Judy Brown (Eishes Chayil)
By Judy Brown (Eishes Chayil)
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News Are You There, Hashem? It’s Me, Judy.
I was 11 years old when I was decided that I was never going to wear a bra. It was right in the middle of the sixth grade, and my life had turned into a bewildering mess. You see, up until then, my world had two kinds of people in it: children and adults. But…
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Life I’m a Mother, Not a Baby Machine
My story about the crushing pressures ultra-Orthodox women face to raise large families touched a raw nerve. The story went live on the Forward’s web site on Monday, March 11. By that night, I was sorting through an avalanche of emails from people within and out of the community, from those who sympathized, and those…
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News Cracks in a Holy Vessel
This is the thing you didn’t know: that motherhood is not all joy; that birth leaves scars forever; that often you will feel no love, only desperation. This is the thing you didn’t know: That pregnancy could fill you with that much dread, that you would weep from misery and they would call it postpartum…
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News An Old Dog’s New Tricks
When I was a little girl, there were things as clear as sunlight, as the sea God had split just for the Jews. One of those things was that dogs were despicable creatures. They were scary and dirty, with teeth like knives, and paws with claws, ripping flesh off bone, the way they’d done to…
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News ‘Ub-u-sive’
Guilty on all 59 counts: guilty, guilty, guilty. On Monday, December 10, a jury of 12 found Nechemya Weberman enormously guilty. The jurors convicted him of sexually abusing an underage girl entrusted to his care. They declared the respected member of the ultra-Orthodox community to be a criminal and a fraud, and thousands of survivors,…
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News Girls Are the Lucky Ones
I always knew I was lucky to be a girl. This, despite being told that I was not. In the ultra-Orthodox world where I grew up, the boys are the exalted ones. Superiority belongs to the men, who learn the holy Torah. Still. I always knew I was lucky to be a girl. We were…
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News Eilenberg’s Beard
Eilenberg trimmed his beard on Tuesday and did not leave home until Friday. It was his wife, my good friend Gitty, who put an end to it — she who could not understand him. “You wanted to trim your beard for over a year,” she screamed, exasperated. “Why are you crying now like you lost…
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News Gentiles at the Gates
Once, life in Brooklyn’s Boro Park was simple. There was the inside and the outside and an impenetrable wall in between. Then came the Internet, and everything changed. In the beginning, we did not fully understand. The computer seemed to be a rather innocuous box: glass screen; dark plastic, flat keyboard, and a cursor that…
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