“There Is Shame and Pride, It’s Not Neutral”: Community Division and Commonalities in Mediatised Public Crisis

Abstract

This paper examines how the Malka Leifer child sexual abuse crisis, mediatised across Australian mainstream, local and social media, impacted the Australian Jewish community. Guided by framing theory, this study uses mixed methods: a news framing analysis of ABC, The Age, the Herald Sun and the Australian Jewish News across four critical discourse moments, and “peer conversation” focus groups across Jewish denominations. Findings reveal that, despite news media’s intentions, coverage consistently adopted an “otherness” frame when reporting Jewish community issues. Such simplified and limited approaches to news framing contrast with the multi-faceted nature of the ethnoreligious Jewish identity, exacerbating vulnerability in a community already navigating the legacies of the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, and triggering responses ranging from engagement to unjustified notions of shame. The article argues that more reflexive reporting practices are needed to recognise the community’s multidimensional identities and mitigate harm in future public crises.

1. Introduction

I don’t align with that community [Adass] at all. But I don’t know, you still feel connected? Because obviously we’re all Jewish at the end of the day.

(BM, FG1, 2022)

This paper critically analyses the impact of mediatised public crisis events on marginalised communities who are the secondary subjects of news media’s coverage during these media moments. Using a case study of institutional child sexual abuse (CSA), this paper analyses how the Malka Leifer case’s mediatisation created disruptions in the social fabric of Melbourne’s Jewish community. Over approximately the last decade, revelations of institutional CSA have been increasing within ultra-Orthodox Jewish institutions (Epstein and Crisp, 2018; Katzenstein & Fontes, 2017; Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022; Mendes et al., 2019, Mendes et al., 2020; Mendes & Pinskier, 2021; Nadan et al., 2019), as they have in other religious institutions (Donnelly & Inglis, 2010; Powell & Scanlon, 2015; RCIRCSA, 2016; Waller et al., 2020). In the Australian context, the Australian Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse (RCIRCSA) ran from 2013 to 2017. Case Study 22 of the RCIRCSA examined the responses of ultra-Orthodox leaderships across Jewish institutions, specifically Yeshivah College Melbourne and Yeshiva Bondi, to CSA revelations.

Concurrently with Case Study 22 of the RCIRCSA, an equally significant case of CSA was also unfolding in Melbourne involving another ultra-Orthodox Jewish institution, the Adass Israel School. The Malka Leifer case spanned 15 years and gained notoriety through Australian and international news media’s reportage. Through the case’s mediatisation, this paper approaches framing as a ritualised process through which repeated media narratives shape community understanding, moral boundaries and collective action during public crisis. Leifer was principal of the Adass Israel School, an ultra-Orthodox Jewish girls’ school in Elsternwick, Melbourne. Dassi Erlich, Elly Sapper and Nicole Meyer, are three sisters who were abused by Leifer and spearheaded the #BringLeiferback campaign through traditional and new media to extradite Leifer back to Australia from Israel (Erlich, 2024). Finally, in August 2023, Leifer was found guilty of 18 of 29 charges of child sexual abuse and sentenced to 15 years in prison. This research argues that the impacts of the crisis extended beyond the case’s legal closure and also to Melbourne’s wider Jewish community, largely due to the dedicated coverage from both Australian mainstream and local community media.

The Australian Royal Commission found that Jewish law, Halacha, influenced how ultra-Orthodox Jewish leadership historically responded to revelations of abuse in their communities (RCIRCSA, 2016, p. 9). The RCIRCSA revealed how extreme interpretations of Halachic laws “caused significant concern, controversy and confusion amongst the members of the Chabad-Lubavitch communities” (RCIRCSA, 2016, p. 17).

Recent scholarly work has utilised the Leifer case study to examine Jewish community-based discourse and existing knowledge of institutional CSA (Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022; Mendes et al., 2019, Mendes et al., 2020; Mendes & Pinskier, 2021; Mendes et al., 2024; Nadan et al., 2019). Judaism is the world’s largest ethnoreligion and, therefore, the Australian Jewish community’s membership is one of far-reaching diversity. The Australian Jewish community make up 0.4% of the country’s population, and Victoria is the most populous state or territory, home to roughly 46% percent of the Australian Jewry (Graham & Markus, 2018, p. 9; Victorian Government, n.d.). Community denominations are generally categorised by religious markers, such as one’s affiliation with a synagogue congregation (Epstein & Crisp, 2018, p. 524; Mendes & Pinskier, 2021, pp. 3–4). Scholars have argued that religious and nationalist markers for categorising the diasporic Jewish identity do not necessarily encapsulate the diversity of the diasporic Jewish identity, although this research is largely limited to the American Jewry (Pianko, 2010; Magid, 2019; Cornthwaite, 2017), a research gap this paper seeks to address.

Through a mixed-method qualitative framing analysis (D’Angelo, 2019; Van Gorp, 2010) of news reportage and community discussions, this paper identifies how the Leifer case’s mediatisation impacted community formation within Melbourne’s wider Jewish community, when their culture is centred through news media’s reportage of the case. Framing is approached not only as an analytic tool, but as a ritualised mediatised process through which the repetition of moral narratives and the visual portrayal of religious markers shape community identity during crisis. The research analyses The Age, Herald Sun, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Australian Jewish News’s (AJN) reportage of the Leifer case across four critical discourse moments (Carvalho, 2008), building on scholarly research that examined Australian mainstream press’s coverage of the Leifer case through a policy lens (Mendes et al., 2024). This analysis provides insights into how Australian mainstream media and local religious community media reported on the Leifer case. The framing analysis of 101 news articles then informs the paper’s main methodology, eight “peer conversation” style focus group discussions with members of Melbourne’s Jewish community (W. Gamson, 1992). Ultimately, earlier work produced as part of this research project revealed that the symbolism of Erlich, Sapper and Meyer, the three sisters, was a central force in the narrative progression of the case through news media’s framing, and how the research participants constructed knowledge of the scandal (see Chatskin, 2024).

