Ikea Israel, Seeking Ultra-Orthodox Customers, Produces Catalog Full Of Dudes

The Ikea protest slogan, a reminder that some of those Malms were recalled? Image by Screenshot/Twitter

By Phoebe Maltz Bovy February 16, 2017

Ikea, the Swedish affordable-furniture giant (and noted relationship stressor) has managed to offend, this time in Israel. Michele Chabin reports that along with its regular Hebrew-language catalog, the store created a special men-and-boys-only version with an ultra-Orthodox audience in mind.

As opposed as I generally am to rules against images of women and girls, part of me wonders whether we should go with it, in this one case. Ikea’s being marketed as dude-only? A guy thing? Fantastic! Start the women’s strike early and let them go to the store on their own, winding their way through Kiviks and Malms, and deal with the whole shebang — getting the planks home, assembling them into something resembling furniture, and, when the lease is up, selling them on Craigslist to the clever souls wise enough to purchase preassembled Ikea in their neighborhoods.

Let the men have Ikea. It’s all theirs. Let the men cook with the Ikea cookware, and do laundry using those trusty, if rickety, Ikea laundry hampers.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy edits the Sisterhood, and can be reached at [email protected]. Her book, The Perils of “Privilege”, will be published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017.

Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.

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.

This year, we have stood together in strength and sorrow. Our Forward team has worked around the clock to help you find clarity amid the chaos.

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