Marc B. Shapiro writes: “I am aware of only two times that a woman (other than one’s wife) can be seen without her clothes. One is the sotah, when her top is removed.[18] R. Judah states that if her breasts are attractive, they are not exposed,[19] but his opinion is not accepted. The other time is that the kohen must examine both men and women for tzara’at, and in both cases they are to be naked.”
“Simcha Goldstein was kind enough to send me these pictures from a Passover Haggadah sent out to donors by Yeshiva Torah Vodaath. It hardly needs to be said that such pictures (check out how the women are dressed), not to mention the Zionist theme as a whole, would never appear today in anything sent out by this yeshiva.”
Marc Shapiro writes:
…today every rabbi will be happy to speak about how Judaism opposes slavery, and that the slavery mentioned in the Torah was far removed from the slavery in pre-Civil War days. Yet two hundred years ago, plenty of rabbis would have found nothing objectionable with Southern slavery. (When I write “every rabbi” in the first sentence of this note, it is an exaggeration. See my post here. See also R. Avigdor Miller, Q&A, vol. 2, p. 12, that it was a mistake for Lincoln to free the slaves, as they could have used another 50 or 100 years of slavery in order to “civilize” them.)
