Women are losing their right to a public presence in Jerusalem:
Over recent months, women's faces have disappeared from billboards across the city amid mounting pressure applied by the powerful ultra-orthodox lobby, who find the female image offensive. Several advertisers have erased female models from their posters in Jerusalem. … Across Jerusalem, female figures have been blacked out of billboards with spray-paint, or vandalised with graffiti branding the image "illegal". Other posters are simply torn down.
Allison Kaplan Sommer reports on the nascent movement to fight back. There is a struggle for then soul of Israel just as there is for America right now, and throughout the Arab world. It's a struggle between fundamentalism and freedom. I believe in Israel as an outpost of freedom, not repression. But things, tragically, are a-changing.
The Dish 