Gabrielle Birkner
By Gabrielle Birkner
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Breaking News Rabbi Gil Steinlauf of Adas Israel Comes Out as Gay
(JTA) — Rabbi Gil Steinlauf struggled for decades with an identity that he only acknowledged publicly this week. On the Monday after Yom Kippur, Steinlauf, the married senior rabbi at Adas Israel — a large and historic Conservative synagogue in Washington, D.C. — announced that he is gay. In a letter sent to congregants, Steinlauf…
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Culture A Network for Courageous Parents Offers New Views, Advice on Grief
Sitting next to her husband in their Palm City, Florida, living room, Oralea Marquardt describes the last few moments of her 8-year-old son William’s life. Displayed prominently behind the Marquardts are photographs of William, who died in February from GM1 — a genetic disorder that causes a progressive loss of cognitive and motor functions. “He…
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Culture Two Grieving Mothers, One Friendship
Scanning her inbox last fall, Becky Benson happened upon an unusual request from a pregnant friend, Emily Rapp: Would she mind if Rapp gave the baby a middle name to honor Benson’s younger daughter, Elliott? If the proposition sounded weird to her, the email went on, she should just feel free to forget it. “I…
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News Meet Sylvia Porter, Jewish Creator of the Personal Finance Column
Sylvia Porter: America’s Original Personal Finance Columnist By Tracy Lucht Syracuse University Press, 230 pages, $24.95 The reveal came on July 20, 1942, when the New York Post’s popular financial column ran under the name of Sylvia Porter. Since starting at the Post seven years earlier, the columnist had hidden behind the gender-ambiguous byline S.F….
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Life Making Peace With ‘Who Shall Die?’
In late August, The Sisterhood launched a series examining the role of women in Jewish mourning traditions. Grieving for a loved one is fiercely personal; doing so as a woman, guided by Jewish laws and rituals, can be comforting or restricting, depending on one’s experience. We asked you, Sisterhood readers, to share your stories. Many…
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Culture Non-Jews Hit by ‘Jewish’ Diseases Fall Through the Cracks of Genetic Screening
For three days in April, about 70 families whose lives have been upended by Tay-Sachs disease gathered in San Diego for the annual National Tay-Sachs and Allied Diseases conference. The event — which attracted families caring for children with Tay-Sachs, as well as those who have lost loved ones to the degenerative disease that claims…
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Life Motherhood in the ‘Lean In’ Era
When Ronit Sherwin moved to Delaware in 2011 to become executive director of the University of Delaware Hillel, she decided to enroll her now three-year-old twins in a daycare program at a well-established Jewish organization. But as a single mother and her family’s sole breadwinner, she couldn’t afford the $2,200 monthly bill for nearly 10…
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News Aging Wisely, Together
Until recently, Howard Sharfstein, an attorney who has had a decades-long career at a white-shoe law firm, had never meditated. “I never took the time to sit and be mindful,” he said. “I never took the time to consider my life values or life goals, or the meaning of relationships or faith.” In a little…
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