TABLET MAG
Admit It: You Hate Religious Jews
Liel Leibovitz
August 22, 2023

Late last week, a 29-year-old Israeli reporter boarded a United Airlines flight from New York to Tel Aviv. A short while later, she tweeted a photo of several Orthodox Jewish men, with the following caption: “Haredis on my flight right now are trying to move me around from one seat to another. Because I’m a woman. By the way, United Airlines are doing nothing about it. They’re telling me that because of me, the flight won’t take off. For shame.” It didn’t take long for the digital tongues to start wagging…The drama quickly seeped into the mainstream press, with headlines speaking of shame and discrimination and conjuring a perfect storm of religious intolerance, corporate malfeasance, and misogyny at 30,000 feet. There was only one minor problem with this grand guignol: It never happened. READ MORE