Ikea Israel’s publication of a male-only catalog has sparked national anger in Israel and started about sexism in the country. The company has since apologized for issuing the product catalog, which contained no images of women.
Oriented towards Jewish ultra-Orthodox customers, the catalog featured men wearing “payot”or side-curls and yarmulkes alongside their male children, and was the company’s first attempt to branch out towards the ultra-Orthodox Haredi community, which makes up roughly 10% of the country’s population—or 8.5 million. The ultra-Orthodox community is known for its stringent gender and modesty norms.
The male-only catalog, which was published alongside Ikea’s regular brochure, was considered alienating to the company’s female customers, who make up a large portion of their user-base.
Shuky Koblenz, Ikea’s retail manager for Israel expressed apologies on behalf of the company for upsetting its customers.
“We realize that people are upset about this and that the publication does not live up to what IKEA stands for and we apologize for this,” he said in a statement to Religion News Service. “We will make sure that future publications will reflect what IKEA stands for and at the same time show respect for Haredi community.”
Koblenz says that the brochure was made custom for the Haredim to reach out to them with commercial messages.
Israel-based Ynet reports that the catalog highlighted products that were highly in demand among ultra-Orthodox families, which tend to be much larger than the average Israeli family, including bunk beds and bookshelves stocked with religious books.
The publication of the catalog is out of the ordinary for the Swedish retailer, which prefers to promote racial and gender diversity in its photographic shoots. In the US, Ikea was among the first companies to promote gay couples in its advertising in the 1990s, prompting boycotts from religious conservatives.
In 2012, Ikea landed itself in hot water for photoshopping women out of its catalogs in Saudi Arabia to appeal to the country’s Islamic fundamentalists. It apologized for that, too.
Israeli critics say that ultra-Orthodox rabbis in the country are waging an on-going campaign to remove or prohibit women from appearing in advertisements on public busses and in public areas.
Writer Samuel Sokol calls Ikea’s catalog “part of the growing trend of purging images of women from ultra-Orthodox publications and is presented by its proponents as being consistent with religious tradition.”
“It’s actually misogynistic market segmentation,” he says.
Ian Miles Cheong is a journalist and outspoken media critic. You can reach him through social media at @stillgray on Twitter and on Facebook.
