The modern, sunlit offices of Mishpacha magazine are located in Jerusalem’s Har Hotzvim high-tech industrial park – a far cry from the shtetls (Jewish enclaves) of Brooklyn and Monsey.
The office park, dotted with upscale glatt kosher restaurants offering business lunch deals, is known for its high rate of ultra-Orthodox employment. Come by during lunch hour, and you’ll see dozens of young religious women in wigs and office attire gossiping over sushi, and religious men standing outside fielding calls on their iPhones. Across the highway, the Orthodox neighborhood Ramot Eshkol’s apartment buildings and yeshivas rise above. Here, one senses a changing ultra-Orthodox community.
The popular weekly Mishpacha magazine, with its colorful graphics, has been carefully trying to capture that shift since its launch in English in 2004 by Eliyahu Paley.
As Orthodox Judaism’s first magazine, Mishpacha sought to be unaffiliated with any one stream.
“The pages of Mishpacha are open to all streams of Torah-observant Judaism,” Binyamin Rose tells me on a recent summer afternoon. Rose is Mishpacha’s news editor, frequently traveling to report for the magazine on world Jewry affairs. With a reddish-grey beard and the spectacles of a scientist or Talmudic scholar, Rose speaks in a measured, polished English. He has a degree in journalism from NYU and a reporter’s passion for details, which he applies to both his journalism and his daily prayer schedule, in which he rises for Vasikin, the morning prayer, at the break of dawn.
Rose meets me alongside his colleague, managing editor Shoshana Friedman, in Mishpacha’s conference room. In the neighboring office, several religious girls lean over a Mac desktop, designing a page layout.
Mishpacha, like Hamodia, has a family focus, with a women’s magazine called “Family First” and a children’s magazine, “Mishpacha Junior.” The English-language magazine reaches about 50,000 households weekly; about one-third of Lakewood’s Jewish households read the magazine.
Mishpacha’s readers span a wide spectrum: Their other news sources include the radio, Twitter, Haredi news sites, Fox News and CNN, the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and Hamodia.
The need for a glossy magazine – with long-form journalism and news round-ups with interesting visuals – was a new one. “Graphics are important to us because information is cheap,” Friedman says. “We’re looking to give a full experience. Our graphics team studies mainstream magazines for ideas, to build a ‘web’-type of read.”
Though clearly Haredi, Mishpacha magazine (both its Hebrew and English editions) is considered relatively open-minded among the ultra-Orthodox. So dangerously open-minded that the Hebrew edition is still delivered in a black opaque bag to readers in Israel, lest one’s more-Haredi neighbors see and disapprove.
“One of our earliest editions addressed anorexia – not something openly discussed before in the Haredi community,” Rose says. “We write stories on mental health, on the challenges and stigmas of single parenting in our community. We’ve held symposiums on poverty – an issue that is mostly unique to the Haredi and Arab communities of Israel. We are not afraid to tackle that issue just because it’s controversial here; we discuss how to integrate Haredim into the workforce. For the Haredi community, the most important issues are family life, education, lack of affordable housing and the rising cost of living. And Israeli security, of course – everyone is worried about that.”
The staff sees starting a public dialogue as a major success of the magazine: A story on breast cancer awareness motivated women to go for screenings, another story on an abused women’s shelter opened discussions on domestic abuse, features on children leaving the fold or going into drugs (the two are almost synonymous here) offer moral support to parents.
“I’ve always felt I had something to give to Jewish people,” Rose tells me. “What I’ve always found was that the two ways to be of influence in the religious community were to be a rabbi or to be wealthy. But I found a third way. I found that as a journalist I’ve had influence if I’ve given stories importance. Mishpacha gives the opportunity for people to open up discussions at home. Many of our readers grew up in closed households.”
That trust took years to build. Their first interview subjects were very suspicious: Who are you, who reads you, who bans you?
Today, the magazine has built a prestigious reputation, running interviews with the highest-ranking rabbis. Yet, somehow, that isn’t enough; the magazine is still considered “liberal” ultra-Orthodox.
The staff has made a sport out of collecting the excuses they hear from extremist Haredim who secretly buy Mishpacha: “They write letters to the editor and always include an excuse: I bought it just for your monthly Jewish thought supplement, or I buy it just for the kids, or my wife said I had to read a specific article ...”
As for women’s photographs – even here, they are still omitted, though as in Hamodia and the Yated, the editorial staffs are mostly comprised of women themselves.
“This is how we avoid the objectification of women,” Rose answers to me in an earlier meeting. “Our policy is that we do not alter pictures as they are. If there is a woman in a photograph, we’ll simply use another picture.”
That’s an unsatisfying answer, I tell him.
“I can only put it like this,” he says. “Based on community standards, there are constraints for our work.”
So, if Hilary Clinton wins 2016, Mishpacha won’t have a picture of the president for the next four years?
“Israel has a policy of nuclear ambiguity – ‘we won’t say we have it,’” he says, smiling slightly. “Mishpacha isn’t going to be the first to introduce women into the magazine. If the standards were to change, it’s a subject that can be reconsidered. But I don’t like to make predictions. Today, a significant readership would object to images of women – we won’t break ranks with them.”
But later, Friedman offers me a different answer for this issue, one less of ideology and more of business: “It’s all market research,” she explains. “The religious public is moving to the right. A lot of people won’t even bring a publication into the house if there is a picture of a woman in it.”
“We’re here to service our readers and not antagonize them,” Rose says. “If you’re too strident here, you lose credibility. We aim to be forthright without antagonizing our readership.” Mishpacha’s rabbinic council reviews every article; Rose compares their function to that of a compliance department in the brokerage business. “Brokers used to joke and call the compliance department the business prevention department, but if you were an honest broker, you looked at compliance as your last line of ethical defense. The rabbinic council aren’t censors, they’re our ethical sounding board, and in that respect they keep the writers and the magazine out of trouble.”
But sometimes, there are slips. Once, an advertisement for the analgesic medication “Bengay” ran in Mishpacha: “Do you have Bengay in your cabinet?” – which could also read in Hebrew as “Do you have a gay son in the closet?” The ad, overseen by rabbinical councils of several Israeli Haredi magazines, made its rounds on the Haredi iconoclast blogosphere for weeks afterwards.
So how does the secular media report on the Haredi world? Rose and Friedman have separate answers.
“They do shallow reporting,” Rose tells me. “Every year, they write about funding for the Haredi community. If every Haredi family receives 5,000 shekels monthly (in total stipends and discounts), then that totals, for 130,000 families, 650 million shekels a year. That’s 2.25 percent of the government budget, for a sector that is 10 percent of the population. When people throw around figures like ‘Haredim are getting 1 billion shekels,’ it sounds like a huge sum, but in relation to a budget of well over 300 billion shekels, it’s not disproportionate.
“The secular media needs to keep things in proportion, do a little more homework and not just throw numbers out but rather show context. If you want to report on any sector, you have to go there. If you want to cover the Haredi world, you have to embed yourself. You can’t just sit in your living room, pontificate and parrot others’ lines.”
Friedman lists off her own answers: “The secular media perceives Haredim as closed, insular, very scared to rock the boat, with very strict rules.”
And are those perceptions true?
“The insularity is way overdone. It’s very, very hard to be insular today with the Internet. And I don’t think the rules are so strict anymore,” Friedman says.
Then she pauses.
“But ... yes,” she says slowly. “We make decisions because of very strong social pressure, I confess. Yes. We are afraid to rock the boat.”
