A Jewish marriage is created by the husband's act and can only be dissolved by his act: he must place a get, a writ of divorce, in his wife's hands of his own free will. If he refuses — out of spite, for leverage in a custody negotiation, or for money — she is an agunah, chained, unable to remarry under Jewish law, and any children of a subsequent relationship are mamzerim with severe marital disabilities of their own. A man in the same position is treated far more leniently. Israel's rabbinical courts have real coercive powers and have imprisoned refusers for years; outside Israel the courts have no jurisdiction, so the community has used social pressure and public shaming, and in one notorious case a rabbi ran a service using kidnapping and cattle prods, ending in federal convictions in 2015. The mainstream remedy is prevention: the Beth Din of America's halakhic prenuptial agreement, now close to universal in Modern Orthodoxy, imposes a large daily support obligation on a husband who separates without giving a get. Much of the Haredi world rejects it. Structural solutions — conditional marriage, or annulment by a rabbinic court — have been proposed for a century and repeatedly refused, and this is the case that liberal movements point to as the clearest cost of an unchanging law.