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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Opinion My Prescription for the So-Called Pathology Plaguing American Jews
In his final act as the Forward’s opinion editor, . The story was illustrated with a bottle of Xanax, but in the text Beckerman refrained from making any prescriptions, leaving us instead with the simple lament that we Jews are plagued with a “fundamental uncertainty and unease of not really knowing anymore what it means…
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Opinion How Donna Karan Dressed Us for the Post-Women’s Lib World
You see, once in a while a designer comes along who not only manages to reimagine how a woman dresses, but how a woman feels. Donna Karan was one of these designers. When she launched her line back in back in 1985 her collection consisted of “seven easy pieces,” designed to be interchangeable and simple…
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Opinion What Can Women of the Upper East Side Teach Us About Gender Roles?
Marketed like a cross between “Gossip Girl” and “The Feminine Mystique,” Wednesday Martin’s new “Primates of Park Avenue” is a quasi-anthropological tell-all about navigating the world of housewifery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and its discontents. Martin, a self-described “cultural critic at large in high heels,” gives us a window into the highly competitive, and…
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Opinion Godology: Searching for the Divine in the Torah’s Scroll
Godology is a monthly conversation between Forward columnist Elissa Strauss and Rabbi Scott Perlo in which they explore what it means to be “Godish” — to kind of, sort of, believe in God. ELISSA: Scott, we recently celebrated the holiday of Shavuot, when we honor the day God gave the Israelites the Torah at Mount…
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Opinion Brassy Jewish Woman 2.0: Pamela From ‘Louie’
The brassy Jewish woman — let’s call her the BJW — has long been a standard character on both stage and screen. Going all the way back to the likes of Molly Picon, the BJW has been played by such comic greats as Joan Rivers, Fran Drescher, Susie Essman, Bette Midler, Barbra Streisand and, most…
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Opinion With That Very First Cut, the Child Is Tamed
Of all the coming-of-age milestones my 2.5-year-old son has already passed through, none has impacted me quite as much as his first haircut. That first shearing, the transformation of the hair on his head from disordered to ordered, wild to tame, left me, to tell you the truth, despondent. So unsure was I of the…
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Opinion Thanks for Passover, Mom
“Who Sets the Table?” is a year-long multi-media project looking at who does what to make Jewish holidays happen at home. Let’s begin with gratitude to our mothers, grandmothers, sisters and aunts. According to the over 500 of you who answered our “Who Sets the Table?” survey, around 80% off all the domestic work for…
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Opinion The Elusive Search for the Ideal Seder
Like many American Jews, I attend a Seder each year. And like many American Jews, I often end the evening both in awe of the tradition and with a few ideas on how I could make the next Seder a little bit better. Less salt in the soup. How can I get everyone to sing?…
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