A Facebook friend linked to “Should there be a Jewish Inclusion Rider?”
… Frances McDormand, … taught us all a new phrase: Inclusion rider. Within minutes of her speech, the phrase was trending on twitter. News outlets spent the ensuing days explaining the term, and interviewing media researcher Stacy Smith, the woman who coined it.
In a nutshell, the inclusion rider is a clause that actors can ask to be included in their contract, demanding at least 50 per cent diversity in the contributors to a film, be it performers or crew. The idea is that a film should accurately reflect, both on and off screen, the demography of the location in which it is set and/or made.
I wondered what an inclusion rider would look like in the Jewish community. And, in particular, how it would impact on the inclusion and representation of women. What would happen, for example, if every man offered a role in a Jewish communal organisation insisted that the organisation accurately reflected the demographics of our community? What would happen, if every male speaker at a communal event insisted that there were an equal number of female speakers? What would happen, if every time a man was invited to appear on a panel, he insisted that an equal number of women were invited too, finally putting an end to the depressingly ubiquitous “manel”.
So to any men reading this, I ask the question. The next time you are invited to speak at a shul event, will you ask how often women are also invited to speak? The next time you are asked to become a trustee of a communal organisation, will you check how many women sit on the board before making your decision?
Here’s my comment on the article:
If she is passionate about diversity, rather than quotas set aside for Jewish women, would it make more sense to have quotas for Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Muslims, etc. at the gatherings that she describes?
[One area where my Facebook friend does not seem to want a quota for Jewish women is in wage-earning. Although her children are now grown and there would be no obstacle to her taking a job, she lets her husband bring home 98 percent of the family’s income.]
She probably should find a different shul then. The community I take part in would probably need a male inclusion rider.
This is the more important article though, https://www.thejc.com/news/uk-news/mark-meechan-scottish-man-who-taught-dog-nazi-salute-found-guilty-of-hate-crime-1.461032 about the conviction of Count Dankula for his video where he taught his girlfriend’s dog to sieg heil at the phrase “gas the jews”.
The claim is that no one actually found the video offensive apart from the Scottish Police so they had to go out and find Ephraim Borowski, director of the Scottish Council of Jewish Communities, to claim offense.
I think the video is silly and in a long line of laughing at nazis and their idiot reflexive salute.
And of course, they didn’t go after Prince Harry now, did they?
Should there be an inclusion rider for those who are 1/8 Irish Catholic, 3/8 British Protestant and 1/2 Polish Catholic? Asking for a friend.
Will there be inclusion riders for Gentiles as Hollywood executives too?
Nobody ever asks me to speak at a shul event. I need people to add me in their inclusion whatever!
Jerry: That Scottish case is interesting. First, I can’t believe that the courts have time for this given their workload of palimony cases (see
http://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2017/06/15/scotland-full-scale-divorce-litigation-without-marriages/
). More interestingly, imagine how this would be covered if it were Russia prosecuting one of her citizens for producing a humorous (at least to some) video! If this guy is imprisoned, at least he can be comforted by the fact that he is imprisoned within the US/UK Alliance of Freedom (TM).