The Erasure of Women in Orthodox Jewish Media
Picture this: a new kosher cookbook targeted at Orthodox Jewish women features contributions by many popular Orthodox female chefs and lifestyle bloggers. Yet the cookbook’s introduction to “meet the authors” depicts each contributor as a different colored bowl instead of using their photographs. Unfortunately, this is likely neither an oversight nor a quirky creative decision but merely the latest example of photographs of women being erased from certain (though not all) Orthodox Jewish media.
In one prominent example dating back to 2011, Brooklyn-based Hasidic newspaper Di Zeitung took this iconic photograph of U.S. government leaders in the Situation Room watching the raid of Osama bin Laden’s compound and edited out U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Director for Counterterrorism Audrey Tomason, instead publishing this photo along with its news coverage. Why? The newspaper had a general policy not to publish any pictures of women because they could be considered “sexually suggestive.” After substantial criticism of the erasure of two high-ranking women from this historic moment, the newspaper issued a statement apologizing for causing offense yet reiterating its policy: “Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention.”
As another example, in 2018, Orthodox Jewish magazine Mishpacha published a somewhat pixelated version of this image showing the liberation of children from the Auschwitz concentration camp, thereby covering the depicted women’s faces.
In yet another striking case, in 2019 an Israeli clothing store advertised its wares with human boy models alongside a girl doll, instead of a human girl.
Going arguably even further, a Hasidic school has blacked out drawings of women as well the word “girl” from secular textbooks it uses, as revealed recently in a New York Times exposé on Hasidic education.
Erasing girls and women from Orthodox Jewish media and other sources is harmful to women and to Jewish society more broadly. By leaving women unable to promote themselves effectively (or by depicting them as inanimate objects like dishes as in the recent kosher cookbook), their reach is limited and women are financially disadvantaged. Erasure also makes it harder, if not impossible, for women to serve as the role models they can be. Moreover, the erasure of girls and women undermines their dignity by treating them as lesser than boys and men, who are not similarly erased. And erasure objectifies girls and women by underscoring that they ought to be and are seen only as sexual objects and must therefore be erased. Beyond harming girls and women in the Orthodox Jewish community, erasure negatively affects how boys and men view and treat girls and women too.
For these reasons and more, the Jewish organization Chochmat Nashim (“Wisdom of Women”) advocates against the erasure of women. To help address the problem of erasure, the group has created the Jewish Life Photo Bank, which contains photos of Jewish girls and women in all aspects of life, and asks Jewish media organizations to un-erase girls and women by using photos from this repository. Chochmat Nashim and others emphasize that women have historically been depicted in Orthodox Jewish media and this erasure is a modern trend disconnected from religious observance. Judaism indeed has no gender, and with continued support, girls and women will hopefully be depicted in their lives as freely and naturally as boys and men.
This writing was later published in a somewhat different form in The Jewish Press on September 30, 2022
