On the day Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak stepped down, CBS chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan was covering the jubilation in Tahrir Square when she was separated from her team in the crush of the mob. She was then sexually attacked and brutally beaten before being saved by a group of women and Egyptian police.

Although there have been numerous attacks on journalists covering the unrest in Egypt since January, the assault on Logan was particularly violent. According to some reports, she was whipped with poles, kicked, punched, and her clothes torn off while the attackers yelled “Jew, Jew” and called her an Israeli spy. Logan, by the way, is not Jewish.

Although the situation was quite different, it made me think of the story of Dinah, the daughter of Jacob and Leah, who was kidnapped and raped by Shechem, a prince and son of the local chieftain Hamor, as she went out to visit women in her city. According to the narrative, Shechem was in love with Dinah and after the attack, Hamor asked Jacob and his sons to allow the couple to marry. Jacob’s sons said this could only happen if all the men of the city underwent circumcisions. Hamor agreed and on the third day when the men were still “sore,” Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, carried a surprise attack, killing all of the males including Hamor and Shechem and plundering the city.

It’s a troubling story of male pride, deceit and brutal vengeance. But it’s also a very disturbing statement about the cruel treatment and undervaluing of women. Dinah does not speak a single word in the narrative. We never know her thoughts or what she wants, but Dinah’s silence has sparked much speculation over the generations about her feelings and her fate. She has been given a voice in various women’s commentaries, including “The Five Books of Miriam” by Ellen Frankel. And Dinah is also the subject of “The Red Tent,” a popular historical fiction by Anita Diamant.

Although we’ll never know for certain about the details of the rape, an explanatory note in the Etz Hayim Torah commentary says that these kinds of attacks on women were not uncommon then. And according to reports out of Egypt after the Lara Logan incident, sexual assaults are still not uncommon now either.

Both attacks are horrible enough, but to make matters even worse, there are some who blame both women for inviting the violence that they suffered. Some Torah commentators speculate that Dinah didn’t just go out to visit the women in the village. She wanted men to see her beauty, they believe.

“The Rabbis compare this to a person who goes in the marketplace holding a piece of meat in his hand, with a dog following him. Eventually the dog will succeed in grabbing the meat from the hand,” according to the Jewish Women Archive’s “Jewish Women: A Comprehensive Historical Encyclopedia.”

Lara Logan has come under the same criticism. In fact a number of news organizations have reported having to remove vulgar online comments blaming the attractive South African reporter for causing the attack herself.

The parallels between the attacks on Dinah and Lara Logan became even clearer to me when I read a very compelling article by Jane Arraf, a journalist who has covered Iraq and Middle East since 1991, mostly for CNN and Reuters. The article was posted on the NPR website on Feb. 18. The article caught my eye because Arraf and I had worked together as reporters for Reuters news service in New York City some years ago.

I had great admiration for her courage to seek an assignment in the Middle East. There had been a period of time when I fantasized about seeking a posting in Reuters’ Jerusalem bureau. In fact, I went as far as hiring a Hebrew tutor and traveling to Israel. But after blunt discussions with the Jerusalem bureau chief about the realities of working as a woman reporter in the Middle East, I realized I really just didn’t have the guts.

Arraf says in her piece that the “bravery” women journalists are given credit for when they cover violent parts of the world is not so much like bravery, but a job assignment. “It’s far braver I think to be open about a sexual assault,” she wrote. “In the West, having been raped is still a stigma. In the Middle East, it’s often a death sentence.”

She said that in the Middle East, women and girls who are raped are often blamed for it, thrown out of their house and are at risk for being killed by relatives to restore family honor.

Arraf, who currently reports from Iraq for the Christian Science Monitor and Al-Jazeera International, said that in Iraq, she mourns the passing sense of promise that existed even in the toughest times in the 1990s that women could have an equal place in society. Reports from the United Nations and other agencies about rising gender based violence say that 80 percent of women have been attacked. In fact, one of the main reasons girls drop out of school is because they have been hit by their teachers.

Dinah might not have had a voice, but her inclusion in the Torah ensures that women’s outrage over her treatment will live on. The outcry over Logan’s attack will most likely die down after awhile, but for now it is magnified -as Arraf points out – because viewers feel that they know television correspondents.

 “If there’s ever anything good to be salvaged from such a horrifying attack,” Arraf wrote, “it’s the awareness that women here are forced to suffer attacks in silence everyday.”

Dor to Dor

Gail Appleson is a writer for Armstrong Teasdale LLP and freelancer who lives in St. Louis.

“Dor to Dor,” is an intermittent Jewish Light series looking at various aspects of “grown-up” life and generational connections through the lens of Jewish writers living in the St. Louis area. If you are interested in contributing to Dor to Dor, please email [email protected].