Category: In The Media

If a man cannot look at a woman and say ‘What a healthy and handsome woman the Almighty has created,’ then I do not know what is happening to us. And I fear that if this continues, we will have to veil our faces.

These are not my words (though I’ve said them in these pages before), these are the words of Rabbanit Adina Bar Shalom, daughter of Rav Ovadia Yosef a’h.

Speaking at a conference, she said she was “greatly ashamed” that the Shas publication “Day to Day” ran a photograph of the newly elected government with the faces of female ministers blurred out.

Read more in the Times of Israel

Shoshanna Keats Jaskoll

Recently, Angela Merkel was removed from the now famous picture of the recent rally in France by an ultra-Orthodox newspaper. In this, she joins the ranks of Hillary Clinton and many Jewish women and girls who have been literally erased from the public eye by elements of the Jewish community who fanaticize the concept of “guarding one’s eyes”

Though the aim of this practice is to be holy and desexualize casual encounters, it instead has the opposite effect, making every interaction between genders a potentially sexual — and thus sinful — one and effectively renders any normal interaction between the sexes impossible.

Though this community is small, it is also the fastest growing and its influence reaches beyond its own neighborhoods.

In this society, men seldom look at women and refrain from reading secular newspapers; strict gender segregation is enforced in schools, synagogues and, really, anywhere that it can be implemented. This has extended to buses and certain bus lines are unofficially (because it is illegal) segregated, with women sitting in the back.

Magazines censor images of women and girls. This relatively new phenomenon extends to magazines that cater to religious, yet far more main stream Jewish communities. Magazines such as Ami, Mishpacha, and Binah all censor women despite having a predominantly female readership.

Read More in the Times of Israel