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
-
Life Q&A with ‘Commie Camp’ Filmmaker Katie Halper
Comic and writer Katie Halper says that “she wouldn’t be alive without Camp Kinderland,” the 90-year-old leftist, secular Jewish summer camp in the Berkshires. When Kinderland came under attack by right-wingers following their discovery that an Obama nominee for the Department of Labor had sent her kids, Halper realized that she had set the story…
-
Life Amy Klein’s Fertility Struggle
This summer journalist Amy Klein, a former Forward reporter, began chronicling her fertility journey in weekly posts for the New York Times’ Motherlode blog. Klein spoke to the Sisterhood on why she decided to write about what was long a private struggle, the negative feedback she has received and the support she is, and isn’t,…
-
Life Now the Pill is Anti-Feminist?
If you could encapsulates women’s progress in one small object it would be, yes, the pill. With birth control we were given the keys to the car, a Eurorail pass to the stars — with our bodies (and therefore our lives) under control, we could go whatever we wanted. (Okay, not whatever, but much, much…
-
Life Are American Women Selfish?
Hey American women, you are a bunch of greedy little piggies. With all your “having it all” talk, you are no better than now-disgraced politician Anthony Weiner who just couldn’t balance his political ambitions with his need to Tweet photos of his penis. Or so says Delia Ephron in her essay “You Can’t Have It…
-
Life Can We Really Change?
A study just came out showing that, as popular culture puts it, “haters are gonna hate.” According to research presented in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, people who tend to dislike things they already know about are more likely to dislike things they have not yet to come in contact with. (h/t Wonkblog.)…
-
Life Blotting Out Female Bodies From Textbooks
In their ongoing quest to obliterate all signs of women from public life, religious Jews in Israel have now decided that the female reproductive system is obscene and have removed it from their science textbooks. As Haaretz reports, “the Education Ministry has asked textbook publishers to eliminate chapters on human reproduction, pregnancy prevention and sexually…
-
Life Tanning, the American Dream?
I don’t tan. Actively or passively. I mean, I don’t put on a bikini and spread myself out on a towel in the path of the sun, nor does my skin turn to bronze should it be exposed to the sun. For years, for most of my life really, I saw this as a problem….
-
Life Why Women Just Can’t Get It Right
Women. We can’t do anything right, can we? Choose not to become a mother, like the Sisterhood’s Chanel Dubofsky, and others view you as selfish. Chose to become a working mother and you are seen as selfish. Or, choose to become a stay-at-home parent and, yep, you are seen as selfish. Over the past few…
Most Popular
- 1
Fast Forward Their Pacific Palisades synagogue is standing, but all three rabbis lost their homes
- 2
Opinion Why is Netanyahu poised to OK a ceasefire that’s favorable to Hamas? One word: Trump
- 3
News Scoop: Heritage Foundation plans to ‘identify and target’ Wikipedia editors
- 4
Opinion What a remarkable Torah rescued from Iran — then LA’s fire — can teach about community amid devastation
In Case You Missed It
-
Looking Forward How a new ketubah helped one couple restart after the LA fire
-
Fast Forward Biden team resolves its final Title VI antisemitism and anti-Arab cases
-
Fast Forward These are the hostages to be released (and left behind) in the Israel-Hamas ceasefire deal’s first phase
-
Music Bob Dylan joins TikTok — just in time for TikTok to be banned
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism