CJR_The biggest nightmare the country’s major ultra-Orthodox Jewish newspapers and magazines face these days is that Hillary Clinton will be elected president. 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.” read more
HERE at Columbia Journalism review.