This paper explores the wider impacts of the Leifer case’s mediatisation. Despite the emotive pull of the sisters’ story (Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020), the mediatisation of a crisis of abuse within a marginalised community can operate ritualistically, reinforcing symbolic boundaries and intensifying internal community divisions when a group’s culture is centred through news media’s reportage. This paper engages with Couldry (Couldry & Rothenbuhler, 2007; Couldry, 2012) and Cottle’s (2004, 2006, 2008) media studies debate through a social constructionist perspective, to consider the power of media representations on marginalised and diasporic communities. This research seeks to centre voices who have had minimal representation in scholarly research in media studies (Katzenstein & Fontes, 2017; Pianko, 2010; Baddiel, 2021). While Jewish news audiences primarily remembered the sisters’ voices when making sense of the Leifer case, research participants also described a shared experience of shame and widening internal community division resulting from the crisis’s mediatisation.

2. Literature Review

2.1. Crisis of Child Sexual Abuse in the Jewish Community

This paper is informed by research conducted for the Breaking Silences (DP190101282) project (McCallum & Waller, 2021; McCallum et al., 2022; Waller et al., 2020; McCallum et al., 2023), that analysed the media’s reportage of the Australian RCIRCSA. A small yet growing body of research has begun examining the Jewish community’s responses to revelations of CSA in their community. Research by Mendes and colleagues (Mendes et al., 2019; Mendes et al., 2020; Mendes & Pinskier, 2021; Mendes et al., 2024) used both Case Study 22 of the RCIRCSA and the Leifer case to analyse how child safety policies and practices can be improved in Australian Jewish ultra-Orthodox communities. Their work emphasises the “limited literature on Jewish child sexual abuse” (Mendes et al., 2019, p. 12) and the necessity for research that focusses on improved language and processes that work to bolster rather than undermine their core cultural values” (Mendes et al., 2024, p. 16). The Leifer case has also been used as a case study in research conducted by Lusky-Weisrose and colleagues (2022) in Israel, which conducted a thematic analysis of reader comments on Israeli news websites to understand public perceptions of institutional CSA. Their research found “the public focus on gendered and cultural stereotypes and other myths about sexual abuse has blurred the essential discourse about the phenomenon” (Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022, p. 173). This paper examines whether Australian news media’s reportage of the Leifer case similarly reinforced these stereotypes, or whether it instead highlighted the diversity of responses in the ultra-Orthodox and wider Jewish community. Moreover, the voices of ordinary Jewish community members are largely absent from scholarly work that examines Jewish institutional child sexual abuse, a gap this research addresses.

The paper is informed by a review of the existing literature on the media reportage of child sexual abuse. Kitzinger (2004) is foundational to the study of media reportage of child sexual abuse, and her findings emphasise the lasting impressions created through the framing of news, particularly in close-knit communities (Kitzinger, 2004, p. 101). Against the backdrop of public commissions of inquiry, the literature largely frames CSA as an individualised problem within news media and audience discourse, often privileging narratives of responsibility and blame over systemic and institutional failures (Weatherred, 2015, p. 23; Miller et al., 2014, p. 62; Goc, 2009; Davidson, 2008).

2.2. Diasporic Jewish Identity and Media

To understand the impact of the Leifer case’s mediatisation on its secondary subjects, it is important to note the Jewish community’s relationship with news media. This paper draws on the literature that considers how typically interior-driven Jewish principles continue to shape diasporic Jewish people’s relationship with the media (Golan, 2013, 2021), especially during public crisis events that centre on their culture and community. The emerging revelations of CSA cases in the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community have been in historical tension with Halachic principles and were discussed earlier in this paper’s introduction (Y. Cohen, 2014, p. 862; RCIRCSA, 2016, p. 9). However, there are also Halachic principles that prioritise accuracy and truth-telling, recognising one has a responsibility to report on any societal dangers, which ultimately overrides extreme interpretations of loshon horo (Y. Cohen, 2014, p. 862; 2018, p. 152). In addition, the advocacy work of victim–survivors of CSA has consequently improved knowledge and approaches to institutional CSA (Y. Cohen, 2018, p. 156). Nevertheless, existing scholarship points to an enduring tension in how more religiously conservative members of the Jewish community respond to revelations of CSA (Chatskin, 2024, pp. 13–14), with implications for cohesion across the wider community.

Scholarly work examining the diasporic Jewish community’s relationship to media consistently emphasises the significance of this community’s connection to Israel. As noted by Cohen, the relationship between diasporic Jews and Israel is a “lop-sided” one, in being Israel-centred. Existing research has demonstrated that public crises extending across national contexts can place particular strain on communities negotiating mediatised events (Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022, p. 169). These dynamics provide important insight into how transnational dimensions of crisis shape localised knowledge formation within diasporic communities.

2.3. Mediatised Public Crisis Events and Media Rituals

This research adopts a social constructionist approach (P. Berger & Luckmann, 1966) and draws on Couldry (Couldry & Rothenbuhler, 2007; Couldry, 2012) and Cottle’s (2004, 2006, 2008) debate on media power, to develop understandings of how mediatised public crisis events impact on marginalised communities. Earlier work from this research project (Chatskin, 2024) demonstrates the Leifer case’s mediatisation did reconstruct existing knowledge and approaches to CSA through the sisters’ advocacy and journalists’ sustained sourcing practices when privileging their voices, therefore reflecting Cottle’s (2004, 2006) theorisation of ritual. This paper expands on this case study and examines the multi-faceted complexities that come with mediatising Jewish community-related public crisis events—even when the community is itself in agreement that news media’s dedicated coverage is justified.

The research also considers scholarship on the mediatisation of religion (Lundby, 2018; Hjarvard, 2012, 2013; Abdel-Fadil, 2018; Liebmann, 2018; Lövheim & Hjarvard, 2019) and how the relationship between media and religious institutions is shifting, with media having the ability to “influence and change religion on multiple levels” (Hjarvard, 2013, p. 80). Abdel-Fadil argues that “religion itself is a trigger theme … This raises the emotional stakes in conflict, and renders its enactment important at both the personal and symbolic level” (Abdel-Fadil, 2018, p. 112).

