use that power.
Where does all of this leave someone who's actually trying to think through a policy like this, rather than just pick a team? Because that's really what Daniel was asking. Not "what's the right answer," but "how do I think about this in a way that doesn't collapse into slogans?
I think the first thing to say is that this isn't a freedom versus equality debate. It's a debate about what freedom actually means when choices are shaped by community pressure, and what equality means when different groups want fundamentally different things from public institutions.
The freedom to choose a segregated program exists on paper either way. The question is what that freedom is worth when your community, your family, your rabbi all have a stake in which option you pick. And equality — is it equal treatment to give everyone the same co-ed classroom, when some people experience that classroom as a barrier?
Here's a framework I've found useful, and it's three questions you can ask about any policy like this. First: who bears the cost of the choice? If we permit segregated programs, the cost falls on the women who'd prefer co-ed but face pressure to choose segregation, and on the broader civic culture that loses a shared space. If we prohibit them, the cost falls on the women who won't attend otherwise. Neither option is cost-free. The question is whose costs we're willing to impose.
Second question: what happens to the people who don't want the segregated option but are in communities that do? That's the dissenter problem. The Haredi woman who wants a co-ed education, whose family is now asking why she'd choose that when a modest option exists. The bill doesn't create her dilemma, but it sharpens it.
Third: what precedent does this set for other public institutions? Not in a slippery-slope panic way, but as a genuine institutional question. If we say gender segregation is a legitimate accommodation in universities, what's the principled reason it wouldn't be in hospitals, in government offices, in public transport? You need an answer to that that isn't just "well, this is different.
That third question is the one I think gets dodged most often. Because the honest answer might be "there isn't a principled distinction, and we're okay with that expansion," or it might be "there is a distinction and here it is." But you can't just not ask it.
The meta-point underneath all three questions is this: "just let people do what they want" is an insufficient framework for public policy. The liberal state can't actually be neutral about everything. Every institutional arrangement embodies some values and not others. The co-ed university isn't neutral — it embodies a particular vision of how men and women should relate. The segregated program isn't neutral either. The choice isn't between neutrality and partiality. It's between which partiality you're willing to institutionalize.
Which is, I think, the thing that makes people on both sides of this so uncomfortable. The secular liberal wants to believe their position is just the default — the neutral baseline from which religious people are asking for a deviation. But it's not. It's a substantive moral position that not everyone shares. And once you see that, you can't unsee it.
The religious traditionalist wants to believe they're just asking for the same freedom everyone else enjoys — the freedom to live according to their values. But the freedom they're asking for is the freedom to shape a public institution around norms that exclude others. That's not the same thing as the freedom to practice your religion privately. It's a claim on public space. And claims on public space have to be negotiated, not just asserted.
The framework Daniel can take away — and anyone listening who's wrestling with a similar debate in their own context — is those three questions. Who bears the cost? What happens to the dissenters? What's the precedent? And underneath all of it, the recognition that nobody gets to claim neutrality. Everyone is arguing for a vision of the good. The question is which vision you're willing to impose, and on whom.
There's one thing that framework doesn't quite capture, and it's the thing I keep coming back to. What about the women who are caught in the middle? Not the ones who want segregation, not the ones who want co-ed, but the ones whose own community is divided and they're stuck in the gap.
That's the human dimension that gets lost in the policy abstractions. Because the religious community isn't a monolith. There are Haredi women who want a co-ed education, who've already decided they're willing to navigate that discomfort, but whose families and communities are now saying — wait, if there's a segregated option, why aren't you taking it?
The bill doesn't create those women's dilemma, but it changes the stakes. Before, she could say "this is the only way to get a degree." Now she has to say "I'm choosing the mixed option." That's a much harder conversation to have with a parent, a husband, a rabbi. The bill makes her preference visible in a way it wasn't before.
It's not just about family pressure. It's about identity. If you're a religious woman who doesn't want segregation, who finds the whole framework stifling, the existence of segregated programs marks you. You become the woman who chose the secular path. Even if you're still observant, still committed, still within the community — you made a choice that now reads as a statement.
The bill probably won't pass in its current form. The political math in this Knesset doesn't quite work, and the legal challenges would be immediate and serious. But the debate it's opened up isn't going anywhere. The tension between religious accommodation and public space is one of the defining political questions of this era — not just in Israel, though Israel is the most vivid case study.
Because it's a tension that every diverse democracy is going to face in some form. What do you do when inclusion means asking some people to give up the very thing that makes them distinct? And what do you do when accommodation means letting people opt out of the shared spaces that make a democracy function? There's no clean answer, and anyone who says there is hasn't thought hard enough about the women whose lives are actually at stake.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: The largest cooking pot ever made from soapstone was crafted in São Tomé and Príncipe in nineteen forty-three, measuring over four feet in diameter and weighing nearly nine hundred pounds. It was commissioned by a Portuguese colonial administrator who wanted to serve a single batch of calulu to an entire village at once.
A nine hundred pound soapstone pot.
I have so many questions and I'm going to ask none of them.
Thanks to Hilbert Flumingtop for producing. This has been My Weird Prompts. If you want to send us your own sticky ethical puzzles, email the show at show at my weird prompts dot com.
We'll be back next week.
