I’ve spent more than two years addressing everything in my control (with the help of an excellent literary agent who has sold some very big books). My experiences as a journalist–and some appalling numbers from the publishing industry–leave me to conclude that editors are passing on my book because I’m a woman.

I’ve also gotten the sense that publishers aren’t interested because the discourse about Israel-Palestine is locked into an overly simplistic discussion of a bilateral “conflict” when—as Israel’s treatment of migrant workers and African refugees shows—the conversation needs to be about the Jewish state’s denial of human rights to ALL non-Jews.

And then there’s the issue of violence. As the old journalism adage goes, “If it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t read.” My experiences with the publishing industry suggest that this holds as true now as ever.

In this post, the first of a three-part series, I’ll talk about what it means to be a woman in journalism and publishing.

***

I should have known that I was battling gender bias the moment my agent asked me if I could turn my original draft—a journalistic, semi-academic, discussion of non-Jewish, non-Palestinian “others”  and their place in Israel—into “Eat Pray Love meets migrant workers.”

Yes, memoir was big at the time. But can you imagine an agent asking a male journalist to turn his investigative work into something less deliberate? Can you imagine a male journalist being urged to write about how “you bumped into this person who introduced me to that person”?

And doesn’t the term “male journalist” sound funny? That’s because we’re not used to hearing it. Male journalists are the norm and we don’t bother describing norms. We only describe the exception to the rule. Articles exclaiming how far “female journalists” have come or the “Unique advantage of ‘female war reporters” actually suggest that we haven’t come that far… otherwise, participating in our profession would be unremarkable, so unremarkable it wouldn’t need to be discussed in an article.

That’s not to say that my agent is to blame. He’s  just a salesman—he’s a conduit for and reflection of market forces. And when it comes to publishing, women are relegated to particular corners of the industry.

Writing in The Washington Post in 2009, my former professor Julianna Baggott points out:

“This fall, Publishers Weekly named the top 100 books of 2009. How many female writers were in the top 10? Zero. How many on the entire list? Twenty-nine.

…I could understand Publishers Weekly’s phallocratic list if women were writing only a third of the books published or if women didn’t float the industry as book buyers or if the list were an anomaly. In fact, Publishers Weekly is in sync with Pulitzer Prize statistics. In the past 30 years, only 11 prizes have gone to women. Amazon recently announced its 100 best books of 2009 – in the top 10, there are two women. Top 20? Four. Poets & Writers shared a list of 50 of the most inspiring writers in the world this month; women made up only 36 percent.”

If you want a great analysis of the whys behind these numbers, read the rest of Baggott’s article. For some more current, but equally disappointing numbers in regards to inequality, read on.

A 2011 study by VIDA Women in the Literary Arts found that a majority of the books reviewed in 2010 in The Atlantic, The Boston Review, Harpers, Granta, The London Review of Books, The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, and The New Republic (to name a few) were written by men. And guess what? The reviewers themselves were also men.

Ruth Franklin of The New Republic gets to the bottom of things: publishing houses release more books written by men.

“Only one of the houses we investigated—the boutique Penguin imprint Riverhead—came close to parity, with 55 percent of its books by men and 45 percent by women. Random House came in second, with 37 percent by women. It was downhill from there, with three publishers scoring around 30 percent—Norton, Little Brown, and Harper—and the rest 25 percent and below, including the elite literary houses Knopf (23 percent) and FSG (21 percent). Harvard University Press, the sole academic press we considered, came in at just 15 percent.”

Surprisingly, Franklin found that the so-called left-wing presses didn’t fare any better than the big publishers.

And then, of course, when women do manage to get their books out there, they face literary ghettoization.

***

Of course, there are editors who would call this a “rant.” That’s what one male editor called an op-ed of mine that later got published elsewhere (by a female editor, mind you). Can you imagine an editor calling a man’s article a “rant”? No, it would be “an impassioned argument.”

