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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Culture A Historical Novel About Ruth, Minus The Sappiness
The Garden of Ruth By Eva Etzioni-Halevy Plume, 304 pages, $14. Novels based on the Old Testament have become quite popular in the past 10 years. While the religious tone and the style tend to vary — some can be read as parables, others as Harlequin romances — one consistent thread has been the highly…
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Culture What’s in a Home?
The Disappearance: A Novella and Stories By Ilan Stavans TriQuarterly, 144 pages, $22.95. Many of our contemporary Jewish writers use comfort to provide tension, creating characters who are often crippled, and sometimes haunted, by the relative ease of their lives. They live under the shadow of comfort’s flipside — apathy — and grapple almost exclusively…
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Culture The Jewish Salsero
In 1957, a 19-year-old named Lawrence Kahn traveled to Cuba after being entranced by the Latin music he had been hearing in New York City. Concerned that the Cubans would have trouble pronouncing his name, he dropped the Kahn and changed his name to Larry Harlow. The switch proved useless, first because Harlow wasn’t any…
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Israel News Even in Defeat, a Mensch Shines
Elliott – né Ephraim – Yamin, the most successful Jewish “American Idol” contestant to date, said his goodbyes to the competition last week after being short the 0.2% of the votes he needed to move on to the final round. The 27-year-old former pharmacy clerk blew one final kiss to his mother, shed his last…
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Culture Beyond ‘Fear’: Tips on Chutzpah
Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life By Erica Jong Tarcher, 304 pages, $22.95. * * *| At the end of “Fear of Flying,” Erica Jong’s 1973 best-selling novel, the lead character lists potential female heroes. Simone de Beauvior? Too obsessed with Sartre. Sylvia Plath? Stuck her head in an oven. Doris Lessing? Her female…
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Culture Avant-garde Painter Constructs Bridges Across the Diaspora
For his 1966 painting “Kibbutz Composition,” artist José Gurvich crowded the canvas with layers of muted colors and boldly outlined images. At first, the kinetic composition tells of the artist’s zeal for kibbutz life. Look at it a little longer, and the story expands beyond the kibbutz; it moves into Latin America, where Gurvich’s hand…
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Israel News Bridging the Generations
Every Wednesday after school, Jeremy Koegel’s mother drops him off at the Workmen’s Circle/Arbeter Ring in Los Angeles for his 3:30 bridge class. The teenage card whiz drops his backpack to the floor and takes his place among a roomful of fellow bridge enthusiasts — all significantly his senior. But age is not the only…
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Culture Ladino: Alive in Song, If Not Speech
For centuries after their expulsion in 1492, Sephardic Jews kept their new homes sounding like medieval Spain. In places as disparate as Amsterdam, Turkey and Greece, the Sephardim continued to live and pray in Ladino, the Judeo-Spanish language, up until the 20th century. Today there are not many opportunities to hear the language spoken, but…
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