Gabrielle Birkner
By Gabrielle Birkner
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Life The Case Against ‘Opting Out’
Get out your virtual pitchforks. I’m about to defend Elizabeth Wurtzel. Last week, the writer-turned-lawyer curried ire with many a stay-at-home mother (#sahm, in Twitter verse), when she denounced “1% wives”–referring to America’s most privileged, educated women–as collaborators in the “war on women.” In her red-meat-for-the-blogosphere polemic, Wurtzel argues that “being a mother isn’t really…
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Life Goodbye, Sisters
It was the little idea that could: Create a virtual space where Jewish women from across denominational, ideological and generational spectra, women living in the United States, Israel and beyond, could come together to discuss the issues and ideas impacting their lives. In April 2009, The Sisterhood was born. Debra Nussbaum Cohen was the first…
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Life Getting Intimate at the Airport
Airport “pat-downs” have been the set-up for too many jokes to count. But the much-ridiculed security measures have also provided the inspiration for a new series of paintings by the Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tirtzah Bassel, 33. In “TSA Chapel,” featured at the 14th Street Y’s LABA Festival — the event begins tomorrow, and runs through…
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Life Emily Yoffe’s, Randy Cohen’s ‘Advice To Live By’
“I recently met a good girl but there is a problem. She has a dimple in her chin and people say that if someone has this, their husband will die early. So I don’t know if I should keep on seeing this girl — please help me.” … “A pogrom took place in Bialystok, where…
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Culture Britain’s Jewish Press Baroness
The First Lady of Fleet Street: The Life of Rachel Beer — Crusading Heiress and Newspaper Pioneer Bantam Books, 348 pages, $30 By Eilat Negev and Yehuda Koren In an era when women were not permitted to vote, when marriage was the only vocation that proper girls were encouraged to pursue, when doctors linked too…
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Life Toward a More Perfect Primetime
Sarah Seltzer has written extensively on The Sisterhood about television’s resistance to developing characters of color. She has wondered why all of the titular girls of HBO’s “Girls,” are white girls, and has challenged the idea that a more diverse cast would make the show any less “real.” “We live in an era in which…
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Life Why Nobody Pays the ‘Nanny Tax’
It’s Tax Day (grumble, grumble), and Sisterhood contributor Melissa Langsam Braunstein has an opinion piece about one of the most commonly evaded taxes: the ‘nanny tax.’ Melissa, writing on the website of the National Review, wonders if more people would pay employment taxes for their nannies if it weren’t so difficult to find a caregiver…
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Life Girlfriend TV — From ‘Lucy’ to ‘Girls’
If the new HBO series “Girls” lives up to its breathless early reviews, Lena Dunham’s Hannah and her tight-knit group of self-reflective friends seem bound to join the television canon alongside Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, and Carrie and Co. In advance tonight’s “Girls” premiere — see The Sisterhood preview here — I spoke with…
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