In addition, Baddiel (2021, p. 35) considers shame as an emotion synonymous with the Jewish experience. Within scholarship on affect and mediatised crisis, shame has been understood as a unifying, yet often unjustified, response (Tangney & Dearing, 2002, p. 20). McPhillips (2017, p. 143) argues that shame “closes down narrative and enacts censorship,” highlighting its capacity to suppress discourse and intensify internal divisions within communities subject to public scrutiny. Such dynamics can shape both news media’s framing and community understanding of public crisis. Drawing on affect theory, Ahmed conceptualises shame as a relational and social emotion, where “shame becomes felt as a matter of being—of the relation of self to itself—insofar as shame is about appearance, about how the subject appears before and to others” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 123). Ahmed’s work highlights that shame is not merely an internal and individualised emotion, but a communicative process that circulates through discourse and mediated representation. This perspective is particularly relevant for examining shame within hybrid media environments, where moral narratives are intensified and widely circulated (Chadwick, 2017).

2.4. Media Categorisations and Representations

Scholarship on media power demonstrates that power relations in media practice are exercised through processes of classification and representation that hold lasting influence. Couldry (2012, p. 124) argues that what makes interrelated notions of power so resistant to change is that the social world is partially built upon classifications. In addition, these classifications are further reinforced through news media through sourcing practices that “are involved in the definition of ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’ in social discourse” (Couldry, 2012, p. 184). Media classifications and representations are ultimately foundational in shaping how audiences comprehend mediatised public crisis events. Further, Cottle recognises that the true power of media as ritual “depends on the willing involvement of participants … it only ‘works’ when we want it to, that is, when we volunteer something of ours” (Cottle, 2004, p. 45). Existing research on mediatised crisis has demonstrated how, in exceptional circumstances, emotional charge can be sustained and mobilised to inspire collective action, such as through centring perspectives of victim–survivors (Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022, p. 170; Chatskin, 2024; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020). This highlights how media rituals operate through classifications, representations and narrative processes, shaping localised knowledge and community formation during public crises.

3. Materials and Methods

3.1. Framing Theory and Culture

A social constructionist epistemological position and a mixed-method “text and talk” research approach grounded in framing theory (P. Berger & Luckmann, 1966; W. Gamson, 1992; W. A. Gamson & Modigliani, 1989; Entman, 1993; D’Angelo, 2002; Van Gorp, 2007, 2010) was adopted as a lens for analysing this mediatised public crisis and its impact on the Australian Jewish community. Framing theory is both a “useful theoretical and methodological tool” (McCallum & Holland, 2018, p. 415) to analyse how Australian media and Jewish community members themselves framed the Leifer case. A constructionist approach to framing recognises that knowledge is formed through interrelated processes (D’Angelo, 2002). Therefore, Jewish Australian audiences understood the Leifer CSA crisis through how Australian mainstream and local religious media framed the case, in conjunction with their own localised knowledge surrounding the innate fear of prejudice and of themselves as an Other (Peters, 1999, p. 74; P. Berger & Luckmann, 1966, p. 90; Seltzer, 2013, p. 223).

Van Gorp (2007) theorises that there is an intrinsic relationship between framing and culture, and that cultural frames are omnipresent and therefore hold deeper resonances (p. 63). A constructionist perspective recognises that both journalists and news audiences purposefully and autonomously select frames (Kitzinger, 2000, p. 12) and exist as heterogenous agents in the media arena (Van Gorp, 2007, p. 63). The qualitative media framing analysis is, therefore, designed to identify which cultural themes are drawn on through the news coverage, how they are framed, and then the impact of these news frames on audiences—specifically, Melbourne’s Jewish community. In doing so, frames were analysed as ritualised mediatised patterns, identified through the repetition of moral narratives and the visual portrayal of religious markers across news texts. By adopting an inductive “text and talk” methodological approach modelled from W. Gamson’s (1992) “peer conversation” style of focus group discussions, the media analysis then informs the interviews with Melbourne Jewish community members. The discussions reveal how truly “implicit” these cultural frames are to minority communities whose culture is profiled in ritualised and subsequently mediatised moments.

3.2. Media Analysis Methodology

As part of the mixed methods research design, a preliminary qualitative news framing analysis was conducted of Australian mainstream and local religious community media’s reportage of the Leifer case. I used the Factiva Database and entered the search terms “Malka Leifer”, “child sex/ual abuse” and “Adass Israel school” and sourced reportage from The Age, Herald Sun and Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC). A broad preliminary search noted the volume of attention given to the Leifer case across the database by these mainstream media outlets. The Australian Jewish News (AJN) is not on Factiva; however, given the case’s significance to the Australian Jewish community, the local outlet has a dedicated “Bring Leifer Back” subpage on its website (Australian Jewish News, n.d.), making it an easy process to analyse the data.

Due to the Leifer case’s extended duration across 15 years, four critical discourse moments were selected to narrow down the dataset (Carvalho, 2008). These critical discourse moments are pivotal media moments within this public crisis that expedited judicial processes.

• February to July 2016: Leifer ruled mentally unfit for stand trial for extradition, halting extradition proceedings (17 articles).
  The 2016 period was the first time victim–survivors began giving “opinions to the media when we felt able, commenting anonymously” (Erlich, 2024, p. 252), and highlights the importance of amplifying victim–survivor voices.
• February to March 2018: Private investigation, Leifer’s rearrest and the Rabbi Grossman affair (30 articles).
  This reportage period illustrates the prevalence of community support in the sisters’ fight for justice, and how collective action was enacted to propel judicial processes forward (Cottle, 2004).
• May to September 2020: Leifer ruled mentally fit to stand trial and extradition order given (32 articles).
  The 2020 period captures the climax of the dozens of hearings in Israel which marked the end of the “torturous process” (ABC, 2020) towards Leifer’s extradition, so that the judicial process in Australia could begin.
• January 2021: Leifer lands in Australia following successful extradition (22 articles).
  This critical discourse moment signifies the end of the Bring Leifer Back campaign, which involved the efforts of the sisters, media publications, community members, victim–survivor advocates and political elites to assist in Leifer’s extradition. Leifer’s arrival back to Australia adds a finality to the analysis of the media’s reportage of the case.

A total of 101 news articles were sourced and included editorials, feature articles, op-eds and letters to the editor (see

Table 1. Media analysis sample size by publication and reportage period.

