Judy Bolton-Fasman
By Judy Bolton-Fasman
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Life When A Nice Jewish Boy Marries Out
Getty Images I think Keren McGinity has a crystal ball. McGinity, a groundbreaking scholar, captures the telling details and the idiosyncratic trajectory of interfaith relationships and marriages in America. But as academic as McGinity’s work is, it is also highly personal. Her parents, both Jewish, divorced when she was ten years-old. Each of them went…
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Life How Katha Pollitt Helped Me Break Abortion Silence
A woman shouts claiming for her abortion right during a demonstration in Madrid, Spain // Getty Images My abortion was a secret that I kept for almost 20 years. When I decided to terminate my pregnancy in 1995, I was happily married and the mother of a six month-old baby girl. I was also dealing…
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Life When Yom Kippur Prayers Don’t Help Grieving
Rosh Hashanah prayers, as depicted in the 18th century // Copyright Wikimedia Commons My father was buried on the eve of Rosh Hashanah 2002 and the holiday began just a few surreal hours after I stood at his open grave. The shiva — the seven-day period of formal mourning — was cancelled to usher in…
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Life A Farewell to Parenting Columns
The author, center, with her children Anna and Adam, in 2014. // Photo courtesy of Judy Bolton-Fasman For eight years I’ve written a weekly parenting column for a local Jewish newspaper in Boston. My valedictory column will be published just before Rosh Hashana. When I accepted the job, I made it clear that I would…
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Life Joanna Rakoff’s ‘Salinger Year’
Joanna Rakoff Joanna Rakoff’s lovely memoir, “My Salinger Year,” brings to mind an image from the Talmud in which an unopened letter stands in as an uninterpreted dream. Rakoff, a poet, novelist and founding editor of Tablet Magazine, has written a book that braids together a stint after college assisting JD Salinger’s literary agent with…
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Life Tova Mirvis’s ‘Visible City’
TovaMirvis.com Like the new high rises that dominate the skyline of Manhattan’s Upper West Side, Tova Mirvis’ third novel, “Visible City,” is both a paean and a lament for a world contained within one neighborhood. It is also a book that brilliantly unfurls connections that overlap and intersect between strangers and lovers. The arresting first…
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Life Reciting Kaddish, As A Daughter
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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Life Who Wants To Be the Voice of A Generation?
Last week I was marooned on my couch with a virus and finally watched the first season of “Girls,” Lena Dunham’s HBO drama about twentysomethings finding their way in New York City. Dunham is very serious about her enterprise, and even the show’s light-hearted moments — which are few and far between — are laden…
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