Elissa Strauss has written for the Forward over a number of years. She is a regular contributor to CNN, whose work has been published in a number of publications including The New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and Longreads.
Elissa Strauss
By Elissa Strauss
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Life More Than A Fashion Statement
Two new feminist t-shirts entered the world this past month and I am not sure which will incite more scandal, considering the context. One is a tight, black, short-sleeved v-neck tee that has “’Daughters of Israel, Do Not Dress Provocatively” printed across it in Hebrew. This is the same language women find on signs posted…
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Life Feminists in the Kitchen
Feminism and motherhood continue to be the Ross and Rachel of the never-ending sitcom that is contemporary womanhood. We know they should get together, that they belong together, but its just not happening. Meanwhile, their little pas de deux is growing tiresome, and honestly we all have better things to do than wait for season…
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Life Michael Bloomberg Bans Low Self Esteem
New York City just launched an offensive on yet another modern plague: low self-esteem in girls. The city started a new public health campaign aimed to encourage girls, aged 7 to 12 years, to challenge the unattainable notions of beauty foisted upon them by pop culture and advertising. The campaign, which consists mostly of ads…
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Opinion Give Us Our Gen-X Judaism
The new PEW survey on Jewish life paints a bleak picture of our future. Among the findings were the fact that 58% of Jews now marry non-Jews, two-thirds don’t belong to a synagogue and 32% of Jews born after 1980 say they have “no religion.” In response, Slate’s Jessica Grose wrote about her mixed feelings…
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Life Tina Fey Schools ‘Girls’
Seeing Tina Fey in a spoof of “Girls” on the season premiere of Saturday Night Live wasn’t just exhilarating because Our Lady of Feminist Comedy (pardon the Catholic reference) had returned, but because it also reinforced a world-order in which age and experience yields wisdom, both in humor and in life. In the skit, Fey…
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Life Do Women Behave Differently At Work?
In her new book “Wonder Women,” Barnard president Debora Spar claims that, despite what feminists have long-argued, women do have inherent differences from men when it comes to workplace behavior. As Spar explains in an excerpt in Salon: In the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, however, a renegade, slightly retrograde view has started…
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Life No, It Really Does Smell Like Roses
It’s official. Everyone is a Jewish mother. Well, insofar as every mother has an inflated sense of the absolute kvell-worthy perfection of their children. In a recent Christian Science Monitor story about why we want to eat our babies (more on that in a minute), they refer to a study that found that mothers rank…
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Life Is Religion Good for Women?
Asking if religion is good for women, as Moment magazine recently did, is like asking if music is good for men. There are no clear answers when asking about the relationship between an incredibly fluid concept with a rather broad category of living beings. Still, this doesn’t stop many of the contributors to the symposium…
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