Did you ever notice that any time a T.V. show or magazine article or, well, anything really, wants to show something Jewish, they inevitably show either a boy holding a Torah or Hareidi men at the Kotel? Inevitably.
This is true across the board, even for seemingly impartial sources such as National Geographic. During their “Taboo: Rites of Passage,” which I was just watching, they showed clips of both of the above scenarios.
Of course, being a fan of movie tropes, I know that men are the generic and women are special. Still, can you really tell me no one who puts these pictures up knows that every other source in the world is also using that totally generic shot of just a couple of dudes at the Wall? Don’t believe me? Just take a look. And there is really no excuse for the fact that Jewish sources do this too.
The same goes for shots of a typical Jewish family: (Except the second one–that’s from ABC and it’s just funny because no one actually wears שלום shirts especially with the freaking vowels.)
Notice anything?
I don’t know, man, I don’t know what’s going on here. It’s like whoever came up with these pictures and programs got confused and didn’t know what to make the women look like. Apparently, in Judaism, just as in TV tropes, men really are the generic.
Even my sister tells me I’m out-of-hand with my rampant feminism, but I like to think I have a good case here. Such as how men have racked up various rites of manhood—Bar Mitzvah, Upsherin (the practice among some Orthodox Jews of giving a boy his first hair cut at age 3), that thing where men start learning Kabbalah at 40 and whatever the heck else they’ve made up over yeshiva, kollel and their daf yomi stuff. But when women want a simple Bat Mitzvah, even during all-women’s tefillah groups, you’ve got something like this thrown at you:
It is easy enough to understand why there was no “bas-mitzva” for thousands of years and why it has sprung up now. Traditionally girls are exempt from advanced Hebrew studies because they are exempt from most of Jewish ritual. […] A girl would have been out of her head to agitate for the burdens of scholarship that engrossed her brothers. […] But… when the bar-mitzva became a huge festival, earned at the price of some mechanical drilling which a girl could do as well as a boy… the girls and the parents sensibly saw no reason why they should not have a “bas-mitzva.”
–Herman Wouk, “This is My God”
But I digress. I don’t think this whole Israel=Kotel=men thing is just about the media being stupid about who’s using those exact same stock photos. Hareidi men at the Kotel is—just like with the movie tropes—the generic. That’s what people think of when they think of Jewish. That’s a little bit of a problem. And as usual with this topic, it’s not just about men versus women. It’s about anyone not fitting that mold being cast as the “other” (to use a Simone de Beauvoir term)—in the public consciousness, at least.
My problem is that this isn’t actually a legal issue–it’s more like a who concedes first issue. I like my issues to be logical and resolvable—or at least, like, containable, and not lost in its own big swirling self-perpetuating genetic fallacy (such as the notion that things are only authentic when they come from the Hareidi). My problem is that there’s no reason not to show a couple of pictures of the women’s side here and there, or to show a woman studying Torah instead of that man. People are probably starting to think that women aren’t allowed to be on camera or something.
And I never thought I’d say something like that. It’s not that I want a quota. But it’s just so annoying to me.
This is all tied up with the fact that people think Reform people can’t be observant, Orthodox people can’t wear normal clothes, Orthodox men can’t touch, talk to, look at, or walk next to women, no one goes to the Kotel except guys in black suits and big hats, Bar Mitzvahs are mostly just parties with DJ’s, and that Judaism is pretty much just a big joke (a joke owned by the Hareidi). After all, Jews are all either assimilated (in which case they’re cool and OK), celebrities, or those crazy ultra-Orthodox guys who camp out at the Kotel and shuckle all day long.*
It’s kind of a problem.
*I have to admit that I, being raised assimilated and Reform and basically secular, totally thought this throughout middle and high school. I thought those Hareidi guys must be like those ascetic monks pretty much making camp at the Kotel because that’s always where I saw them, and shuckling was just something those guys did in some sort of scary spiritual frenzy. It was all very scary. So I kind of know what innocent bystanders must be getting from these images.