Reportage Period	The Age	Herald Sun	ABC	AJN	Total per Reportage Period
February to July 2016	3	4	4	6	17
February to March 2018	9	4	9	8	30
May to September 2020	4	15	4	9	32
January 2021	8	8	3	3	22
Total per publication	24	31	20	26	101

). The media items were analysed through an inductive framing analysis. After collating the news articles, the articles were read again in concert with the scholarly literature cited above to note the media’s cultural representations (Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022; Mendes & Pinskier, 2021; Mendes et al., 2024; Kitzinger, 2000, 2004; Miller et al., 2014; Van Gorp, 2007). I considered key language and imagery choices and how they could impact Jewish Australian readerships, informed by the research’s social constructionist epistemology. Scrutiny was given to which schemata “remain on the top of the mental bin” (D’Angelo, 2002, p. 875), and initial themes were identified through journalists’ framing and sourcing practices. These framing devices were then grouped thematically, considering the broader unifying elements within these coding signifiers.

Table 2. 5 News frames and 15 coding schema.

News Frame	Coding Schema 1	Coding Schema 2	Coding Schema 3
Privileging victim–survivor voice	survivor–advocate voice	victim–survivor voice	emotive language
Conniving perpetrator	manipulative/all-powerful	differing norms/religious garb	bad mother
Orthodox otherness	evasion of justice/moral panic	secretive/insular	differing sociocultural norms
Foreign tensions	diplomatic tension	criticism	assertive language
Collective Jewish strength	collective action	diversity	unity/cohesion

demonstrates the five news frames and 15 framing devices that were identified through the inductive news framing analysis and how Australian mainstream and local religious media proliferated the Leifer case into the public sphere. Previous work published from this research (Chatskin, 2024) analysed the “Privileging victim–survivor voice” frame. This paper focuses on the “Conniving perpetrator” and “Orthodox otherness” news frames, as these frames were central in fuelling the internal community division in this mediatised public crisis. The remaining news frames, while theoretically relevant, are not examined in this paper in order to maintain analytical focus and depth.

3.3. Focus Group Methodology

This paper’s central methodological approach is informed by W. Gamson’s (1992) “peer conversation”-style discussions and Kitzinger’s (1995) natural groups. Participants were recruited for the study via the snowballing technique (Bryman, 2016, p. 424; Scott, 2014) and, although some seemed apprehensive when initially approached, after hearing the research’s aims, they were eager to participate. Eight focus group discussions emerged from the research, involving 26 people. Discussions included a total of 14 women and 12 men, with participant ages ranging from their mid-20s to mid-80s (see

Table 3. Focus group demographics.

Focus Group	No. of Participants	Age Group	Gender	Community Sect	Peer Dynamic
Focus Group 1 (FG1)	6 IA, HS, NW, BM, OG, DB	Mid-20s	3 W 3 M	Modern-Orthodox, Traditional, Cultural	Friends
Focus Group 2 (FG2)	4 MA, KA, BR, HS	50–65	2 W 2 M	Traditional	Family/Siblings and partners
Focus Group 3 (FG3)	2 AA, LI	Mid-20s	2 M	Chabad/Orthodox	Friends
Focus Group 4 (FG4)	4 QE, BJ, MG, WC	1 M: 30s 3 W: 50–70s	3 W 1 M	Traditional, Secular, Modern-Orthodox/Mizrachi	Colleagues/ Volunteers at a Jewish organisation
Focus Group 5 (FG5)	5 MF, RG, CG, BL, PL	50–65	2 W 3 M	Modern-Orthodox, Traditional	Friends/ Same synagogue congregation
Focus Group 6 (FG6)	3 GN, BN, RN	Mid-20s–50s	3 W	Traditional and Secular	Family/ Mother, 2× daughters
Focus Group 7 (FG7)	2 FL, BD	70–mid-80s	1 W 1 M	Traditional	Friends/ Same synagogue congregation
Focus Group 8 (FG8)	2 RK, AF	4–50s?	2 W	Chabad/Orthodox	Friends
Totals	26 people		14 W 12 M		5× friends 2× family 1× colleagues/volunteers

). While some participants I made contact with were themselves very keen to participate in the study, they struggled to find peers to participate in the discussion with them. This is particularly true for more religiously conservative community members and highlights why some discussions only featured two participants.

These interviews with Melbourne’s Jewish community also point to the value of this research: such data are not easy to come by and, hence, add to the significance of the contribution of the research. The dataset includes participants from a range of community denominations, in efforts to capture the diversity of this ethnoreligious community.

Focus groups were structured as a semi-free-flowing discussion which lasted between approximately 60 and 90 min, guided by 12 main prompts with several sub questions per point. Otter AI was used to transcribe the interviews, before I manually refined the interview transcripts.

The approach to focus group interviewing was inductive, using participants’ insights to further crystalise the themes and news frames identified in the media analysis. The media analysis findings enabled me to validate insights that participants shared, and to examine whether the frames that dominated news reportage are the same ones that have solidified themselves within the community’s psyche through the themes that emerged in the discussions.

Towards the conclusion of each of the discussions, I presented participants with sample articles to further synthesise the frames identified through the research. This enabled a semi-structured discussion which became more structured as the discussions went on. The sample articles enabled me to test my coding of the news frames identified in the media analysis, through examining whether participants similarly identified these frames in their discussion. Based on the main themes explored in the discussion, I could determine which sample articles were presented to the respective groups. Time permitting, participants were presented with three sample articles to read and discuss together.

The discussions were mostly held around community members’ dining room tables, a space typically surrounded by Judaica and where issues related to the community are often deliberated, over Jewish holiday meals such as Friday night dinners welcoming the Sabbath (Y. Cohen, 2012, p. 180). In this way, this research replicates how the community organically negotiate times of mediatised crises that affect them.

Participants were asked how they first heard about the Leifer case and who they feel are the main voices that tell the story, what news sources they engage with, and whether they read the AJN, and were asked to reflect on their feelings about the prevalence of antisemitism in the Australian media landscape.

I identified how the news frames through which Australian mainstream and local religious media told the Leifer story intersect with the community frames adopted by participants when constructing meaning of the Leifer case. These news frames and community frames are considered as two interrelated notions that contribute to the construction of reality in times of crisis (P. Berger & Luckmann, 1966; Hall, 1980).

3.4. Reflexivity

When analysing a sensitive subject matter such as the Leifer case and its impact on Melbourne’s Jewish community, it is essential to consider reflexivity. Scholarly literature stresses the importance for qualitative researchers to openly articulate the contextual, intersecting relationships between the participants and themselves, as this not only enhances the credibility of findings (R. Berger, 2015) but also deepens understanding of how this knowledge is produced (Dodgson, 2019, p. 220).

