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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The Schmooze Bringing Back Yiddish…One Email at a Time
Last summer brother and sister Yiddish enthusiasts Shaul and Shulie Seidler- Feller decided they wanted to spread their love of the mameloshn, so they started the Yiddish Word-of-the-Week project. Mainly a listserv, but also a Web site in development, the project includes weekly mailings that feature a word of the week with an English translation,…
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Life What Makes a Body ‘Womanly’?
In the style world, there has been a lot of talk lately of a possible return to “curvy,” or “womanly,” figures on the runway. In The New York Times, for example, fashion critic Cathy Horyn wrote the following about a recent Marc Jacobs show: But to me, this collection wasn’t as much about returning to…
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Life Towards a More Democratic Feminism
In a just-posted Newsweek article, Jessica Bennett discusses her discovery of feminism at age 28. She writes that it wasn’t until she entered the workforce that she realized that things weren’t nearly as equal as she thought they would be: So for all the talk about feminism as passé, mine wasn’t a generation that rejected…
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Life In Linda Richman’s Footsteps: ‘Ronna and Beverly’
As much as I love the whole Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Ben Stiller, Judd Aptaow schlemiel genre I always shudder a bit when finding out, again and again, that their co-star is a semi-serious perky blond. (For the most recent example, see the new movie “She’s Out of My League”, where the real-life half Jew…
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Life Parlaying the Power of Pretty
When I was in kindergarten I played Queen Esther in our synagogue’s Purim spiel. I remember feeling pretty good about playing the lead, and energized that the role called for playing a heroine and putting on a frilly pink dress. I thought about this Saturday during a discussion at my synagogue about gender and power…
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Life White Bathing Suits, Red Hats and Other Tampon Ad Tropes
The perils of tampon advertisements was the topic of conversation Monday evening, when DoubleX co-editor (and Bintel Brief guest columnist) Hanna Rosin, former “Colbert Report” executive producer Allison Silverman, Sarah Haskins of Current TV and Susan Kim, author of the new book “Flow: The Cultural History of Menstruation” (St. Martin’s Griffin, 2009) came together in…
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Life Najla Said: Palestinian American Princess
Najla Said, daughter of famed literary scholar and Palestine advocate Edward Said, has a new one-woman show about growing up in-between cultures. “Palestine,” the play’s title, explores the tension between her growing up as a Christian Arab on Manhattan’s heavily Jewish Upper West Side. “Until September 11, 2001, if you asked anyone to spend five…
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Life There Is No Shame in Miscarriage
I am 30 — the age when, among other things, you begin to stop hearing from your friends for about three months. Then finally, at the end of 12 weeks, you get a Sunday afternoon call announcing what you knew already: She is pregnant, and at the end of her first trimester. I’ve experienced this…
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