Asking for Too Little: Taylor Swift’s All Too Well Better Wake Us All Up to Normalized, Sexist Abuse of Power
Sacred prayer
I was there
I remember it
all too well.
Taylor Swift’s restored lyrics to her song and short film All Too Well, re-released last week in its form as “Taylor’s version,” resonate differently with this rabbi.
I’ve spent the week alternating between listening to Swift’s full album, Red, on repeat, and holding space for my friends’, colleagues’, and mentors’ responses to a recent report by the law firm Morgan Lewis detailing decades of sexual abuse, harassment, and sexist campus culture at the Hebrew Union College — Jewish Institute of Religion, the institute of higher education that, among conferring other degrees, ordains rabbis and cantors in the Reform Jewish Tradition.
No one could read the report and deny that much of the behavior it describes regarding six named men, most of them ordained rabbis, with positions of power in the institution are clearly sexual abuse. (In alphabetical order) Dr. Steven Cohen, Rabbi Dr. Michael Cook, Rabbi Dr. Alfred Gottschalk, Rabbi Dr. Stephen Passamaneck, Bonia Shur, and Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman each crossed sexual boundaries in baldly abusive ways, from ongoing, pestering, pointed…
