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 Avoid Bad Rabbi? There’s an App for That
An Israeli couple at their wedding (Haaretz) — When Israelis want to be warned of traffic jams ahead they check Waze, the popular crowd-sourced GPS. When they are planning their vacation, they look at hotel ratings and reviews on Tripadvisor to make sure their trip is smooth. So why shouldn’t they have the benefit of…
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Life Get Out of Our Beds, Shmuley Boteach!
(Haaretz) — As everyone in show biz knows, if you want attention, you’ve got to have a gimmick, and more than a decade ago, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach came up with a great one. In 1999, Boteach published Kosher Sex: A Recipe for Passion and Intimacy. It wasn’t the first time sex advice was offered from…
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Life Shameful in Beit Shemesh
(Haaretz) — It was as frightening as any terrorist attack, recounted the young woman assaulted in broad daylight at a bus stop in Beit Shemesh last week. But in fact, it was probably worse. After all, one might presume that if an Israeli Jewish woman had been attacked by a Palestinian in the middle of…
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Life Sara Netanyahu, Israel’s Marie Antoinette
Haaretz Illustration (Haaretz) — Oh, Sara, Sara, Sara. First there was your nanny way way back in 1996 – a young South African girl named Tanya Shaw, who told the press that you were a nutty clean freak, a screaming shrew and accused you of firing her on the spot for committing the sin of burning…
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News What the Heck Is a ‘Quenelle’?
(Haaretz) — It’s a word that most of us had never heard until this week. Quenelle: a word that sounds like it could be a sophisticated French pastry or obscure breed of exotic bird, or perhaps the latest bizarre celebrity name for a child. On Monday, it was the third-most-searched-for term on Google. As those…
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Food Israel’s Somek Winery Is a Family Affair — With Deep Roots in the Land
Located on a small street in the picturesque village of Zichron Yaakov, a few blocks away from the town’s touristy promenade lined with cutesy stores and cafes, one finds Barak Dahan’s small house, with a sign for Somek Winery pointing toward the backyard. Behind the home, alongside the family’s cages for pet doves and children’s…
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Life In Zuckerberg Nuptials, No ‘Intermarriage’ Talk
Mazel tov, Priscilla and Mark! You pulled it off: a surprise wedding. What was supposed to be a medical school graduation party for a newly minted M.D. turned out to be an event in which she collected a M.R.S. degree and also wedded a newly minted billionaire. The wedding was strategically timed to happen the…
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Life Silencing Little Girls
As the Israeli national-religious population continues to lurch rightward, the belief that for an Orthodox man, the sound of a woman’s singing voice is inappropriately erotic and therefore violates Jewish law has gone increasingly mainstream. This lies behind the ongoing dispute over whether IDF soldiers have the right to walk out when women sing…
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