Recently a group of scholars have begun a project to document the history of the Bais Yaakov schools, which since World War I have led the way in providing educations to girls from the most strictly Orthodox families. On the project’s website is an image of what appears to be a woman in a dress holding a Torah scroll. It is in fact something very different, argues Rachel Manekin:

The illustration . . . appeared first on a postcard, one in a set of ten “art postcards” drawn by Uriel Birnbaum, the son of the general secretary of Agudath Israel, Nathan Birnbaum. The postcards were produced by the Viennese Ts’irei Agudat Yisrael organization (Agudas Jisroel Jugendgruppe) and sold for fundraising purposes. The price of each set was 500 krone. Indeed, in May 1922 the Austrian Orthodox weekly Jüdische Presse published advertisements for this set.

The postcard with the illustration of the youth holding a Torah scroll as if rescuing it from the whirlwind in the background (perhaps symbolizing the First World War) appears with the verse from Jeremiah 1:7, “Do not say I am a youth, for to whomsoever I shall send thee thou shalt go and whatsoever I shall command you thou shalt speak.” The import in this context is that one should not excuse himself from obeying God’s commandment, interpreted here as spreading Torah study, by claiming to be a youth.

The youth is wearing a long kapota [kaftan] reaching his feet, as did many at the time, and his head, especially the back of it, is all colored in black and so one cannot see the skullcap. Still, it is obvious that this is a young male, not only because of the biblical verse under it, but also because it is absolutely inconceivable that a female carrying a Torah scroll would appear in an Agudath Yisrael sponsored postcard in the 1920s—or, for that matter, today.

Commenting on the wave of anti-Hamas demonstrations in the Gaza Strip, Seth Mandel writes:

Gazans have not have been fully honest in public. There’s a reason for that. To take just one example, Amin Abed was nearly beaten to death with hammers for criticizing Hamas. Abed was saved by bystanders, so presumably the intention was to finish him off. During the cease-fire, Hamas members bragged about executing “collaborators” and filmed themselves shooting civilians.

Which is what makes yesterday’s protests all the more significant. To protest Hamas in public is to take one’s life in one’s hands. That is especially true because the protests were bound to be filmed, in order to get the message out to the world. The reason the world needs to hear that message is that Westerners have been Hamas’s willing propaganda tools. The protests on campus are not “pro-Palestinian,” they are pro-Hamas—and the people of Gaza are Hamas’s victims.