NPR’s story on a local election in El’ad, an ultra-Orthodox Israeli town, is great as far as it goes; it just does’t go very far. Reporter Emily Harris’ four minute audio clip focuses on why two mothers are challenging community mores to run for town council. According to Harris, the “Mothers for El’ad” are just doing what moms anywhere would do: fighting for their families. The candidates want the town to build amenities including a library and a pool, and they’d also like better bus service. Harris captures the campaign’s frisson, including muted support from the town’s other mothers. But it lacks context for understanding Israel’s growing gender problems, El-Ad’s unusual history and the ways that both reflect the strength of the ultra-Orthodox community.

El-ad was “born” in the late 1990s, a settlement bordering the West Bank in central Israel. (Since El-ad is within Israel, residents did not receive the financial incentives awarded to settlers who move to the West Bank.) Ariel Sharon, who was the country’s minister of housing at the time, saw it as a strategic geographic outpost that also served ultra-religious Jews who wanted inexpensive but comfortable homes in a new community. City planners built big homes to accommodate large Orthodox families, but they did not include the community facilities that the Mothers of El’ad now seek.

El-ad’s female candidates are part of a larger movement pushing back against religiously circumscribed gender roles. Racheli Ibenboim, an ultra-Orthodox woman who sought a seat on the Jerusalem city council, embodies the push as well as the pull back. Ibenboim withdrew from the race after receiving threats to her family. Ibenboim’s experience, in the country where Golda Meir served as prime minister more than 40 years ago, illustrates the impact of religious Orthodoxy on Israeli life. As a recent article in Al-Monitor points out, Israel has been “a relatively positive model for women’s rights,” but the increased social presence and political power of the Orthodox has erupted in conflicts over seating on public buses and images on outdoor ads.  (The Israeli Supreme Court prohibited forcing women to sit in the back of public buses and permitted females faces on public advertisements.)

Almost two years ago, the New York Times quoted a Hebrew University philosopher who predicted that gender issues would be as unsettling in Israel as they have been in Muslim countries, “This is an immense ideological and moral challenge that touches at the core of life, and just as it is affecting the Islamic world, it is the main issue that the rabbis are losing sleep over.” And just this new summer, the New Republic suggested that Israel’s best hope against fundamentalism is a nascent coalition of secular and religious women. The American news media has overlooked internal Israeli issues since events in Eqypt, Iran and Syria are more spectacular–that is, dramatic, sensational and conflict-laden. But the rising role of the Israel’s religious right is an important domestic as well as international story. And its ramifications will echo beyond winners and losers in the El-ad election.

Today’s WP article on Jerusalem’s mayoral race, to be decided on October 22, strangely sidesteps many of the deep religious and cultural divisions in that city. While noting that the incumbent multi-millionaire Nir Barkat has a reputation as a secularist and the support of “middle-class, center-right Jerusalem Jews,” as contrasted with the challenger, Moshe Leon, who has the backing of ultra-nationalists and the ultra-orthodox Shas party, the WP boils the contest down to  politics that would be familiar in any city — cleanliness, progress, subsidies and scandal.

But it’s worth noting that the photo accompanying the article shows Barkat taking part in a ceremony celebrating a Jewish housing development in an annexed part of Arab East Jerusalem. This particular photo op represents the mayor’s ongoing efforts to win support from Jerusalem’s religious Zionist voters by backing their settlement agenda. Bartak’s support for this agenda has won him endorsements from several important Zionist rabbis. It’s anticipated that on election day, it will be the religious Zionists who decide the election. 

Leon is himself a religious Zionist and one of his most prominent backers is Aryeh Deri, Knesset member and leader of the Shas party. His greatest chance for victory depends on the haredim turning out for him.

And finally, while the article notes that nearly one-third of eligible voters — Jerusalem’s Arabs — will boycott the election as they traditionally have, their disposition is crucial to city’s future. Education, housing, and crime in Arab East Jerusalem are all important issues facing Jerusalem’s next mayor.

Despite the impression left by the WP, Jerusalem is not a city like any other. By downplaying the cultural and religious elements underlying politics there, readers miss a crucial part of the story.

During a recent trip to Nigeria, I traveled by road from Jos, a religiously mixed university town in the middle of the country, to Sokoto, seat of the 200-year-old Sufi caliphate that shapes the dominant Muslim culture in the country’s northwest. The most obvious indicator marking the transition into the nine-state region where both civil and criminal law conform to shari’a was the change in the wardrobe for the female models on the ubiquitous billboards advertising Ma Dish—a seasoning mix used in the spicy stews that anchor Nigerian cuisine. South of the city of Zaria, Ma wore a colorful head-tie typical of the Christian south. North of Zaria, she wore a hijab.

What didn’t change was the steady sprinkling of evangelical Christian churches along the road. Even when we reached Sokoto, where Christians compose a small minority of the population, outposts of the Assemblies of God and homegrown neo-Pentecostal movements were easy to spot.

While interreligious violence plagues other parts of Nigeria, relative comity between evangelicals and Muslims in contexts where shari’a governs daily life is not unique to Sokoto. In Indonesia, where a secular government is at least nominally committed to the ideals of the country’s pluralist constitution, minority Christians often support local shari’a-based ordinances that prescribe modest dress for women and that ban the sale of pornography and alcohol.

