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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Books Our Rack: Némirovsky Bio, Translated Hebrew Fiction, Advice With Lox
Non-Fiction • The newly translated “The Life of Irène Némirovsky: 1903-1942,” (Knopf) by French writers Olivier Philipponnat and Patrick Lienhardt, tells the life story of the author of the posthumous bestseller “Suite Francaise.” The biography covers Némirovsky’s childhood in Russia, her adulthood in her adopted country of France, and her death at Auschwitz. Philipponnat and…
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The Schmooze Court Rules Catholic Woman Has To Raise Stepson as Orthodox Jew
Divorce is never easy, and mixing in the rules of Orthodox Judaism certainly doesn’t make it easier. But that’s precisely what happened when Laura Derbigney became entangled in a custody battle between her Catholic husband and his Jewish ex-wife over the ex-couple’s 7-year-old son. Derbigney, a Chicago resident, is being forced by a court to…
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Life For Rachel Berry — and for Real Girls, Too — It’s Not a Choice Between Hook-ups and Romance
Caitlin Flanagan’s use of Rachel, the brassy Jewish character from the Fox television show “Glee”, as an anecdote for her Atlantic essay “Love, Actually” about the renewed interested in the “boyfriend story,” or old-fashioned romance, is a bit flawed. Yes, Rachel wants love, but she is hardly an innocent romantic. Early in the series she…
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The Schmooze PunkTorah’s Jewish Prayer Campaign
PunkTorah, creators of the Indie Yeshiva Pocket Siddur, have taken a do-it-yourself approach to daily prayer. The non-profit organization has just launched the website 3xdaily, which aims to explain the traditional three daily prayers (Shacharit, Mincha, Ma’ariv) along with other information related to Jewish prayer. On the site, PunkTorah explains that they created 3xdaily in…
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The Schmooze Sarah Silverman Gets the Ax
Looks like there will be no follow up to “Wowshwitz,” this year’s season finale of “The Sarah Silverman Program,” which just got axed from Comedy Central. Deadline Hollywood reports that Comedy Central did not renew the show for a fourth season despite a Twitter campaign to keep it alive. The show was on the chopping…
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The Schmooze Nigerian Yiddish Speaker Charged With Fraud Jumps Bail
John Star, a Yiddish-speaking Nigerian national, has jumped bail after being charged with mortgage fraud, the New York Daily News reported today. Star learned Yiddish as a child from his adoptive parents who were Orthodox Jews and raised him in Switzerland. Apparently his Yiddish came in handy when committing mortgage fraud in New York. “He…
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Life Why a JAP-y ‘Jersey Shore’ Makes Me So Nervous
I think many of us saw this coming. Really, how many other cultural clichés could lend themselves as easily to the outrageousness and garishness displayed by the self-proclaimed “guidos” and “guidettes” on the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore”? The “Jewish American Princesses” just had to be next. And now they are. Radar Online recently got…
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News In Case of Emergency
I got married last year. So it made sense that recently, when I went to a new doctor, I would put my husband as my emergency contact rather than my mom, who was across the country, in Los Angeles. I wasn’t at the doctor for anything serious, just a gluten-intolerance-related check-up with a new gastroenterologist….
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