There’s more. About four years ago, the (female) deputy foreign editor of a Very Famous Media Outlet thought my pitch about migrants in Israel was great. But, she said, I needed to check with the Jerusalem-based bureau chief, a man who promptly shot down the story. A young journalist, eager to learn and grow, I asked him why.

“It’s not fresh enough,” he said.

Before I’d pitched, I’d done my research. His outlet had never published anything about migrants in Israel. I pointed this out to the bureau chief. His answer was still no.

Yet, foreign workers were suddenly fresh enough for that same bureau chief two years later when a male freelancer pitched him a near-identical story.

In the five years that I’ve been working as a journalist, I’ve also watched younger men with far less experience and fewer qualifications enter the profession and bound ahead. I’ve seen them bust into publications that I and other female colleagues can’t get the time of day from.  I’ve watched them get the encouragement and positive feedback that pushes them forward while the fine work of many women journalists goes overlooked.

Is this any surprise when, as the Guardian puts it “sexist stereotypes, humiliating photographs of women, and male bylines dominate the front pages of British newspapers”?

Reporting on research conducted by Women in Journalism, the Guardian states that more than three-quarters of front page articles are written by men. An analysis of these same stories found that over 80 percent of “those mentioned or quoted” were men.

***

I’m also to blame. I’ve internalized stereotypes about women. I, too, end declarative sentences with a question mark so I don’t sound too assertive and I find myself using what linguists call “hedges” (sort of, like, you know)—devices used more often my women than men.

I don’t self-promote or share my work like my male colleagues do for fear of being thought aggressive. When my agent asked me to make my book “Eat Pray Love meets migrant workers” I said “yes” even though all of my instincts and my heart said no. And, a few years ago, when I interviewed a “woman journalist” about her excellent non-fiction book, one of my first questions was whether or not she would write a memoir about her personal connection to the material.

Part two: a black and white conflict with no shades of gray

A version of this post first appeared in Souciant.

Beware: Your Prime Minister is now being ironic (Photo: Avi Ochayon, Government Press Office)

On Thursday night, Ami Kaufman posted on this site a collection of memes dealing with the Looney Toons bomb Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used during his UN speech. Posted before any other local or international news source, it was one of the most successful items our site ever had (over 3,000 likes and counting). But did these memes aid the public debate, or truly criticize Netanyahu? I am not so sure.

Memes are part of a culture of irony, which has become the dominant approach to politics in certain circles – especially certain liberal circles. In the past, we used to lack irony in politics. People treated their leaders with too much respect, or took them too seriously. Now, it seems that we don’t take our leaders seriously enough.

Netanyahu’s UN speech is a good example: its topic was the prospect of a nuclear arms race in the Middle East, and perhaps even a nuclear war. There probably isn’t a more “serious” problem today. You need not agree with Netanyahu’s politics in order to acknowledge the gravity of the issue at hand; if you believe Iran poses an immediate existential threat to millions of Israelis, you must be anxious and tense as you watch this speech. If you feel – like me – that Netanyahu is creating an unnecessary escalation that could draw the entire region into war, and that his true aim is to divert attention from inner problems and the Palestinian issue, than the prime minister’s rhetoric can make you angry or sad.

Israelis watching this speech could feel either that their fate is in the right hands, or that a madman has taken over the throne. Their reaction to the speech could be hopeful or sad, admiring or upset – each of those reactions make sense. Each reaction, except for the sort of self-satisfied giggles that memes produce – the kind which seem to dominate the responses in the Left following Netanyahu’s speech. The aforementioned feelings could lead to political action. Giggling, like one would over pictures of babies and cats, can only generate “likes.”

In the past few months, I have been troubled by the prospect of war (“terrified” would be a more appropriate term) to the point of actually planning the evacuation of my family from Tel Aviv, in the event something does happen. I remember the missiles falling on Tel Aviv in 1991, and the thought of going through this with a child can literally keep us awake at night. Memes offer relief. They generate a feeling that “things are not that bad.” After all, we are only dealing with Road Runner bombs here.

