No one knows how many ultra-orthodox men and women kill themselves every year. It’s hard to know when there are so many ways to die in silence, by drugs, by overdose, by drowning. The victims leave no note, and it all goes by—the announcement, the burial—as if it were an accident, just another self-destructive tragedy.
Back in January, a group of women in the Israeli city of Beit Shemesh won a lawsuit against the municipality for refusing to remove “modesty signs”—signs instructing women how to dress, placed around the city by members of the ultra-Orthodox community—which the plaintiffs argued created a threatening atmosphere for…
A haredi (ultra Orthodox) newspaper in Israel, not wishing to offend the eyeball modesty of its readership, photoshopped German Chancellor Angela Merkel out of a photo of a recent march in solidarity with the staff of Charlie Hebdo, where 12 people were recently murdered in a terrorist attack. Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo…
We often talk about the problems religion brings upon women by forbidding the use of birth control, but, oddly enough, there's a phenomenon in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community which is causing the exact opposite problem. Their strict religious rules, known as halacha, govern many aspects of women's lives, including…
An American girl attempting to walk to her Jewish school in Israel is subjected to daily taunting and physical intimidation so bad that she says it makes her afraid to go to school. Her tormenters aren't fellow children, but rather adult men upset by the presence of the "immodest" girls attending school in their…
Ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Israel are about to issue an edict banning a particular outfit adopted by a few women — because it's too modest. That outfit? A burqa.