You could be forgiven for not knowing about these complexities if your main source of information about shari’a and non-Muslim minorities is the New York Times. This week, for example, the Times picked up an AP story (“Nigeria: Fashion Police Take on Cabbies”) that sensationalized the enforcement of a shari’a-based dress code. Other recent stories have traded on a largely unqualified association between shari’a and conflict in Indonesia, Egypt, Syria and Mali. Coverage in the last story is emblematic of the problem: While it’s true that the Tuareg rebels who briefly occupied Timbuktu favored a particularly brutal interpretation of shari’a, what’s missing from the piece is an acknowledgment that other interpretations of Islamic law are inseparable from the culture of a Muslim city long associated with tolerance and learning.

The Times, which did a good job of exposing the hysteria of the domestic anti-shari’a movement during the last presidential campaign, has a spottier record when it comes to reporting on Islamic law, conflict and pluralism abroad. Resources like Islawmix and explainers from scholarly experts (see posts from Haroon Moghul here and here) can help to clarify and nuance reporting around these issues. Readers of the Times may be surprised to read about Christians flourishing under shari’a in Nigeria, Indonesia and elsewhere—in any case, always leading with bleeding is misleading.

A middle-aged man, I was decidedly in the minority at an 11am weekday screening of “Gravity” at the Grove, one of the open-air consumerist Potemkin villages that began sprouting in Los Angeles and other Sunbelt cities just before the economic downturn in 2008. About a third of the audience was under the age of 1, and each of those diapered cinephiles was accompanied by at least one grownup female companion. The possibility of a cacophony of crying infants worried me a bit, but when a lesbian couple settled in next to me with all of their baby-on-board paraphernalia, I knew I was in the right place.

No spoilers. I’ll just say that Sandra Bullock can expect another Oscar nomination, and her character’s rapturously rendered rebirth at the end of the narrative was especially gratifying. The most interesting aspect of the film, from my perspective, was the tacit but pervasive reference to the overview effect, a shift in existential perspective that many spacefarers across the geopolitical spectrum have reported since Yuri Gagarin became the first person to orbit the Earth over half a century ago. Seeing our biome as a whole, suspended in the great void, produces an appreciation for its preciousness and makes much of the overheated drama of human society seem like so much petty squabbling.

And it is. I suspect the remarkable popular and critical success of “Gravity” has to do, at least in part, with the facsimile of the overview effect that the film imparts to an audience living in a country whose noisiest political actors seem hell-bent on hastening the End Times.  It’s worth noting that references to the Apocalypse punctuate much news coverage of the debt-ceiling crisis—in mainstream media like the New York Times and the Atlantic as well as staid Wall Street-oriented outlets like Businessweek and Bloomberg.

The Times is usually pretty good about publishing news analysis pieces that offer deeper and wider perspective on important events. But it has yet to examine the close relationship between Tea Party religiosity and the movement’s alarming alacrity for brinksmanship—a connection begging to be made, considering how easily talk of the apocalypse has slipped into reportage that is otherwise oblivious to the influence of religion on the events in question.

At its best, journalism offers a kind of overview effect to news consumers. The importance of that notion struck me as the credits rolled and several dozen young mothers softly murmured knowingly to one another while they tended to their sleeping babies. Safe, stable societies need journalistic institutions that are committed to illuminating the relationships—religious as well as monetary and political—that support the exercise of power. In its coverage of the debt crisis, the Times has followed the money and analyzed political machinations, but it has yet to see religion hiding in plain sight.

Today’s LATimes reports that American “officials” fear that “radical Islamists could take root in Syria.” Their concern has been piqued by the Al Nusra Front, a militant Islamic group allied with al-Qaida that seeks to replace the Assad government with an Islamic state.

Almost two weeks ago, the Jerusalem Post reported  a similar story. According to an Israeli think tank, “the Nusra Front presented a significant strategic threat” that would in two years secure a stronghold in Syria comparable to the one it took al-Qaida ten years to build in Afghanistan.

The Jerusalem Post says Al-Nusra Front is a Salafi group, the LA Times refers to it as “radical Islamicist group.” Are the differing formulations significant or is this a difference without distinction?

In a 2012 New York Times op-ed, Robin Wright, a longtime Middle Eastern correspondent, warned “Don’t Fear All Islamicists, Fear Salafis.” Wright noted Salafis, “ultraconservative Sunni” Muslims have made significant inroads since the Arab spring. Supporters of Islamic governance—not unlike Puritan colonists who looked to the Bible for political models—Salafis seek to establish societies that conform to shariah. In some countries, they’ve organized political parties; in others they lead military campaigns.

Like many religious purists, Salafis are opposed to most modern mores, including gender equality and GLBT rights. But they’re equally disinterested in human rights, democracy and personal liberty. Wright notes, “A common denominator among disparate Salafi groups is inspiration and support from Wahhabis, a puritanical strain of Sunni Islam from Saudi Arabia. Not all Saudis are Wahhabis. Not all Salafis are Wahhabis, either. But Wahhabis are basically all Salafis.”

Understanding the difference between Muslim traditions leads to awareness of the sociopolitical cleavages that are rending the Middle East. And knowing that the Saudi government has supported Salafis throughout the region makes a difference when thinking about geopolitics, diplomacy and American allies.