I guess that this is a reason for the success of the ironic approach. Throughout history, irony has been a tool that has helped people deal with tragedies. But there is an important difference here: the Bibi memes do not deal with a past catastrophe but with a future one. Tragedy is a literary genre in which disaster is inevitable, while politics are about changing the future.

For me, memes represent desperation – a feeling that a catastrophe is around the corner and we cannot do anything about it. This is probably the worst approach to politics; the opposite of the existentialist notion that even when there is truly no hope, we should act as if there is one. And to be sure, I don’t think we are at a hopeless moment in history, not even in Israeli or Palestinian history.

My favorite Bibi-UNGA meme: The picture itself is funny, but also flatters my taste in cinema (Shira Glezerman)

On top of everything, those memes obviously help Netanyahu (not unlike the way Jon Stewart is helping Michele Bachmann). They serve as an echo chamber for the prime minister’s talking points. Take another look at those memes and you will find that some of them actually compliment Netanyahu.

Let’s think about it this way: if Netanyahu had a group of cartoonists sit in a room after his speech and asked them to produce highly viral content, I guess they could have come up with some of the same results as the leftists on my Facebook feed did. We feel those memes are critical because we place them in a critical context to begin with. Yet more often than not, they make everything seem playful and harmless; at other times, they increase the celebrity status of Netanyahu while avoiding a meaningful challenge to his politics.

Watch for example the “28 standing ovations” remix we posted here following Netanyahu’s speech in front of a joint session of Congress. At the time, it looked satirical. Now try to imagine this was a clip produced by the Prime Minister’s Office. Could it still make sense? I certainly think so.

It seems that sophisticated leaders like Netanyahu are by now well aware of the ironic approach to politics and are using it to their benefit.

On Thursday, as Netanyahu was preparing for “the speech of his life” (“his eighth,” noted a commentator on Israeli television), proxies to the prime minister hinted that the speech would contain a certain “surprise.” In the past, this kind of leak was meant to signal a political news item, perhaps a declaration of a new policy. But this surprise turned out to be a cartoon bomb. (Actually, the prime minister office couldn’t have been more literary, given the fact that most cartoon surprise “packages” contain bombs.)

Cartoons instead of policy – Netanyahu didn’t offer one idea or initiative since he agreed to utter the words “Palestinian state” somewhere in 2009. All he gave us were PR surprises, yet for the world media this is more than enough. The Israeli prime minister made the front page picture of all of America’s most serious papers on the day following his UN speech. I believe that the many editors who placed this front page picture found the cartoon bomb to be ridiculous and childish, but nevertheless, played along with the trick. (I remember similar dynamics in the media desks I have worked on.) As it is often the case with “progressives,” the ironic enjoyment of the moment overcame the editors’ political and professional judgment, to a point where playing along with the gimmick becomes the professional thing to do.

Even The New Yorker had its own highbrow version of the Bibi meme industry. Like others, the magazine’s editors preferred the performance to the content of Netanyahu’s speech. If Netanyahu was indeed trying to divert attention from the Palestinian issue, his worst critics were the first to play along. The ironic zeitgeist allowed for this.

At this point, it is clear that the brilliance of Netanyahu’s move was that the bomb was so lame. If he was quoting reports and scientific data on an actual nuclear bomb, or showing a proper diagram, he would not have gotten the same effect. In the end, the joke was on us.

Political powers, it is worth remembering, are never ironic. An amused approach to politics helps drive attention away from the true meaning or consequences of their actions.

Far from everything is known about Dagan’s career. Two reporters for Yediot Ahronot, Yigal Sarna and Anat Tal-Shir, once investigated a story that, before Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon, which was aimed at rooting out Yasir Arafat and the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Dagan led a secret unit across the border whose mission was to instigate terrorist events that would justify an incursion. Military censor killed the story, Sarna told me. Dagan acknowledges the censorship but denies the thrust of the story.

