The Israel Project Offers All-Male Roster of Analysts To Weigh In on U.S. Election
Image by Paul J Richards
By Naomi Zeveloff November 8, 2016
With the U.S. possibly poised to elect its first female president, an Israel advocacy group has sent journalists a list of expert commentators to interview about the election — with nary a female in sight.
The Israel Project sent a list of 10 Israeli experts, including former U.S. diplomats, professors, think tank analysts and military chiefs to Israel-based journalists on November 6.
Michele Chabin, a Jerusalem-based reporter and analyst who writes for USA Today and the Jewish Week, first raised the omission of women on TIP’s list on Twitter. Other reporters later followed suit on Facebook.
I just asked an organization that links journalists with experts why its list of US election experts doesn’t include a single woman. #unreal
— Michele Chabin (@MicheleChabin1) November 7, 2016
Chabin said she reached out to TIP about the lack of women and was told that her query was passed along to the group’s Israel director, Lior Weintraub, who is also listed as one of 10 expert commentators — but got no response.
“The irony is that I was writing about the elections, the first with a woman candidate, and there wasn’t a single woman listed as an expert,” she told the Forward. “I wasn’t looking for an analysis on Clinton’s female traits, but about her experience and leadership, etcetera, and there was no female to comment on that.”
Asked about the omission, TIP insisted that the list was not a reflection of the organization’s overall attitude on women.
“We take special pride in having prominent women from academia, think tanks, as well as current and former officials, taking leading roles in TIP’s briefings, tours, conference calls and the many other activities we hold,” the group said in a statement to the Forward. “We believe that this represents not just TIP’s values, but also Israel’s multi-faceted, integrated society and reality.”
The group added that it is “working tirelessly on a daily basis in order to expand and enrich our pool of experts.”
It did not provide any female names.
TIP, a U.S. not-for-profit, was founded by former Democratic Party activist Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi to advocate for and educate about Israel with journalists and opinion-makers.
Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected] or on Twitter @naomizeveloff
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