Often, scholarly discussion of reflexivity centres around “researching as an outsider” (Dodgson, 2019, p. 221) and notions of power. My positionality in this research is significant in that, while power dynamics are inherent in the researcher–participant relationship, the epistemological position is driven by researching a marginalised group of which I am a member, rather than one to which I am an outsider.

By recruiting participants via the snowballing technique through word of mouth (Scott, 2014) after social media recruitment was unsuccessful, a level of trust was established between myself and the participants during the initial point of contact. In addition, “peer conversation”-style (W. Gamson, 1992) discussions sought to foster comfort and emotional safety, further supported by facilitating discussions in community members’ dining rooms, a physical space already familiar to most participants. The presence of Judaica in these settings provides further familiarity and ease during discussions of a sensitive nature.

The data were deidentified and participants were given pseudonyms. Participants were provided with a Support Services Referral Sheet at the beginning of the discussion when signing consent forms, and were advised they could withdraw from the study at any point in time.

The research takes a grounded inductive approach to constructing knowledge, to ensure that any potential biases are mitigated. This research project includes voices of an often under-researched minority group, where representations and insights are considered through my positionality and common stock of knowledge. Bryman asserts, “reflexivity entails a sensitivity to the researcher’s cultural, political, and social context. As such, ‘knowledge’ from a reflexive position is always a reflection of a researcher’s location in time and social space” (Bryman, 2016, p. 393). Noting the social constructionist positioning of this research, reflexivity is thus incorporated into the research design and execution.

4. Results and Discussion

4.1. Media Analysis

The “Conniving [nature of the] perpetrator” and “Orthodox otherness” frames are the focus of this paper and were utilised by Australian news media as central frames to mediatise this crisis of abuse.

4.1.1. “Conniving Perpetrator” News Frame

“Conniving perpetrator” framed Leifer as manipulating the justice system through defying sociocultural norms, and did so through the bad mother trope (Goc, 2009). Leifer’s distinct religious garb marked out a perpetrator with clearly differing sociocultural norms for general news audiences. An example of this news frame was seen through the Herald Sun. This was the only outlet that continuously depicted Leifer as a “mother of eight” “hiding in Israel”, across half of its reportage during the first critical discourse moment (Deery, 2016, p. 9). Furthermore, the Herald Sun was the only publication to reinforce Leifer as a mother of eight even in its 2021 reportage, as if to emphasise that her number of offspring had some causal link to her abhorrent actions as a CSA perpetrator (Drill, 2021a, 2021b). This finding reflects existing research on the popularity of the bad mother trope when Australian journalists frame crises (Goc, 2009), further exacerbated through sensationalist reportage (Davidson, 2008). Her unassailable nature was depicted through the Herald Sun’s reportage that “she was dragged screaming” and “she visibly shook and clawed at her face” (Whinnett & Auerbach, 2018)—therefore, the opposite of maternal behaviour. These framing devices also worked to widen the ethical discrepancies between victim–survivors and perpetrator (Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022; Weatherred, 2015). The vilification of Leifer through news reportage, where the perpetrator was framed as manipulative and emotionally unstable, showcases how moral boundaries are constructed around acceptable femininity and religious behaviour.

4.1.2. “Orthodox Otherness” News Frame and the Ambiguity of Jewish Identity

The “Orthodox otherness” news frame presents some of the greatest complexity for news makers and users. While it may seem implicit that news media would shape understanding of this crisis by providing context on the perpetrator’s insular community and the institution where the abuse occurred, this news frame has the potential to perpetrate ambiguity about the Australian Jewish identity. The many denominations within Judaism and even ultra-Orthodox Judaism, which themselves prioritise interiority (Y. Cohen, 2012; Golan, 2013, 2021; Nadan et al., 2019), ensure that it is even more difficult for those with little knowledge of Judaism to report and engage with crises affecting the Jewish community. Australian mainstream media apportioned blame on the Adass Israel community’s leadership yet also cast a collective responsibility on the wider Adass community and even other Orthodox Jewish sects (Miller et al., 2014). In addition, the intrinsic relationship between culture and framing is evident when mediating knowledge of the case (Van Gorp, 2007).

In total, 100% of articles published by The Age in 2016 reported that Leifer fled Australia to Israel in the middle of the night with assistance from members of her community; for example, her escape was “allegedly with the help of senior members of Melbourne’s secretive Adass community” (Shuttleworth, 2016). In later reportage, the ABC emphasised that “it was unusual for members of the Jewish community to speak up about sexual abuse” (ABC, 2018). By the public broadcaster collectively referring to “the Jewish community”, this cast an even wider net over Melbourne’s Jewish community as implicated by the coverage, although the piece primarily reported on the Orthodox Jewish community. Like The Age, the public broadcaster sought to allude to a deeper issue, one which focused on the embedded nature of CSA, through emphasising the interiority of Leifer’s community when reporting on her rearrest.

In addition, during the 2020 period, the Herald Sun was the only publication that reported on the ultra-Orthodox community finding a “loophole” in Victoria’s COVID-19 lockdown restrictions. The article, “Support group incites anger over meetings” (Atkinson, 2020, p. 7), published that “an ultra-Orthodox Jewish group has been accused of exploiting a loophole in lockdown laws to run clandestine religious ceremonies in Ripponlea and St Kilda East”. It is significant that this publication not only reported on the community’s manoeuvring of lockdown laws but made a causal link between this sect’s violation of lockdown and “the Adass Israel group that helped accused paedophile principal Malka Leifer flee Australia” (Atkinson, 2020, p. 7). This denotes how the Herald Sun framed the disparity between this community’s ethical codes and the wider Victorian population. Furthermore, by linking it to the Leifer case, the publication inferred how ethical codes were again breached by this insular group (Cottle, 2004, p. 51).

The findings also reveal an ambiguity regarding who qualifies as part of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. The Herald Sun reported on “the Adass Israel School, which is based around a community of 500 ultra-Orthodox families in Melbourne” (Drill, 2021b). Yet, only two days later, The Age reported that this community was made up of 150 families (Estcourt et al., 2021). This denotes the disparity in perception of who qualifies as part of this “othered” community by Australian mainstream media, fuelling potentially inaccurate cultural stocks of knowledge about the ultra-Orthodox—and even broader—Jewish Australian community (P. Berger & Luckmann, 1966; W. Gamson, 1992; Van Gorp, 2007). This difficulty in defining the Adass community demonstrates that, although mainstream media attempt to delineate “insiders” and “outsiders” in social discourse (Couldry, 2012, p. 184), insular and diverse ethnoreligious minority communities remain inaccurately represented.