I posted this paragraph in Hebrew on my Facebook wall. Sarna commented:

Indeed, the censorship [on these stories] has been on for years. Horrifying things were done there, not just planned.

The Jerusalem Post ran an op-ed yesterday (Monday) by a writer and attorney from Washington, D.C. explaining why he is canceling his 50-year subscription to the New Yorker magazine. The poorly-argued and belligerent article directly implicates the magazine’s editor of 14 years, David Remnick, for being “unabashedly anti-Israel,” and personally attacks him as being unfit for the job and its salary since his “only previous editorial experience was at his high school newspaper.”

I guess the writer did not want to mention Remnick’s Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the fall of the Soviet Union when he was still a Washington Post correspondent, or his award for excellence in journalism, or his Editor of the Year award from 2000.

Instead he claims that Remnick went on a “diatribe” against Israel in his March 12 “Talk of the Town” article  because he merely pointed out what former Israeli prime ministers, American Jewish figures and the entire international community have already admitted: that Israel’s 45-year occupation is at odds with its democratic character, threatening it from within, and that if it does not change its policies it will become an apartheid state. According to the writer’s logic, Ehud Barak and Ehud Olmert must thus also be “anti-Israel” for pointing out that Israeli policies conflict with democratic behavior.

He also attacks a Hendrick Hertzberg column from almost a year ago (directly implicating Remnick, who hired him to write regularly for the magazine) for calling the prime minister “Netanyahoo.” However, the writer clearly did not actually read the short piece, since this was not Hertzberg’s term but rather a quote from Republican Senator Chuck Grassley, who tweeted that he was “waiting for Netanyahoo” in the House Chamber to address Congress.  I guess that senator must be “anti-Israel” as well.

I could go on and on about the baselessness of the article, but suffice it to say, it is not fit to be printed in any self-respected newspaper. If you are interested, look yourself. Normally I wouldn’t bother to address an article of such poor caliber – but I believe it is worth noting since it perfectly illustrates the pathetic battle being waged by people and entities who relentlessly insist on being the authority over the definition of “pro-Israel,” but increasingly have little to no substance to their arguments – and instead attack others.

Figures like David Remnick, Peter Beinart and many other American Jews have been feeling a deep conflict between Israeli policies and their core liberal values, some for a long time. It is only in recent years that an increasing number of them have felt confident and frustrated enough to express it openly.

And no matter how many other countries commit human rights violations or struggle with their democratic record, it does not change the fact that Israel is continuing to act reprehensibly, or make it any less problematic. As long as Israel expects Jews to support it, and as long as the United States continues to unconditionally support Israel, no one should be surprised that the editor of the New Yorker chooses to allocate a few articles per year on the matter. In fact, if anything it shows disproportionate care for Israel and the future of the Jewish people, not an aversion to them.

I am not surprised that an American Jewish writer had the nerve to accuse David Remnick of a diatribe against Israel and to attack him for using “valuable New Yorker real estate” on such “trivial matters” as a grownup Orthodox man spitting on a schoolgirl. I am however appalled that the most widely-read English language Jewish newspaper in the world chooses to publish it – and by doing so positions itself squarely in the Israeli government propaganda machine, which is certainly not lacking hard working members.

This is not the first time the Jerusalem Post has aligned itself directly with a rightwing agenda or with belligerent acts aimed at silencing open dialogue about Israel, as was the case when one of its correspondents served as the mouthpiece for NGO Monitor’s attack on one of our donors, claiming we too are anti-Israel.

Especially considering a recent cartoon in the magazine showing Moses parting the Red Sea and some Israelites behind him commenting that they like him but just wish he could “be a little more pro-Israel,” I personally couldn’t be a happier subscriber.