Jewish women master retroactive invisibility!


It’s too bad it came too late to help them. Here’s a famous photo of Jewish civilians being herded out of the Warsaw ghetto by Nazis. Awful, horrifying stuff, right?

original

Yet when a conservative Haredi newspaper in Israel published this photo, they edited it in interesting ways.

edited

Isn’t it ironic that the Jewish women who were victims get their faces erased, but the Nazi men with guns are left untouched? Of all people, you’d think Jews would be most sensitive to the importance of preserving the horrors of recent history…but I guess it only matters if it happened to men.

Comments

  1. says

    …and they criticize the burqa…probably because they didn’t think of it themselves.

    Religion poisons everything.

  2. grumpyoldfart says

    Eventually the people will start kicking up a fuss about incidents like this – but it will be too late. Once religion gains a little bit of power it hangs on and never lets go.

  3. blf says

    Someone’s confused. You can’t get cooties from pictures, not even from iconic ones. And besides, the cooties aren’t only on the face. Just being not-male is sufficient to infect those around you with the cooties.

    I wonder if the censors wear special protective cootie-proof clothing when going about their pixelisation? And are they working in a lab rated to contain the cooties in the event of an accident?

  4. Sastra says

    Are the Haredi officially down as being more worried about cooties — or sexual arousal?

    If it’s the latter (as I suspect) then they are implying that Jewish men are quite likely to get horny from looking at the faces on pictures of women being rounded up by the Gestapo. They have to work hard to prevent such things. Because Jewish men are so moral.

    I don’t think they’ve thought through what this sort of nonsense looks like to outsiders. No, we are not impressed by how moral they must be. They just look creepy. Real creepy. On several levels.

  5. Abdul Alhazred says

    A Haredi would say they respect the modesty of those women, but not that of the Nazis.

    Sure it’s screwy, but it’s not really as bad as your strawman argument would have it.

  6. mythbri says

    @Abdul Alhazred #6

    A Haredi would say they respect the modesty of those women

    Enforced modesty is not respectful.

  7. burgundy says

    They blur out the faces, but not the bodies? Couldn’t their bodies cause distress and improper thoughts? Also, even though it’s pixelated, you can still see their hair. The harlots.

    Looking at the first picture makes me want to cry. Looking at the second picture makes me want to puke. It’s an odd feeling.

  8. Crip Dyke, MQ, Right Reverend Feminist FuckToy of Death & Her Handmaiden says

    I don’t know anyone who made it out of the Warsaw Ghetto. Goldfinger is an historical figure to me, or should be. But I see the mother of one of the members of my congregation back in Portland behind those pixels. It’s funny, they anonymize her, which then allows my brain to personalize her.

    I don’t know what to say save this is making me physically ill. I’ve been nauseated since the moment I read the OP, and it has only become worse since reading more about Bakehillah and their reasoning. I hope my old rabbi is in Israel right now – she’d kick up a fuss about this.

  9. thumper1990 says

    Looking at the first picture makes me want to cry. Looking at the second picture makes me want to puke. It’s an odd feeling.

    QFT.

  10. noastronomer says

    I’m at a complete loss as to understanding the thought process behind this. At what point did someone propose this as a reasonable idea? Why wasn’t that person laughed out of the room?

    Mike.

  11. burgundy says

    @noastronomer – these are the same people who think it’s OK to spit at little girls for being immodest. I suspect that your definition of reasonable and their definition of reasonable are almost entirely non-overlapping.

  12. Muz says

    Is this the same paper that completely photoshopped some women out of some pictures recently?
    I don’t remember exactly.
    That was an Orthodox rag from memory. I’m not good at distinguishing the batty Jewish fringe, unfortunately.

  13. sonofrojblake says

    I went through unconcerned (Oh, they’re preserving the dignity of the victims while condemning the Nazis and making their faces visible to shame them, that makes, well, some sense I guess) through baffled (hang on, they didn’t preserve the boy’s anonymity, in fact, his face is very clearly visible, so, wtf?), and had to read the linked article to believe that, yes, the pixelating really was being done because the person was a woman, and wimmen be temptin.

    And at that point baffled breaks down and I really don’t know where I am. I’m pretty sure I’d be spitting angry if I could get my brain to believe it. Right now I’m stuck in “nah, no way did they just do that”. I mean seriously, wtf?

  14. WharGarbl says

    At first I thought that the blurring out was meant as some sort of misguided attempt to protect the victims identity (sort of like how news coverage tries to avoid naming the name of a rape victim).
    But then I saw that they didn’t bother covering the face of the male victims (child in front, child in back, and a few adult males in the back who looked like they’re part of the group being herded out).

  15. David Marjanović says

    I don’t think they’ve thought through what this sort of nonsense looks like to outsiders. No, we are not impressed by how moral they must be. They just look creepy. Real creepy. On several levels.

    QFT.

  16. jaybee says

    First they pixelated the women, but I didn’t object because I wasn’t a woman.
    Then they pixelated …

  17. fleda says

    They completely eliminated the little girl in the left middle edge. First the Nazis, then the Haredi.

