Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Israel News

The Israel Project Offers All-Male Roster of Analysts To Weigh In on U.S. Election

With the U.S. possibly poised to elect its first female president, an Israel advocacy group has sent journalists a list of expert commentators to interview about the election — with nary a female in sight.

The Israel Project sent a list of 10 Israeli experts, including former U.S. diplomats, professors, think tank analysts and military chiefs to Israel-based journalists on November 6.

Michele Chabin, a Jerusalem-based reporter and analyst who writes for USA Today and the Jewish Week, first raised the omission of women on TIP’s list on Twitter. Other reporters later followed suit on Facebook.

Chabin said she reached out to TIP about the lack of women and was told that her query was passed along to the group’s Israel director, Lior Weintraub, who is also listed as one of 10 expert commentators — but got no response.

“The irony is that I was writing about the elections, the first with a woman candidate, and there wasn’t a single woman listed as an expert,” she told the Forward. “I wasn’t looking for an analysis on Clinton’s female traits, but about her experience and leadership, etcetera, and there was no female to comment on that.”

Asked about the omission, TIP insisted that the list was not a reflection of the organization’s overall attitude on women.

“We take special pride in having prominent women from academia, think tanks, as well as current and former officials, taking leading roles in TIP’s briefings, tours, conference calls and the many other activities we hold,” the group said in a statement to the Forward. “We believe that this represents not just TIP’s values, but also Israel’s multi-faceted, integrated society and reality.”

The group added that it is “working tirelessly on a daily basis in order to expand and enrich our pool of experts.”

It did not provide any female names.

TIP, a U.S. not-for-profit, was founded by former Democratic Party activist Jennifer Laszlo Mizrahi to advocate for and educate about Israel with journalists and opinion-makers.

Contact Naomi Zeveloff at [email protected] or on Twitter @naomizeveloff

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.