4.1.3. Local Religious Media—The Australian Jewish News

The “Orthodox otherness” news frame was entirely absent from the Australian Jewish News’s reportage. Instead, the AJN’s coverage centred on the “Conniving perpetrator” news frame to construct knowledge of the scandal, especially during later critical discourse moments. This reflects how the AJN stressed that it was Leifer, and her lawyers, who were to be blamed for the extended delays, not the wider ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. However, the omission of this news frame also risks continuing to construct knowledge of institutional CSA as an individual issue, rather than as an institutional one (Weatherred, 2015, p. 23; McCallum & Waller, 2021; Waller et al., 2020).

4.2. Community Knowledge

This section of the paper examines how members of the diasporic Jewish community constructed knowledge of this mediatised public crisis, centring the voices of participants. This paper focuses on “Orthodox otherness” as a key frame that shaped localised understanding among members of Melbourne’s Jewish community in relation to the Leifer case. These participants’ insights reveal how the framing adopted by news media was absorbed and negotiated within the community’s common stock of knowledge when making sense of the crisis of abuse in their community (P. Berger & Luckmann, 1966).

4.2.1. Internalisation of “Orthodox Otherness”

Local talk (McCallum, 2010, p. 159) revealed the enormous power of media representations which consequently furthered the divide between the Australian Jewish community and Orthodox Jewish sects who hold greater values of interiority. The media analysis identified the “Conniving [nature of the] perpetrator” and “Orthodox otherness” as central to how Australian legacy outlets framed the Leifer crisis, through emphasising the perpetrator and her wider community’s differing social norms as key framing devices.

This is significant, as Melbourne’s Jewish community—particularly its more religiously progressive members—themselves used this otherness framing when discussing the Leifer scandal in focus groups. Many participants in this study discursively distanced themselves from Malka Leifer’s Adass community, and felt that it was important to emphasise this delineation in discussions with their peers. This is exemplified by MA, who shared, “when I talk about it [the Leifer case] to non-Jewish people, I’m very quick to always point out that Adass does not represent me and I am not part of Adass” (MA, FG2, 2022). Embarrassment and shame were common concerns voiced by focus group participants, in fear that the wider general population would associate the broader Jewish community with the Adass leadership’s members who aided Leifer to flee. Participant MG noted the most pertinent memories of the mediatised case as follows:

Just the general awful pictures of her wearing that dreadful head hair thing. That’s the most embarrassing thing of the whole lot … apart from the poor kids, but oh my god.

(MG, FG4, 2022)

By considering the head covering as “the most embarrassing thing”, a relationship is drawn between, on the one hand, ultra-Orthodox communities and how they are viewed by the wider Jewish community, and on the other hand, the fear that the general public associates this community as closely affiliated with secular Jews despite this garb being unique to the Adass community.

When participant BJ was introducing herself at the beginning of the focus group discussion, she shared that she “became Dati [religious] but I wear pants and I’m pretty normal” (BJ, FG4, 2022). Almost immediately after BJ shared with the group that she is religiously observant, she felt a need to assure her fellow participants that she is “normal”, despite being surrounded by Jewish peers. This choice of phrasing again demonstrates how the ultra-Orthodox community is seen through an otherness lens even by other religiously observant Jewish community members. Participants of the study needed to clearly demonstrate a distinction between themselves and the Adass sect of their community, due to similarly observing Halacha. This highlights how public narratives that were central to legacy media’s framing were absorbed and negotiated within the wider Jewish community and their common stock of knowledge.

Engaging with ultra-Orthodox members of the community demonstrated how these members view this divide within the community. The discussion extended to Melbourne’s strict lockdown laws during COVID-19 and the restrictions that were broken by some ultra-Orthodox community members, as reported by the Herald Sun (Atkinson, 2020, p. 7) and discussed earlier in this paper. Sharing anecdotal evidence, ultra-Orthodox participant LI noted the following:

Someone put out a voice note that went viral, or at least in my WhatsApp circles. He’s friends with the police Chief Commissioner of St. Kilda, saying he’s [Chief Commissioner] never seen a community turn on itself the way the Jewish community has over COVID … We’re going to be the good Jews, who tell on the bad Jews… that impulse to be the good Jews telling on the bad Jews.

(LI, FG3, 2022)

LI’s assertions are noteworthy as they reveal how the recent pandemic contributed to a further community schism, with community members feeling the need to define themselves as “good Jews” or “bad Jews”. Significant also is how LI, as an ultra-Orthodox man, felt the wider community “turn[ed] on itself” and its more religious members, in a way unique to this community. These insights highlight the internal community division that risks coming to the fore for Jewish Australians during mediatised public crises where they are the secondary subjects.

Earlier research (Chatskin, 2024) has argued that knowledge of the selected mediatised public crisis event was primarily formed through the symbolism of the three sisters, through the “Privileging victim–survivor voice” frame. This paper focusses on news media’s adoption of the “Conniving [nature of the] perpetrator” and “Orthodox otherness” frames, and how this framing also influenced the Melbourne Jewish community’s knowledge construction of the Leifer crisis. These news frames were especially utilised by Australian mainstream press, exacerbated pre-existing Jewish community division and solidified the shame felt by community members, as two themes borne from this mediatised public crisis event.

4.2.2. Mediatised Shame and Internal Community Division

When considering the notion of shame with regard to child sexual abuse in the Jewish community, it is logical to assume that Jews’ pre-existing knowledge of this emotion (Baddiel, 2021, p. 35)—however unjustified—only deepens in times of crisis. When asked how seeing the Leifer case in the news makes them feel, one participant commented “I’m deeply embarrassed by the Leifer case, every time it comes into the mainstream newspaper.” (KA, FG2, 2022).

