Censoring lady position available

August 8, 2021 Censoring lady position available

Posted at 07:24h in Artifacts, Censorship, Economy by Frieda Vizel 1 Comment

Here is a job opportunity that I came across in the Hasidic classified section. A school is looking for responsible women to do censoring on a school premises. There was a time that I used to think that censoring positions were the most outrageous thing for the 21st century. And furthermore, that my own sister would have such a job would just compound the absurdity. But now that social media companies have normalized the industry, it has lost all its shock value.

Censoring in the Hasidic community is blatant and unabashed. All textbooks are censored. I’ve shown some of my own censored schoolwork in this previous post, where I challenged you to guess what information had been removed. I also noticed that words like God and Bible were censored out. These are all very overt, unlike the censorship-by-omission we see in the Hasidic media in stories like the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation hearings.

Here is a particularly egregious example of censorship. This is a math assignment, and it’s made confusing by some of the missing details in the word problem. In this case, “girls” has been marked out, as boys and girls shouldn’t be mixing, as has the word “circus,” as it’s considered an immodest and goyish affair.

And yet another type of censorship: covering immodest images on toy boxes:

Censoring the screens on an airplane!

On another note, I like to look at Hasidic classifieds to see how jobs are advertised, what’s available, and what the process of finding jobs is. Based on the way the ads are phrased, and that they are largely for secretarial positions, I’d say these are all job opportunities exclusively for women and girls.

The second job is for a secretarial position in a local school. No experience required. But phone skills are a must. All you need to do is to make a call.

The fourth one is for the position of playgroup teacher. I am always astonished by how many playgroup positions show up in the classified pages. The community’s growth rate means that classes are constantly being added, and new jobs in education are aplenty. Here they also offer the position of teachers’ assistant and clarify that the candidate does not have to have experience.

The last two positions are a high school teacher and office position. Again, you’ll notice there is no mention of resume, references, credentials. Only a “detailed message.”

This is a very interesting example of how this community has not yet become so bureaucratized that every simple position is layered with an endless amount of procedure. There are still a lot of elements in this community that retain the small-community culture. And this allows for word of mouth, interviews, and other informal procedures to be a more old fashioned, and I would say more effective, process of doing business with each other.