User:Cullen328/sandbox/Jewish religious clothing
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- Keep the image, add other images and improve this mediocre article. An article in the Times of Israel called "Orthodox girls fight for the right to don tefillin: As young women come of age and demand more gender equality, observant communities are made to contend with a heady dose of halachic egalitarianism" makes it clear that this is not some sort of extreme and rare anti-Orthodox deviation from normative Judaism. This article is not called Haredi religious clothing but ought to represent Jewish religious clothing all the way back to the high priests, throughout the millennia, reflecting the religious clothing of diverse Jewish cultures and of Conservative, Reform, Reconstructionist and Renewal Jews as well as the Orthodox. It is commonplace to see women wearing tallitot and kippot while praying and reading from the Torah in non-Orthodox synagogues. Such photos should be included in this article. A section on the distinctive religious clothing of the Yemenite Jews is obvious and many other Jewish subcultures through the ages wore various forms of unusual and notable Jewish religious clothing. Just consider the quirky medieval Jewish hat which began as a symbol of proud community identity but ended up as a social stigma imposed by gentile civil authorities. Why no images of religious clothing from those days? We also need more photos of Orthodox women wearing their most common head coverings, and better images and prose in general. I am concerned by an assumption implicit in the arguments against this image: namely, that ultra-Orthodox editors have some special right to control articles about Jewish religious practices. Most Israeli Jews are not Orthodox and in the United States, #2 in Jewish population, there are far more Jews affiliated with non-Orthodox synagogues than Orthodox ones. Therefore, articles about these practices must fully represent non-Orthodox practice as well, neutrally, and never favoring one branch over the others. Anything else violates the neutral point of view, a core content policy. If consensus is that this photo should be removed because the woman donned tefillin (which is not clothing), then all photos of men with tefillin should be removed as well. All that being said, the photo in question ought to be moved into the women's section, as it were. I will leave this image alone until consensus is reached, but I plan to add and move other images and make other changes to the article, based on reliable sources.