While KA recognised that this embarrassment peaked when she saw it in the mainstream press, she did not directly blame the media for triggering these feelings. Instead, she blames

… how long it’s taken for this whole thing to come to a legal outcome … She [Leifer] hides in the observant community … it is manipulation and abuse of the observant insular group that she’s part of. I find that objectionable and embarrassing and I don’t think it’s the press that does that. I think it’s the story and I’m very uncomfortable with it.

(KA, FG2, 2022)

At the time these interviews were conducted, Leifer was in prison in Melbourne post-extradition, but official court proceedings had not yet commenced. KA recognised that it was the crisis’s notoriety and lasting power of representations and categorisations in the media (Couldry, 2012, p. 54) that heightened her embarrassment. Likewise, GN reflected that, when her Jewish identity is mediatised:

It’s a bit of a paradox because there is shame and pride. It’s not neutral. It’s either oh ‘they’re [Jews] doing great things’ or oh, ‘they’re doing bad things.’ It’s very extreme.

(GN, FG6, 2023)

These two distinct poles, the participant contends, are the predominant emotions through which Jewish community members negotiate mediatised public scandals about them. This paper gives voice to diverse Jewish community voices to make evident the significance of this crisis for Melbourne’s Jewish community through the mediatisation of religion (Hjarvard, 2013; Abdel-Fadil, 2018; Liebmann, 2018; Lundby et al., 2018; Lövheim & Hjarvard, 2019). The intense emotional charge articulated by participants reflects Cottle’s (2004, p. 45) theorisation of media ritual, in which exceptional media moments are sustained and mobilised through collective action and the willing involvement of participants. In this case, Melbourne’s Jewish community is shown to be deeply invested in media narratives that centre their culture within the Australian media landscape.

The dominating fear, that general readerships would view all Jews as responsible for Leifer’s escape to Israel, ultimately created a need for community members to delineate between themselves and the ultra-Orthodox community members that were framed so centrally in news media reportage of the case. This highlights the intrinsically divisive nature of news media, especially during mediatised public crisis events that profile already vulnerable communities (McPhillips, 2017; Couldry, 2012). For many participants, it was Leifer’s distinct religious garb being highlighted in news media that most activated Jewish news consumers’ defence mechanisms and discomfort at the case’s mediatisation (Davidson, 2008; Miller et al., 2014; Kitzinger, 2004). The highly emotive pull from news events that mediatise religion (Abdel-Fadil, 2018; Hjarvard, 2013; Wahl-Jorgensen, 2020), along with the particular resonances of cultural frames (Van Gorp, 2007, 2010; Entman, 1993; D’Angelo, 2002, 2018, 2019; De Vreese, 2014), were emphasised through this crisis. Several discussions presented in this paper exhibit the reflexivity of participants who recognised “the Jewish cringe” that stems from a desire “to distance ourselves, as a community or as individuals … from those that are doing evil and therefore tarring the community with that brush” (RG, FG5, 2023). The divisive framing utilised by legacy media to attribute blame ensured shame was the primary communicative and social process through which community members made sense of the crisis. This analysis reflects Ahmed’s assertion regarding “the very physicality of shame” (Ahmed, 2014, p. 121). Rather than operating as an individual emotional response, shame functioned as an affective lever that sustained collective engagement and ritualised the involvement of Jewish community members in this crisis of institutional child sexual abuse.

This paper reflects Couldry’s theorisations regarding hierarchical structures as inherently reinforced through media (Couldry, 2012; Couldry & Rothenbuhler, 2007; Couldry & Hepp, 2013, 2016). While news media sought to contextualise the Leifer scandal within the dynamics of Melbourne’s ultra-Orthodox Adass community, the cultural resonances and common stocks of knowledge drawn on did little to appease the wider Jewish community, the case’s secondary subjects (W. A. Gamson & Modigliani, 1989). Many participants pointed out that, when media emphasised the otherness of ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities—specifically Australian legacy media—the general Australian readership likely did not have sufficient knowledge to differentiate between the 300 families known as the Adass community (Mendes & Pinskier, 2021, p. 4) and the Australian Jewish community’s wider denominations when forming meaning through Jewish cultural frames (Van Gorp, 2007, 2010; D’Angelo, 2002, 2018; Entman, 1993; De Vreese, 2014). The repeated emphasis on ultra-Orthodox otherness across news coverage functioned ritualistically (Couldry & Rothenbuhler, 2007; Couldry, 2012), establishing a moral framing through which power operated via religious markers and, in turn, shaped how community identity was understood during the crisis.

News media’s framing risks hindering the community cohesion that is of utmost importance when navigating mediatised scandals, especially in marginalised communities, preventing long-term change from taking place (Couldry, 2003, p. 47; Hjarvard, 2013; Lövheim and Lied, 2018). As mentioned in this paper’s introduction, Melbourne’s Jewish community is diverse, and yet there is still a commonality that binds this ethnoreligious group, through a “shared history” (BM, FG1, 2022) of prejudice.

4.2.3. “Good Jews” and “Bad Jews”: Mediatised Moral Differentiation and Uneven Burden

As this paper demonstrates, it is ultimately this othering and vilification of the perpetrator and her community (Miller et al., 2014; Davidson, 2008; Goc, 2009; Kitzinger, 2004; McCallum et al., 2023) that predominantly resonated in Jewish news readers’ minds, along with the sisters’ story (Chatskin, 2024), especially when these news frames dominated rather than the emphasis on the broader Jewish community’s collective action in support of the sisters. The lasting power of media representations in the hybridised age (Couldry, 2012; Chadwick, 2017) highlights that, even when media attempt to provide context for who is responsible in violating moral and ethical boundaries in public crisis events, community division still follows. This is due to general audiences likely lacking the cultural capability to understand the intricacies of Judaism as an ethnoreligion (Hall, 1980; S. J. D. Cohen, 2020; Himmelfarb, 2009; Solomon, 2006) and, thus, potentially drawing a causal link between Leifer and her community, and the wider Jewish community.

Couldry’s conclusion about the intrinsically divisive nature of media helps explain how, despite efforts by survivor–advocates to inspire collective action, elements of tribalist division shaped how audiences negotiated the Leifer crisis. This was a result of the case’s mediatisation and the blame directed at ultra-Orthodox Jewish community members as part of the broader vilification of the perpetrator (Davidson, 2008; Weatherred, 2015; McCallum et al., 2023).

