Yair Lapid’s wife says she was fired from newspaper due to husband’s career
Lihi Lapid says she was told it would be ‘problematic’ for her to resume her popular Yedioth Ahronoth column, after taking hiatus to help with Blue and White election campaign
Lihi Lapid, wife of the Blue and White party’s No.2 Yair Lapid, says she was fired from her longtime job as a columnist for Yedioth Ahronoth’s network of local newspapers due to her husband’s political career.
In a Saturday Facebook post, Lihi Lapid said that she had recently taken time off to help her husband campaign in the run-up to the April 9 election, but her editor was now refusing to take her back.
According to Lihi Lapid, the Yedioth editor told her it would be “problematic” for her to return to writing her column following the election.
In response husband Yair accused the paper of being “afraid of the government” and said the move was “part of the campaign against us that has crossed all red lines.”
Lihi Lapid said her weekly column dealt with contemporary women’s issues, and contained her personal reflections on motherhood, career, family, friendships along with the occasional holiday recipe.
“I told [the editor] that I don’t think its a problem for me to write a personal column in the paper, just because my husband is a politician,” Lihi Lapid wrote in her post. “I don’t think that in 2019 Israel you should be able to fire someone because of their partner’s job.”
“I’m proud to be Yair’s wife, but I’m more than just his wife,” she wrote. “I’m a woman with a career.”
Lihi Lapid is a journalist, photographer and author of several best-selling novels and children’s books. Her popular weekly column has run in Yedioth’s local papers for the last 15 years.
Yair Lapid is the leader of the opposition Yesh Atid party and a frequent critic of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. In an effort to oust Netanyahu from office in the April election, Yair Lapid merged his party with Benny Gantz’s Israel Resilience and Moshe Ya’alon’s Telem to form the centrist Blue and White alliance.
Likud won 35 seats in the election, the same as Blue and White, but support from smaller right-wing parties allied to Likud led to a majority of 65 lawmakers backing Netanyahu to remain as premier for a fifth term.
