JTA: The Global News Service of the Jewish People

Sexism in Israel?

By Uriel Heilman · September 25, 2008

Kevin Peraino writes in Newsweek: If Tzipi Livni manages to assemble a coalition, all three branches of Israel's government will be led by women: Dalia Itzik became Israel's first female speaker of Knesset in 2006 and Dorit Beinisch heads the Supreme Court.

So you might think all the fuss in America about lipstick and pigs is a little passé in Israel. Golda Meir, after all, cracked Israel's glass ceiling some 35 years ago.

Not so, Peraino's piece suggests.

Some Israeli pundits have argued Livni is the manliest woman in Israeli politics. JTA's Dina Kraft explored that theme a bit in her Livni profile earlier this month.

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Where’s the outrage?

By Lisa Hostein · September 25, 2008

It's easy to be incensed by Iranian President Ahmadinejad's loathsome remarks at the United Nations and in media appearances, but several commentators are wondering why there hasn't been more public outrage by the world community? I'm wondering why all the outcry over the lack of outcry is only coming from the right?

Eve Epstein, who as a U.N. insider serves as an important Jewish voice at the world body, writes in National Review Online:

To their shame, U.N. member states' pledges of "Never Again" were betrayed by a singular lack of moral outcry. Have they learned nothing from the multitude of Holocaust education and genocide prevention programs they sponsored?

She also sees through his use of the word "Zionist" instead of Jew when he seeks blame for the world's ills.

If he had used the word "Jew" instead of "Zionist," such sentiments would likely be barred from the Internet in many countries, as a form of hateful invective.

But Ahmadinejad is clever, and summons the spirit of European and Muslim antisemitism by casting this as an issue of the Jewish state.

Elsewhere, a British commentator, in The New York Sun, takes the Europeans in particular to task for their silence.

And, in The Spectator, Melanie Phillips notes the irony that on the same day that Ahmadinejad took the stage in New York, Paul McCartney was talking peace in Israel.

Salon, on the other hand, buys Ahmadinejad's distinction between Jews and Zionists, and criticizes Obama for conflating the two.

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