Inside the World of ultra-Orthodox Media: Haredi Journalists Tell It Like It Is
Every morning, Pinchas would wake up to find his copy of Haaretz on his doorstep, crumpled.
Pinchas, then an American yeshiva student living in Jerusalem, grew frustrated – his subscription cost him good money and the newspaper somehow always came wrinkled.
Once, when he woke up earlier, he stepped outside and saw a group of yeshiva students lining up at his door, one of them holding his copy of the paper.
“That’s my newspaper!” he insisted in his American-accented Hebrew.
“There’s a line,” he was told casually, and was pointed to the end of the queue.
Years later, Pinchas Lipschutz laughs as he tells the story in the editorial office of the Haredi newspaper Yated Ne’eman. “No one would have subscribed themselves, you know, their kids wouldn’t get into school if they find out you have a Haaretz subscription,” he said. “So they read mine.”
The thirst here, among ultra-Orthodox English readers in America, for serious journalism has created a robust industry of its own – and in the past three decades, several powerful newspapers and magazines have emerged, entering thousands of Orthodox homes, gracing coffee tables and informing the masses’ Sabbath table conversations and rabbinic lectures alike. Attend any Haredi event – the funerals of saints, weddings of the children of rabbinic celebrities, the Siyum Hashas – and you’ll see a few journalists, bearded and in suits, hovering near the action with their recorders.
Here, the most powerful are the Hamodia (“The Informer”), Yated Ne’eman (“The Faithful Peg”) and the weekly Mishpacha (“Family”) magazine. Other New York religiously affiliated Jewish papers don’t count – The Jewish Week is too secular and too closely tied to the UJA-Federation of NY, and The Jewish Press and The Jewish Voice are too openly Zionist. And then there are the freebies, like the Lakewood Shopper and the Flatbush Jewish Journal, peppered with advertisements selling merits for a shidduch, good business and good health, and where the complicated mathematics of the “matchmaking crisis” are deciphered (“Danger: More than 10% of Bais Yaakov girls may God forbid never get married, may the Merciful One save us”).
While the Internet is spreading in these communities (quietly, subtly, with its own host of online gossip-heavy Haredi news sites – Yeshiva World News, Vos Iz Neis, Matzav), and insularity is becoming nearly impossible, the ultra-Orthodox community still demands print journalism. Here is a world that relies heavily on internal newspapers for local community news, with most reading taking place on the Sabbath, when all electronic devices are turned off and put away.
And it’s here, in these thick bundles, with their own brand of news reporting, opinion columns, detailed classifieds sections, Torah portion discussions, motivational (and at times melodramatic) stories – it’s here that one finds a window inside. Know a newspaper, and you’ll know its readership.
“To me, the most intriguing – and telling – window into the Orthodox world provided by its newspapers lies in the small print of its classified ads,” Agudath Israel’s spokesman Rabbi Avi Shafran once wrote, noting the classifieds listing hundreds of local community services, also known as gemachs – free secondhand baby carriages, clothing, wedding gowns, furniture, wigs, etc. – that “reflect the essence of the community.”
Yet as much as Haredi publications are defined by what they do publish, they are perhaps defined more by what is noticeably absent: celebrity gossip, sports, scandals, crime and any photographs or illustrations of women. “Our children read political analysis and Israel news instead of pop culture,” a Haredi mother tells me proudly.
So – who are the people behind these papers, these powerful opinion-makers? And is journalism still journalism when stories are censored by the all-powerful rabbis? When the editors and reporters who were interviewed for this article requested to review their own quotes before publication – a breach of mainstream journalistic ethics, certainly – what does that say about the definition of a controlled “Pravda” here?