    This is not respect. This is not protective of either women or men.

    This is hatred.

  18. truthspeaker says

    Abdul Alhazred

    4 April 2013 at 10:49 am (UTC -5)

    A Haredi would say they respect the modesty of those women, but not that of the Nazis.

    Sure it’s screwy, but it’s not really as bad as your strawman argument would have it.

    It’s different, but it’s every bit as bad.

  19. Goodbye Enemy Janine says

    “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler the universe who has not created me a woman.”

  20. don1 says

    That would be mind-crushingly sick in any other context. But it’s a deeply held belief so I guess it’s fine and we should respect it. Hang on, no we shouldn’t.

    It’s just sick. Whatever you’ve been doing that led to thinking like this, you should stop because, damn, look where it leads.

  21. bishopdm says

    Here’s what I find mindnumbing:

    In period films, when Nazi concentration camp victims are shown being murdered, if the people are naked, their genitals are intentionally obscured.

  22. says

    They changed the crop, too. As a photographer, I lose my mind completely when someone changes my crop; it completely alters the image.

    The cropped version focused your eye on the little boy, directly, whereas the uncropped allows your eye to follow the circle of the events. The uncropped photo is vastly superior.

    It’s as if all they care about is the little boy.

  23. Xaivius says

    Marcus Ranum@25

    The cropped version focused your eye on the little boy, directly, whereas the uncropped allows your eye to follow the circle of the events. The uncropped photo is vastly superior.

    This was their stated intent. They wanted to focus on the story of the boy. But the Haredi cannot show women in photographs, so they invented a lame excuse to try to deflect the backlash. Because erasure is completely fine when it’s traditional! /snark

  24. Forbidden Snowflake says

    Muz @15 is probably remembering the incident in which a Haredi newspaper photoshopped the secretary of state out of the Bin Laden assassination HQ.

  25. says

    This was their stated intent. They wanted to focus on the story of the boy.

    Then why not a vertical crop with just the soldier and boy? That’d almost not suck. Unless you’d seen the original.

  26. says

    So what is more fucked up, blotting out the pictures of women to prevent sexual arousal in their male readers, or the idea that their male readers might get sexually aroused by pictures of holocaust?

  27. kantalope says

    As I understand these Haredi, the boy child being taken by the Nazis was a tragedy. The other blobs being taken…meh, they were filthy creatures, probably askin for it.

    They should have totally photoshopped out the women in the first place, then we could forget they were ever there.

  28. Xaivius says

    Marcus Ranum @28
    Apologies, I think I need more snark tags. They’re lying shitstains. They’re justifying this all after the fact because they’re a part of a hugely sexist religious sect that spits at young girls.

  29. says

    …I’m also pretty sure they missed a woman in the back behind the sack of potatoes. I’m guessing, because the hair doesn’t look like any of the mens’.

  30. TonyJ says

    Onamission5

    I’m confused how having a face is immodest.

    But you don’t understand. The mere sight of female flesh drives men into an insane frenzy of desire!

    I’m listening to the audio book version of Infidel by Ayaan Hirsi Ali on my drive to work, and every time I hear this explanation for forced modesty, I have to stop myself from yelling at the stereo.

  31. Happiestsadist, opener of the Crack of Doom says

    Related to holytape @#29, I do wonder what this kind of enforced censoring and the resultant sexualization of women in literally any situation, apparently including that one, does to the minds and sexuality of the men there.

  32. loopyj says

    I had to Google Haredi and the following bit from Wikipedia made me laugh:

    Use of the term “ultra-Orthodox” can also be controversial,[14] and is considered pejorative…Canada’s Centre for Faith and Media, while stating that the term “sometimes… cannot be avoided”, advises journalists to

    Try to avoid the term ultra-Orthodox to describe very observant Jews, partly because ultra implies extremism…As well, there is no analogue on the other end of the religious spectrum (there are no ultra-Reform Jews.)[18]

    Of course there are ultra-Reform Jews – we’re called Atheists. (N.B. I’m not Jewish, but all four of my grandparents were.)

  33. Ichthyic says

    Of course there are ultra-Reform Jews – we’re called Atheists.

    Indeed. I suspect based on personal acquaintances that Jews that identify as atheist actually outnumber Haredi by a couple of orders of magnitude. at least.

  34. anuran says

    My parents grew up Orthodox, although they abandoned it before I was born. They barely recognize today’s Black Hat version of Orthodox Judaism.

    There are all sorts of Christians. Then there’s The Family.
    There are all sorts of Muslims. Then there’s Salafism.
    The Charedim are Judaism’s entry in the chiroptera-scat All-Faith Olympics

  35. dancaban says

    I seem to remember that the boy at the front was lucky enough to survive the war and was tracked down for his thoughts about the photograph. I think it was a BBC program about 15-20 years ago? Anybody else remember it?

  36. yubal says

    That is like murdering them a second time.

    Wasn’t remembering the Holocaust and its victims what we had in mind?