Daas balabatim you can trust

The Bavli Inbox

Reported by (deep breath)…

Gedalia Guttentag, Binyamin Rose, Jake Turx, Yaacov Lipszyc, Menachem Weinreb, Yitzchak Landa, Michal Frischman, Rikki Boles, Shmuel Botnick, Chaia Frischman… and others too modest to need a byline.

Wrong Address

I’m just writing to say shkoyach for an excellent newspaper. We’ve been buying it since 1958, and proudly display your logo on our mailbox. My favorite column is Mordechai Schmutter.

Malcolm X., Flatbush

Featuring the Faceless

To the Editors,

Your policy of refusing to print pictures of women is shameful, degrading of Womenkind and a dreadful lesson for our new generation of progressive, confident Jewish women. It sends a message that women don’t exist.

It’s obviously a reflection of the fact that your editors are all male, pale, and stale. If there was one — just one! — woman on your editorial team then this would never happen.

While we recognize that your publication is commercial, the pandering to half-a-million backward extremists is a perversion of halakha and Jewish tradition. Shame on you.

Jewish Outraged Fulminators Association

Hello,

Is Mishpacha intent on destroying every halachah l’Moshe m’Sinai established in Kattowitz in 1912? Besides for 50-years-worth of Jewish Observer magazines, no chareidi paper has ever published a picture of a woman. It’s a slippery slope — first small illustrations, then the cover.

Y. S., New York

Relaxation, Not Politics

Dear Editors,

It’s very disturbing to find politics on your cover week after week when we’re trying to relax on Shabbos. Aside from a few askanim, who cares what happens in Washington anyway? We want to put our feet up and enjoy reading about the shalom bayis crisis and the shortage of frum therapists.

(I prefer not be identified, but if I must, it’s R.T.)

Traumatic Times

I opened Mishpacha last week and promptly threw it into the garbage, and then I posted on all 50 of my WhatsApp groups that everyone should do the same rather than risk the dangers of being exposed to your content.

Do you realize how TRIGGERING your magazine is? Do you realize what kind of TRAUMA you are causing in innocent readers? Honestly, where do you come up with these items???

We don’t want to read the word “war,” we don’t want to hear about people getting hurt or killed or losing family members. We most definitely do not want to see pictures of people who were taken hostage, it might make us sad and scared and then how will we be able to come up with good themes for our kids’ costumes that will actually match our shalach manos?

I hope you realize what kind of damage you are causing. We will never get past this. It will now be embedded in our genes. Our grandchildren’s trauma is ON YOU.

White House Opens Hebrew Reading Crash Course (White House D.C.)

Insiders: Sign on door now reads “Ulpan Office”

He made his fortune in real estate, branched out to hotels, diversified into golf courses, and struck gold with reality entertainment, but now America’s 47th president has a new hustle as a Hebrew teacher.

According to two dozen administration sources granted anonymity to enable them to speak freely, the West Wing will house a Hebrew reading crash course — led by President Trump himself.

“The president’s first lesson was free for the American public and focused on the word ‘Shalom,’ ” explains a White House source. “First, he tweeted that Shalom Hamas means hello and goodbye to terrorists, and then as revision for the first session, he tweeted ‘Shalom Columbia.’ ”

The rest of the course will be behind a paywall, intended to bridge a cash crunch at Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which faces a budgetary shortfall after it inadvertently axed the Treasury Department.

The scheme has won the support of Musk himself, a key figure in the administration. “I salute the idea with all my heart — which is where all my salutes originate,” the billionaire wrote on X, his social media platform.

According to presidential historian Tevi Avdo, Trump’s turn to pedagogy invites comparisons with Lyndon B. Johnson, who began his working life as a teacher.

“Hebrew lessons are just the start,” say insiders. “Now that we’ve closed the Department of Education, we’re looking at the president teaching K-12 directly himself. He can teach math, physics, geology — you name it! We want all of America’s kids watching this incredible president via livestream all of the time.”