Ikea Israel, Seeking Ultra-Orthodox Customers, Produces Catalog Full Of Dudes
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
Ikea, the Swedish affordable-furniture giant (and noted relationship stressor) has managed to offend, this time in Israel. Michele Chabin reports that along with its regular Hebrew-language catalog, the store created a special men-and-boys-only version with an ultra-Orthodox audience in mind.
As opposed as I generally am to rules against images of women and girls, part of me wonders whether we should go with it, in this one case. Ikea’s being marketed as dude-only? A guy thing? Fantastic! Start the women’s strike early and let them go to the store on their own, winding their way through Kiviks and Malms, and deal with the whole shebang — getting the planks home, assembling them into something resembling furniture, and, when the lease is up, selling them on Craigslist to the clever souls wise enough to purchase preassembled Ikea in their neighborhoods.
Let the men have Ikea. It’s all theirs. Let the men cook with the Ikea cookware, and do laundry using those trusty, if rickety, Ikea laundry hampers.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.
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.
