Allison Kaplan Sommer is a journalist at Haaretz, host of Haaretz Weekend podcast and co-host of The Promised Podcast.
Allison Kaplan Sommer
By Allison Kaplan Sommer
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Life Stink Bomb Welcomes Girls Back to School
The end of the long string of Jewish holidays in the fall is normally a time for relief and celebration for Israeli parents who are weary of entertaining their children during the long weeks of school vacation. But for the parents of girls at the Orot Banot school in Beit Shemesh, back to school marks…
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Life Female Soldiers Forced Away From Torah Dancing
Simchat Torah wasn’t much of a celebration this year for a group of angry female Israeli soldiers who were furious over being segregated far from their male counterparts, and completely out of their sight line when it came time for the traditional round of dancing with the Torah that ends the holiday, known as Hakafot…
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Life Gilad Shalit’s Vulnerability, and Ours
If Israel could choose a single day to live over and over again, then Tuesday, October 18, 2011 would be a leading contender. The days preceding Gilad Shalit’s homecoming were full of stress, worry and controversy regarding the price the country would have to pay for his return, the release of more than one thousand…
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Life JDater Allegedly Stole Hearts and Money
It’s always horrible to hear stories of people getting swindled for thousands or millions of dollars. But I always feel an extra wrench in my heart and an extra dose of righteous anger when the swindler is someone involved in a romantic relationship with his victim. It feels like a double dose of larceny –…
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Life Finding a Friend’s Forgiveness on Facebook
I plug her name into the Facebook search engine and there she is: my former friend, Bea. The years have been kind to her: She’s not looking too much older, I see essentially the same face that was smiling next to me in my wedding photos when she served in the role of unofficial maid…
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Life Will Jews Wearing Burkas Open Pandora’s Box?
Are the practice of forcing young girls to walk around draped in black sheets, denying them formal education and coercing them into early marriage the markings of a cult? Should such communities that do these things be illegal, and should girls whose parents join such a community be removed from their custody? Israelis are now…
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Life Do We Care How Sarah Jessica Parker ‘Does It’?
The studio that made the movie “I Don’t Know How She Does It” knew they could bank on women like me to buy a ticket. When I read the novel after it first came out in 2002, I confess that I could relate: as the working mom, I chuckled in recognition at the heroine, Kate…
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Life Throwing Eggs and Jeers at Little Girls
It’s not right that the denim-skirted young girls of the Orot Banot school in Beit Shemesh should be the front-line soldiers in the battle for religious tolerance and co-existence in their city. But as they face jeering men and hurled eggs, and tomatoes as they walk to and from their classrooms, that’s exactly what they…
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