The Seven Circles of Hell of Galeria

Dear Editor-in-Chief, why did you send me back to this inferno? It's not funny. I'm willing to write about anything else, just not about Galeria. Part 2 and final in the critique of the Galeria supplement

Cerberus - Son of a bitch from hell  (Source)

Last week we were sent to review Galeria, but the editor wasn't satisfied because there wasn't a detailed reference to the supplement's content. Therefore, with a special kind of humor reserved for editors - and like a bitch who did her business in the middle of the living room - she was sent again to stick her nose in the dung heap. So this time we won't just analyze the smell, but we'll actually rummage through the pile of feces and mark them. Seven sections in Galeria corresponding to the seven circles of hell corresponding to the seven sins of political correctness:

Anger
Tzafi Saar - Supposedly I - as a feminist woman by day and a bitch by night, and cumulatively a feminist bitch - should have been her target audience. In practice, Saar's column is the worst thing to come out of the patriarchy. The level of mental and emotional violence it contains is simply unhealthy for the soul (and I'm convinced for the body too), and is a full and symmetrical reflection of male violence and mansplaining - it's a preachy and mobilized column on the level of the thunderous voice of a religious girls' school principal. Maybe the cancer of patriarchy requires treatment, but this column is equivalent to drinking chemotherapy instead of coffee. It's simply distilled poison, with zero calories and no added sugar. And like any missionary stance of a fundamentalist religious girls' school principal, even a principal for feminism, it suffers as a column from absolute banality, which is the banality of evil. TL;DR [Translator's note: Hebrew acronym for "Too Long; Didn't Read"]: The religious girls' school principal had a sex change operation and now writes in Haaretz for transgender rights. Identifying mark: Terminal lack of humor (this is how you'll recognize the religious girls' school principal even if he castrated himself and added silicone breasts).

Envy
Beta Male - The banality of good. Yes, you're a good and boring man, and you're busy proving it every time, like a sycophantic guy on a dating site who doesn't understand why he's not getting out of there and doesn't interest anyone. Next. Once there was a truly challenging writer in Haaretz in the masculinity arena, an unapologetic alpha male named Gabriel Bukobza, only one day he disappeared in circumstances that were not clarified to readers and Haaretz took revenge on him with a series of slanderous articles that remained for about eternity at the top of the homepage, with no proportion to his "sins". My beloved told me that he probably had a conflict with someone in the editorial staff (we fantasized about Tzafi or Lisa), or they're just jealous of his success in reality TV or that he was the only non-trivial column in Galeria (and thus made all the others look really bad), and so they brought in his place intentionally a neutered and boring puppy to represent the new masculinity, which doesn't threaten anyone. What's certain is that the newspaper came out worse than the writer. TL;DR: Identity politics is not really capable of containing the other (and in its case, it's the man. Oh, the irony).

Lust
The Human Species - The only person in the world who can write in the most boring way in the world about the most interesting topic in the world is Neta Halperin on sex. I really don't want to imagine where such an approach to sex comes from (sorry, intercourse. Sorry, sexuality). Even at the level of potential traffic for such a column, I don't understand what she's doing there, unless you look at Galeria as an ideological whole and then everything makes sense. Actually, she's a mandatory piece in the puzzle, and represents an essential characteristic of political correctness: zero libido. TL;DR: A sex education lesson at the Baharan [Translator's note: A religious girls' school] Seminary (also known as the Tehran Seminary).

Sloth
Lazy Eye - Television is not culture. Period. Again: The fact that you watch TV instead of reading literature doesn't make it culture. What's the next stage, video game reviews? YouTube video reviews? Porn video reviews? Again: The fact that you watch porn doesn't make it cinema. And by the way, what shows more than anything that this has nothing to do with culture is the lack of historical perspective and zero tradition. Where's the engagement with classic series from the past? All the "masterpiece series" came out yesterday and will be forgotten tomorrow. The fact that it's a common and reprehensible habit (and in Niv Hadas's case, an addiction) doesn't make it something that should be given legitimacy (cultural, and maybe even social). Leave the low standards to Mako [Translator's note: A popular Israeli entertainment website]. The Bitch wishes to remind that a newspaper is reading material, and if it's not interesting as reading material, it won't help it to deal with "what interests" people these days. Those interested in series will prefer to watch series. The newspaper is intended for those interested in reading about the phenomenon of series, which is a phenomenon of cultural degeneration, as the column proves in its content (though not in its observations). TL;DR: A column whose raison d'être is the legitimization of the loss of shame of both the writer and readers, a product of a wholesale transfusion of garbage juice directly into the brain artery over a decade (see: binge).

