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 Remembering Jewish Astronaut Judith Resnik
Unlike my mom, who loves to “b’sheret” everything, I don’t tend to make a big deal of coincidences. But one happened this week that is worth a Sisterhood mention. My mom had been going through some old boxes when she discovered the newspaper clipping of the Challenger disaster. “You wouldn’t let me throw it away,”…
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Life We Should Talk To Boys About Sex, Too
A new online PSA warning from Children of Street, an organization in British Columbia dedicated to preventing the sexual exploitation of children, warns young women of the potential negative consequences of sending nude self-portraits, or naked “selfies,” to their boyfriends or crushes. In the video, a young woman flips through placards which say, “I sent…
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Life Your Shirt Was Probably Made in a Sweatshop
Thinking ethically while grocery shopping or eating out has become, for many of us, part of our lives in the past decade. We fill up cloth sacks of local organic apples at our farmers’ markets, and show more concern than ever over the provenance of our chickens. But many of us who would rather starve…
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Life How FreshDirect Saved My Seder
I wasn’t going to host a seder this year. No way, no how. I just came off a year during which I moved three times while pregnant and had my first child in the middle of a hurricane. Then there were the problems breastfeeding and my foolish resistance to getting any help during my baby’s…
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Life Can Housewifery Be Feminist?
In this week’s cover story in New York magazine, Lisa Miller profiles women whose decision to leave work and become stay at home moms is seen by them as a fulfillment of the grand feminist desire to “have it all.” Jessica Grose over at Slate’s DoubleX does a great job at explaining why the journalism…
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Life What Feminists Can Learn from Jews
Last week Hanna Rosin scared me. In an essay on Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, she expressed a deep skepticism about the relevance of feminism, today and tomorrow. Let me start by saying I have deep respect for Rosin and the way she often wipes the schmutz off the women’s movement’s collective windshield to help us…
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Life When Will U.S. Catch Up On Parental Leave?
Us lady bloggers have been complaining for some time now about the lack of mandatory paid parental leave in the United States. We are the only advanced economy in the world that doesn’t make sure new moms get a little something something to stay afloat following the birth of their child. It really is the…
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Life Men Still Dominate Major Publications
The 2013 VIDA Count — a survey of the gender breakdown of bylines, book reviewers and authors reviewed at major publications — is out, and the numbers aren’t pretty. The vast majority of book reviewers and authors reviewed at publications like the New Yorker, the New York Review of Books and Harper’s are men, as…
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