[Avodah] Taliban Women and More

Zev Sero zev at sero.name
Tue Jun 12 17:08:03 PDT 2012


On 12/06/2012 6:38 PM, Simon Montagu wrote:
> On Tue, Jun 12, 2012 at 11:50 PM, Zev Sero<zev at sero.name>  wrote:
>> In this article he claims (in footnote 7) that the charedi press's
>> "prohibition" on  women's pictures has a basis, and R Yosef Hayim
>> "writes quite strongly against women’s pictures, because men will
>> come to look at them".  He reproduces a page from _Rav Berachot_
>> in support of this claim, but if you go through the page you find
>> that it doesn't even mention this subject, let alone "write strongly"
>> against them, or give a reason.
>
> Try the next page:
> http://www.hebrewbooks.org/pdfpager.aspx?req=1759&st=&pgnum=150

Ah, that makes more sense.  Yes, that was clearly the page intended.
He writes not about *publishing* women's photographs -- such a thought
probably never occurred to him -- but against women allowing themselves
to be photographed at all, even if they intend merely to distribute the
photos to their friends and relatives.  Of course he wrote this at a
time when photographs were a novelty and somewhat rare; a person might
be photographed once in her life, and a person who receives a photo
would keep it and look at it and give it some sort of chashivus.  This
all seems rather quaint now, when photos are so ubiquitous.


-- 
Zev Sero        "Natural resources are not finite in any meaningful
zev at sero.name    economic sense, mind-boggling though this assertion
                  may be. The stocks of them are not fixed but rather
		 are expanding through human ingenuity."
		                            - Julian Simon



More information about the Avodah mailing list