21 Lessons for the 21st Century

by Yuval Noah Harari

In 2011, a scandal erupted when the ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn paper Di Tzeitung published a photo of American officials watching the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound but digitally erased all women from the photo, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The paper explained it was forced to do so by Jewish “laws of modesty.” A similar scandal erupted when the paper HaMevaser expunged Angela Merkel from a photo of a demonstration against the Charlie Hebdo massacre, lest her image arouse any lustful thoughts in the minds of devout readers. The publisher of a third ultra-Orthodox newspaper, Hamodia, defended this policy by explaining, “We are backed by thousands of years of Jewish tradition.”5