By Johnna Kaplan
This year, like other years, I am doing nothing special (read: nothing at all) for Shavuot. It is not, as Marissa Brostoff
recently noted in Tablet, not hugely popular as Jewish holidays go. Every year I see Shavuot on the calendar and think,
What’s that one again? And then I remember,
That’s the one about the Torah. And cheese.
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By Johnna Kaplan
May, I recently found out, is
Jewish American Heritage Month. (It also happens to be Mental Health Month and National Salad Month.) I don’t know how the existence of JAHM eluded me until now; it was first proclaimed by President George W. Bush back in 2006. (Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Senator Arlen Specter introduced the resolutions in Congress.) Even the fact that this year’s White House reception recognizing the month was a
victim of sequestration did not bring Jewish American Heritage Month to my attention.
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By Johnna Kaplan
The rebuttals to Julia Shaw’s Slate article titled “Marry Young: I got married at 23. What are the rest of you
waiting for?” began almost immediately. There was Amanda Marcotte, also writing in Slate, who slyly
pointed out that young marriage often leads to young divorce. There was Tracy Moore in Jezebel, who
deftly dismantled several aspects of Shaw’s advice, most notably that marriage alone will not magically confer maturity, and that it is “obviously ludicrous to tell people what to do” regarding an institution that is so different for each individual. There was Ta-Nahesi Coates in the Atlantic, a
rare, nuanced male entry into the sport of women judging other women’s lives, who generally related to Shaw’s position but couldn’t support her “certainty and determinism.” (Coates’s post is called “If You Want to Be Married Young, You Should Marry While Young.”)
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By Johnna Kaplan
When that phrase first started to turn up in every article aimed at a female audience, I rolled my eyes at it too. There has been much conflation of the two ideas (alongside claims that Sandberg did not intend to conflate them.) But it’s clear that “am I leaning in?” has, at least for now, replaced “can I have it all?” as the issue we’re supposed to worry about.
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By Johnna Kaplan
I’m not normally a fan of diets, though I have on occasion ventured into the world of trendy eating plans. There was the one from Seventeen Magazine (at the time I was much younger than 17) that introduced me to the dubious concept of eating breakfast. There was an attempt at that cabbage soup fad in college; my roommate and I made the soup and were instantly so disgusted by it that we left it in the fridge untouched for I don’t remember how long. And there was that moment when seemingly all of America went on the South Beach Diet. South Beach food was extremely healthy, but — as I coincidentally learned
in South Beach — the cumulative effects of several months without starchy carbs means a drastically reduced tolerance for alcohol.
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