An American woman living in Eretz Yisrael named Ronit Peskin has been doing wonderful work to bring a bit of sanity to the absurdity that is the controversy at the Wall. She recently founded a group called Women For the Wall that advocates for maintaining the sanctity of the Kosel countering the theatrics and agitprop on the other side with appeals to common sense and decency.
She has also been writing regularly about the situation for the Times of Israel and in a recent piece entitled “What People Really Are Thinking about Women of the Wall on the Streets of Jerusalem” she shares the results of a thoroughly unscientific survey she conducted on the streets of Yerushalayim by approaching Israelis at random and asking them to share their religious self-identification and their take on the controversy. After citing the gist of each of the 35 interviews she conducted she sums up:
[O]f the people I asked only 18% support the WoW’s right to pray at the Kotel as they do now … vs. 81% who are opposed to what the Women of the Wall are doing at the Kotel…. I asked mostly masortim 40% followed by 31% datiim followed by 17% chilonim and only 11% Chareidi.
Her attempt to go beyond the rhetoric to get at least some inkling of what the average Israeli thinks of the issue inspired me to try my hand at some empirical analysis of my own on this issue. I decided to begin by examining a post at Commentary’s Contentions site written by its editor Jonathan Tobin a fine journalist who has actually written about anti-Orthodox media bias in the past.
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