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The Court, the Silence and the Fine

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The Court, the Silence and the Fine

For its first two years on the air, Kol BaRama broadcast no female voices at all, a policy the station never publicly framed as anything other than a decision about its Haredi audience's expectations. The Orthodox feminist association Kolech and the Israel Religious Action Center saw it differently, and in 2012 they filed a class action lawsuit arguing that a licensed public broadcaster, regulated by Israel's Second Authority for Television and Radio, could not simply erase half its potential audience and half its potential voices from the air.

The case took six years to resolve. On September 20, 2018 the Jerusalem District Court ruled against the station, finding that Kol BaRama's total and deliberate exclusion of women damaged dignity and self-worth, deepened perceptions of female inferiority, and prevented the influence of women in public discourse. The court ordered Kol BaRama to pay one million shekels, roughly 280,000 dollars, in damages, directing that the money be donated toward initiatives supporting women's place in Israeli society rather than paid to the plaintiffs directly.

The ruling did not shut Kol BaRama down, and the station remains on the air today, still licensed, still broadcasting to its Haredi audience across central Israel, Jerusalem and the south. The case became a documented reference point in Israeli media studies scholarship on how Haredi broadcasters navigate the space between serving a religiously conservative audience and operating under a secular state's regulatory and legal framework, one that does not exempt a licensed station from its own equality law.

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