The Jewishness of Israelis: Responses to the Guttman Report

2. The Media and the Guttman Report

2 The Media and the Guttman Report CHARLES S. LIEBMAN This chapter and the chapter that follows survey how two critical sectors of the Israeli public, the media and the academic community, greeted the Guttman Report. The media and the academics are very important because they serve as the major conduits through which the results of the Guttman study were communicated to the general public. Both the full text of the Guttman Report and a summary of the report, published as a separate pamphlet under the title Highlights from the Guttman Institute Report (hereafter referred to as Highlights and reprinted in this volume as chapter 1) were on sale to the public. But the distribution facilities of the Guttman Institute and the Avi-Chai Foundation border on the nonexistent , and the public is not accustomed to purchasing material of this sort anyway. THE GUTTMAN CONCEPTION The media's interpretation is critical in the short run; the academic community is probably more important in the long run_ We turn our attention first to the media. In doing so, this chapter is not only attentive to the text of the media reports but to the more subtle question of how the results of a scientific report become popularized and the attendant and inevitable distortion that accompanies that popularization. Barbie Zelizer, relying on earlier scholars, describes journalists as an interpretive community. She observes that journalists present events through explanatory frames that construct reality but do not reveal the secrets, sources or methods of such a process. Audiences tend to protest this only when they 39 40 Liebman dislike what is being portrayed ... the selection, formation, and presentation of events ultimately hinge on how journalists decide to construct the news in one way and not another....J Avi-Chai, with Guttman Institute approval, prepared a press release that it distributed together with Highlights to all Israeli newspapers. Some reporters did request and thereupon received copies of the full report. However, coverage of the Guttman Report in the press and on television and radio suggests that, with some exceptions, reporters and editors relied heavily on a press release for their basic information of the report's contents. The press release comprised five and a half single-spaced pages of text, so even though the media was in fact reporting on a press release it had to select from among the wealth of information reported in the release . Highlights facilitated the journalists in this regard as well by quoting three key statements from the report on its front cover. The quotes really constituted a shortened version of the press release. The first three paragraphs of the press release were as follows: "The rhetoric of secular and religious polarization used to characterize Israeli society is highly misleading. It is truer to say that Israeli society has a strong traditional bent, with a continuum from the 'strictly observant' to the 'non-observant,' rather than a great divide between a religious minority and a secular majority. Israeli Jews are strongly committed to the continuing Jewish character of their society, even while they are selective in the forms of their observance. They believe that public life should respect tradition, but they are critical of the 'status quo' governing State and Religion." These are some of the conclusions of this most detailed and in-depth study ever done in Israel, encompassing 2,400 personal interviews, on the subject of "Beliefs, Observances and Social Interaction among Israeli Jews" carried out by The Guttman Institute of Applied Social Research, at the initiative of the AVI CHAI Foundation in Jerusalem. AVI CHAI is a private foundation which focuses in Israel on efforts to encourage mutual understanding and sensitivity among Jews of different religious backgrounds and commitments to observance. The study was carried out under the direction of Dr. Shlomit Levy, Hanna Levinsohn, and Prof. Elihu Katz, Scientific Director of the Institute. The three paragraphs found on the front page ofHighlights, designed to look like direct quotes from the report, are also to be found in the first paragraph of the press release. They are reproduced here in their entirety: The Media and the Guttman Report ... the rhetoric of secular and religious polarization generally used to characterize Israeli society is highly misleading. . . . Israeli society has a strong traditional bent, and, as far as religious practice is concerned ... there is a continuum from the "strictly observant" to the "non-observant," rather than a great...