Gluttony
By the same logic as "Lazy Eye", foodies are also cultural figures. Why does Haaretz actually have three (or four) food columns? What's the function of this other than to mark what goes in the mouth and comes out of the anus as "culture", and thus give "high" prestige to simple human gluttony, as part of the postmodern project of flattening hierarchies and prostituting standards? In general, a significant portion of the columns raise the question: What is this doing here? What editorial need does an unfunny satire column answer? The Conformist was more amusing in Cinemoran [Translator's note: A satirical Israeli TV show], and that's not a compliment. Even in Cinemoran, the potential of the format (kudos) helped offset the lack of sharpness in execution (ugh). Here the format no longer manages to do that. What impression do I as a reader get? Moran wandered in the editorial office after being the editor of Haaretz Magazine (supposedly a respected position), so they found him a work arrangement in the method of the Israel Broadcasting Authority. Political correctness has never excelled in humor as it has excelled in morality. The same goes for the migration of Nissan Shor's column from Haaretz Magazine in parallel with the takeover of "Shchori" [Translator's note: Likely referring to a person or group], when the feeling is that there was nowhere to put it - so Galeria. In my opinion, he's missed in the Galeria identity puzzle and could have filled the "Russian" slot, or at least the immigrant (he wrote a book about it). Ariel Horowitz, who was for a short period in the "religious" slot, was returned to his original source, because apparently it's a slot that doesn't fit in identity politics. But I have a great idea: Galeria should take the soporific Neri Livneh from the magazine and put her under the senior citizen slot. How am I at Sudoku?

Greed
Art Criticism - They parted ways with the previous critic and brought Avi Pitchon. My partner asked me: What, can he be an art critic? I answered her: Is there anyone who can't be? (It made her laugh. Me, a little less). My personal feeling is that Pitchon is the editorial darling (oh, the penguin!) and simply coveted Shaul Setter's column, because if he can then why can't he? (And really, why not, huh?). This entire column is a certificate of poverty for Israeli art, which is itself a certificate of poverty for contemporary art, which is itself a certificate of poverty for Western art. So why do we need the Bitch, to give a certificate of poverty to a certificate of poverty to a certificate of poverty to a certificate of poverty? The only writer in Haaretz who could have been a successful art critic is Yonatan Hirschfeld. Gideon Ofrat would also have been great if they had taken him out of his storage. There are hardly any good writers on art in Israel, so it would have actually been very easy to staff the column successfully. But with typical laziness, they brought someone from the inside instead of the right person. Does anyone think that the enormous damage to the ecosystem of the Israeli art world in that there isn't a decent regular art critic in the entire State of Israel interests the editor?

Pride
As in the seven deadly sins, this is probably my sin. I don't have the energy for you, Galeria. You're not worth it. Actually, I would simply close Galeria and fire all the writers, except for Uri Klein, who admittedly recycles his conceptual system from the 80s, but maybe there are children who haven't been exposed to cinema and he can instill knowledge in them in Haaretz Magazine in the tradition of old Israel (Dan Handel also writes about not-taken-for-granted architectural projects. Not populist - but lacks spice). And I sniff my own tail and wonder: Why does the Bitch actually despise Galeria, after all it's just an appendage to the newspaper? Maybe because it proves that the female part of the newspaper is inferior to the male part, that the new female (and feminist) side of culture is still pathetic compared to the old institutions, that it doesn't have a drop of panache and talent and respectability and elitism and depth, but is all focused on the surface. Galeria actually justifies in retrospect the old patriarchy of Haaretz, and shows that dogs are still preferable to bitches.

So, is there no constructive suggestion? Galeria is such a failed institution that everything must be destroyed and a worthy supplement rebuilt from scratch, with a worthy editor who is a cultured person who is also interested in low culture, and not a person of low culture who is "also interested in culture". But no, that won't happen. On the contrary. In ten years, Haaretz Magazine itself will turn into Galeria, Galeria will turn into Mako, and Mako will turn into a combined porn and news site (startup!). At this stage, there will really be porn reviews and reviews of Facebook posts and app launches and interviews on the occasion of posting a picture on Instagram in Galeria, and then we'll finally get to have a regular cat column.

* Full disclosure: The Bitch is prevented from writing about Ben Shalom for reasons of personal accounts.