About Nashim (magazine)

Nashim (magazine)

Nashim, whose name is the Hebrew word for "Women," is a Hebrew-language magazine for religious Jewish women in Israel, published as a supplement of the newspaper Makor Rishon. It began to appear in the summer of 2006 and is published once every two weeks with the newspaper, from Jerusalem. It covers family, faith, lifestyle and culture for the national-religious readership that Makor Rishon serves. The magazine presents itself in its subscription marketing as the leading magazine for the religious woman in Israel, "with everything that interests, intrigues and inspires." Together with the independent magazine Pnima, it is one of the two titles most often named in academic surveys of the media of national-religious women.

The parent newspaper: Makor Rishon

Makor Rishon is an Israeli newspaper founded in July 1997 to create an independent publication with a Jewish-national character. Over its history it developed from a small weekly struggling for financial survival into an influential voice in Israel's public conversation and an important platform for journalism, literature, culture and Jewish thought, addressing current affairs alongside Jewish identity, Israeli society, Jewish law, literature and intellectual life, and shaping discussion within the national-religious public while reaching readers well beyond it. The newspaper is published in Jerusalem, and its supplements are the framework within which Nashim appears: a family of magazine supplements that includes the culture and commentary magazine Motzash, the portrait magazine Dyokan, a law supplement, the children's paper Otiyot and others.

From Pnei Isha to Nashim

Nashim was not the newspaper's first women's magazine. Before it, Makor Rishon published a women's magazine called Pnei Isha, "A Woman's Face," edited by Ayelet Kedem and after her by Roni Shuv. In the summer of 2006 the present supplement began to appear under the name Nashim, published once every two weeks. Its editor, as recorded in the newspaper's reference entry, was Limor Grizim-Magen, a journalist who also worked on other Makor Rishon supplements. The biweekly rhythm placed the magazine regularly in the hands of the newspaper's subscribers, inside the weekend reading of the national-religious home.

Frequency and form

Nashim appears once every two weeks as a supplement of Makor Rishon. As a newspaper magazine it belongs to the Israeli institution of the weekend supplement, in which a newspaper's identity is carried as much by its magazines as by its news pages. Within the Makor Rishon family, the women's magazine stands alongside the children's and youth papers produced by the same house, Otiyot, formed by uniting the children's supplement Makor la-Yeladim with the veteran religious children's paper Otiyot, and its younger sibling Sukariyot, so that the newspaper offered age- and audience-specific magazines for the whole religious family, with Nashim addressing its women.

Content and readership

The magazine covers family, faith, lifestyle and culture for the national-religious readership. Academic surveys of Hebrew women's journalism group Nashim with Pnima and with the Haredi magazine Mishpacha as religious women's publications whose main contents are intended to strengthen the woman's roles in the home. Its own presentation to prospective subscribers describes the leading magazine for the religious woman, carrying everything that interests, intrigues and inspires her. The two descriptions, the scholar's and the publisher's, meet on the same ground: a magazine whose centre is the religious woman's home and family life, and whose range extends across the subjects that fill that life, from relationships and parenting to health, food, style and spiritual growth.

Religious women's press in context

Nashim is part of the religious branch of Israel's women's press. Surveys of that press note that Israel has a religious women's journalism of its own, exemplified by Pnima, whose regular sections include parenting, alternative medicine, fertility, education, aesthetics, interior design, recipes, relationships, fashion, health and Jewish spirituality, an architecture typical of the sector and shared by its titles. The same surveys observe that women's publications are a space in which the changes of religious society are expressed and fed: alongside the central, traditional and dominant voice of the editorials, other voices are heard, mainly in the personal columns and the features. A biweekly women's magazine inside the national-religious newspaper of record is one of the places where that negotiation between tradition and change is conducted in print, every second week.

The sector it serves

The national-religious public that Makor Rishon and Nashim serve combines religious observance with full participation in Israeli public life, and its media have historically been produced in Jerusalem, as this directory's profile of the magazine records. For the women of that public, general women's magazines such as LaIsha, published since the 1940s, did not address religious life, while Haredi women's publications addressed a more separate community. Nashim was created in the space between: a women's magazine inside the sector's own newspaper, in Hebrew, treating faith as the frame of lifestyle and culture coverage rather than as an addition to it.

Editors and continuity

The recorded editorship of Nashim begins with Limor Grizim-Magen at its launch in the summer of 2006. Grizim-Magen's name is attached in the newspaper's history to the women's magazine specifically, after a sequence of earlier roles in the paper's supplements, and the women's magazine she inherited had itself passed through the editorships of Ayelet Kedem and Roni Shuv in its earlier form as Pnei Isha. The continuity of the women's supplement across changes of name and editor, from Pnei Isha to Nashim, shows the permanence of the women's magazine within the Makor Rishon bundle even as other supplements of the newspaper, such as its culture supplement of 2005-2006 or its short-lived Israeli Friday magazine of 2006, came and went.

Nashim and Pnima

Surveys of religious women's media in Israel habitually name Nashim and Pnima together, and the comparison defines both. Nashim, the older title in its present form since 2006, reaches its readers as part of a newspaper, on a biweekly cycle, under the discipline and the distribution of Makor Rishon. Pnima, launched in 2011, is an independent magazine. Between them they map the two institutional forms of national-religious women's journalism in Israel: the supplement and the standalone magazine. Both address the same reader, the observant woman of the national-religious sector, and both are cited in the Jewish Women's Archive's overview of the sector press and in academic surveys of religious women's media as the representative titles of that world.

Standing

Nashim has appeared since the summer of 2006 as the women's magazine of Makor Rishon, published every two weeks in Jerusalem in Hebrew. Its record is the record of a supplement that became a fixture: a named, edited and marketed magazine with its own subscription campaigns, addressed to religious women and recognised in the scholarly literature as one of the two principal magazines of its sector. In a media landscape in which the national-religious public is served by a small number of durable institutions, Nashim's two decades inside the Makor Rishon family give it a standing beyond its pages, as part of how that public reads itself.

A changing family of supplements

The durability of the women's magazine is clearer against the turnover of its siblings. Makor Rishon's culture supplement Hashavuon appeared weekly from January 2005 to February 2006 and was then cancelled; a biweekly chrome-format magazine supplement, Shishi Israeli, launched in June 2006, the very season Nashim began, was meant to become weekly and was cancelled after about three months; an expanded festival supplement, Shabbat Hagadol, appeared three times a year; and a free synagogue leaflet, Makori, ceased at the end of 2010. Supplements of the newspaper rose and fell with the economics of print, while the women's magazine that began in the summer of 2006 continued on its two-week cycle. The pattern is common in Israeli newspapers, whose women's supplements, addressed to the most loyal segment of the household readership, tend to outlive more experimental magazine ventures.