The insights of some Orthodox participants—who are not part of the Adass community—reveal how the divisive tropes utilised in news media’s framing also worked against them. This raises questions regarding the credibility of mainstream news media when reporting on an inward-looking and diverse group such the Jewish community and crises that affect them (Lövheim & Hjarvard, 2019). Ultimately, feelings of deep shame were triggered for community members who share similar religious observance and practices to the perpetrator. When asked how seeing the Leifer case in the news made her feel, AF, who is an Orthodox Jewish woman, shared the following:

I look at religion as a way to be a better person. And it [child sexual abuse] goes against every single thing that religious people stand for. That to me is embarrassing.

(AF, FG8, 2023)

It is revealed, by AF continuing, “if you’re [Leifer] going to stand and be religious with me” (AF, FG8, 2023), that, just by being religiously observant, an already existing split is widened within Melbourne’s Jewish community, between those to abide by Halacha and those who do not, when their community is centred in news reportage. While this division already exists within Jewish communities, both in Israel and in the diaspora, media’s influential categorisations and their subsequent power ensure that, in times of mediatised public crisis, this separation can be further exacerbated. This was further supported by an ultra-Orthodox participant who shared the following:

I’d say there’s prejudice against Israel and prejudice against religious Jews. I wouldn’t say there’s prejudice against assimilated Jews in the mainstream media … like … Mark Zuckerberg. I don’t think there’s prejudice against someone who’s just like, Jewish—simply, their Jewishness is not notable or relevant in any way.

(LI, FG3, 2022)

Yet, just by Orthodox Jewish people’s shared religious observance with the Adass Israel community being “notable,” these community members are further challenged by the case’s mediatisation. Through news media drawing on Halachic observance as a “shared cultural phenomenon” (Van Gorp, 2007, pp. 65–66) when framing the Leifer case, religious practice was again used as an inadequate representation of community identity (Cornthwaite, 2017; S. J. D. Cohen, 2020).

4.2.4. Community Schism Persists Post-Disclosure

The Leifer case and Melbourne’s COVID-19 lockdowns are mediatised public crisis events that emphasise the community split discussed above. Participant MF, a modern-Orthodox man, encapsulated the community schism and how, “even being super sensitive, we bring a lot of this to public attention” (MF, FG5, 2023). Reflecting on media’s reportage of the ultra-Orthodox Jewish community during the COVID-19 restrictions, he shared the following:

There were people in the general community that were amazed it was Jews who actually reported on the High Holidays [illegal prayer services]. That all came from within the community … It’s dangerous, and in one sense, it’s very healthy … others just keep it hidden. But there’s a significant percentage of the community that think it’s very healthy to bring these issues out and give it fresh air. Which is interesting about us, isn’t it?

(MF, FG5, 2023)

MF’s assertion alludes to a deeper tension that exists within the community, not just in relation to child sexual abuse, but on the broader scale of whether to keep community-based issues hidden or to bring them into public discourse where they may be subsequently mediatised (Y. Cohen, 2012, 2014, 2018; Kitzinger, 2004). Furthermore, MF noted, “other communities are not like us, small communities”, who he suggests keep matters within the community out of concern for the prejudice they might face from the general audience when making public. By contrast, MF remains fascinated by the fact that, while the Jewish community “are concerned” about antisemitism, the community continuously proliferates community-based issues into the forefront of public discourse through mainstream media outlets, who he believes do so more than other communities, echoing LI’s discussion of “good” and “bad” Jews (FG3, 2022). Thus, an inevitable division is created in the community, between those who fear the potentially detrimental consequences of a crisis’s mediatisation, and those wanting to make issues public. Interestingly, MF himself seems conflicted over whether this public disclosure is “dangerous” or “very healthy.”

5. Conclusions

This paper’s findings demonstrate how media framing and mediatisation are interconnected processes which shape localised knowledge and community formation during public crisis. Ultimately, due to legacy news media’s framing that othered ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities (Couldry, 2012, p. 184; Magid, 2019, p. 113; Lusky-Weisrose et al., 2022) and vilified a distinctly foreign perpetrator (Weatherred, 2015; Miller et al., 2014, p. 62; Davidson, 2008; Goc, 2009), the Australian Jewish community themselves used this divisive framing when forming knowledge about the crisis. This emphasises how media narratives do not develop in parallel to the communities that are their secondary subjects, but are instead negotiated, codified and embedded within them. The case’s mediatisation subsequently hindered holistic community formation during the public crisis, as pre-existing notions of shame within the Jewish identity (Baddiel, 2021) were exacerbated by legacy media and by the use of religious markers as primary qualifiers of Jewish identity. Consequently, moral boundaries were reinforced, widening tensions between community members who are integrated into secular mainstream society, and those who share greater commonalities with the ultra-Orthodox community (Lövheim & Hjarvard, 2019).

This paper contributes to framing and mediatisation scholarship by revealing how framing operates as a ritualised process through which moral narratives and symbolic markers reiterate meaning during crisis. Within the context of this case study, shame operates not only as an individual response, but as a socially and communicatively mediatised process that shapes community formation and identity. This study extends understandings of how media framing and mediatisation operate within diasporic, ethnic and religious minority communities.

These findings are also significant in informing policy and practice. This paper argues that Australian mainstream media should adopt more reflexive reporting practices that centre the diversity of the diasporic ethnoreligious Jewish identity, therefore avoiding the reinforcement of collective blame and internal division. For ethnoreligious communities and their institutions, the findings showcase the importance of recognising how external media narratives may become internalised, exacerbating shame and producing uneven moral burden among community members, particularly for those who share similar religious practices with the perpetrator. At a policy level, the analysis showcases the value of developing reporting guidelines that support media makers in holding powerful institutions accountable, while also maintaining cultural sensitivity that acknowledges the diversity of these communities. While this study focuses on a specific mediatised public crisis within the Australian Jewish community, the findings encourage further consideration of how diasporic communities negotiate their identity when their culture is centred throughout mediatised public crises. Future research could examine how current mediatised global crises are further challenging the diasporic Jewish community’s relationship with Australian mainstream and local media. While this paper highlights Jewish community members’ reflexivity in recognising the power of media framing and representations (Couldry, 2012, p. 261; D’Angelo, 2018, 2019), it also shows how negotiating this space in mediatised scandals can have further detrimental effects on community formation.