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Friday January 18, 2008

Ad rejection has Jews Ms.-tified

by sue fishkoff
jta

sue fishkoff | jta

The American Jewish Congress is ramping up its protest against Ms. Magazine’s rejection of its pro-Israel advertisement.

In a campaign launched Jan. 13, AJCongress urged people to write, call or email the prominent feminist publication to “register your complaint at their anti-Israel bias.”

It also has enlisted the support of high-powered Jewish feminist speakers, several of whom appeared at a news conference Jan. 15.

The ad in question features photos of three prominent Israeli women leaders and the phrase “This is Israel.”

AJCongress leaders claim Ms. rejected the ad because of its bias against Israel — a charge the magazine’s executive editor hotly denied.

“We only take mission-driven advertisements,” Katherine Spillar said last week.

“Because two of the women were from the same political party, we understood it as political endorsement,” she said. Ms. “does not get involved in the domestic politics” of other countries.

AJCongress President Richard Gordon called that argument “specious,” noting that in any parliamentary democracy, the foreign minister and parliament leader are going to be from the same party.

Gordon also said that none of the women are running for office, and the ad does not suggest support for their parties.

He noted that Ms. ran a cover story about Jordan’s Queen Noor in 2003, and a story in its most recent issue about House Speaker Nancy Pelosi under the headline “This Is What a Speaker Looks Like.”

Gordon said the only difference he sees between Pelosi and the three women featured in the AJCongress ad is that Pelosi is not Israeli.

“Ms. Magazine obviously is trying to create a legal fiction after the fact to cover their bias at the time of the incident,” he said.

Spillar said this week that it is “unfair and untrue” to allege that Ms. is anti-Israel. She said the magazine is running a two-page profile of Israeli Minister of Foreign Affairs Tzipi Livni, one of the three leaders pictured in the AJCongress ad, in its Winter 2008 issue, which hits newsstands Jan. 29.

In a faxed statement, Spillar wrote that the magazine has covered the Israeli feminist movement and the country’s women leaders in 11 articles in its past 16 issues.

But the AJCongress ad was “inconsistent” with the Ms. policy of not being politically partisan, and the slogan “This Is Israel” in the ad “implied that women in Israel hold equal positions of power with men,” whereas “Israel, like every other country, has far to go to reach equality for women.”

Spillar said she “puts the U.S. in the same category as Israel” in terms of having far to go to achieve full gender equality. But the AJCongress ad “was almost a country ad, and we don’t take country ads.”

Harriet Kurlander, the director of AJCongress’s Commission for Women’s Empowerment, said that when she originally tried to place the ad, a magazine representative told her that the magazine “would love to have an ad from you on women’s empowerment, or reproductive freedom, but not on this.”

In other conversations with magazine staff members, Kurlander said she was told that publishing the ad would “set off a firestorm.”

Kurlander said Ms. should admit its “cover-up” and “simply print the ad.”

Among the Jewish feminists speaking out on the issue is Blu Greenberg, the founding president of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Greenberg said that by not accepting the ad, Ms. is “aligning itself with the political far left that wants to delegitimize Israel altogether on the stage of world opinion.”

“I wish I could believe that we’re overblowing it, but I’ve been in numerous situations where I’ve seen the same thing — this total excoriation of Israel,” she said. “That’s what we’re all feeling right now.”

Susan Weidman Schneider of Lilith magazine said she was “very surprised” by the refusal of Ms. to run the ad. But Schneider said that after speaking to the magazine’s publisher, she believes the ad was likely rejected “out of a place of ignorance” and was not intended as “a willful slap in the face to Israel.”

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