Featured Post

Free The Hostages! Bring Them Home!

(this is a featured post and will stay at the top for the foreseeable future.. scroll down for new posts) -------------------------------...

Oct 27, 2015

the challenge Hillary Clinton brings to frum newspapers

There is an interesting article in the Columbia Journalism Review about how Ultra-Orthodox newspapers are planning to deal with the challenge of Hillary Clinton possibly being the next President of the United States vis a vis their policy of not printing images of women in the newspapers.

an excerpt:
It’s not just her politics that worries these publications, although they are far to the right of Clinton on most issues. More troublesome is her gender. For reasons of tradition and modesty, and in line with some interpretations of Jewish law, the ultra-Orthodox publications do not run pictures of women in their pages. When they publish articles about Clinton, they are likely to run images of her campaign posters, a picture of her house in Chappaqua, NY, or a photo of her husband, Bill. Occasionally, they will run a caricature of Hillary Clinton from a political cartoon, but not a photo.
It was one thing to avoid printing Clinton’s picture when she was First Lady or a United States senator, or even Secretary of State. But how can you not show the President of the United States?
In interviews, the editors of four major English-language ultra-Orthodox publications, three of them published in New York and one in Jerusalem, said that they are reevaluating their no-women policy in light of the Clinton candidacy, but would not make any final decisions alone. As with all important decisions, they will take the question to the boards of rabbinical advisors with whom final authority over the publications’ content rests. One of the editors, a rabbi himself, said that a Clinton victory could spell a change in the longstanding no-women policy in his paper and the others. “I think we’re going to have to rethink it,” Rabbi Yitzchok Frankfurter, the executive editor of Ami Magazine, told me. Not to do so, he said, “would be disrespectful.”

This alone might be the cause for many people to vote for Clinton, and they would be willing to ignore any and every other issue, just to get the frum papers to start printing images of women....

Then again, the real frum response really should be that clearly Hillary Clinton is going to lose, so that the frum papers won't have to break their tradition of thousands of years...




------------------------------------------------------
Reach thousands of readers with your ad by advertising on Life in Israel
------------------------------------------------------

3 comments:

  1. If they look scary, can their pictures go in?

    ReplyDelete
  2. On a scale of 1 to 10000, this is the 10000th smallest problem with a Clinton presidency.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is this another example of Charedi lies and distortions? It's OK to disrespect Frum, Jewish women, but we'll throw out a "Halacha" to avoid disrespecting a politician?

    The "correct" thing to do is to uphold the policy and defend your religious rights. If you are embarrassed to do so, you aren't "Charud L'dvar Hashem" after all, are you?

    ReplyDelete

Related Posts

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...