Israeli Haredi media and the ‘female factor’: the case of the Kol Barama radio station

In 2018 the Jerusalem District Court fined the Haredi Kol Barama radio station 1 million shekels ($280,000) for excluding women from the airwaves, stirring outrage within the Haredi community, highly sensitive to appearances of women in public contexts, which had created the station to provide radio broadcasts for its constituents, whose needs were not met by mainstream radio stations. The affair thus serves as a cardinal test of the level of freedom of a radio station, the interests of minority religious audiences, and the powers and responsibilities of the supervising public broadcasting authority.