Leah Berkenwald
By Leah Berkenwald
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Life Our Favorite New Ad — and What You Still Can’t Say on TV
A new advertising campaign by U for Kotex has done what no menstrual product company has done before: create an ad that is not only straightforward about menstruation, but also pokes fun at its own history of vague and sanitized ads. Both reasons make this ad campaign groundbreaking, but for some reason, you still can’t…
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Life Conservative Groups: Celebrating V-Day Is Unladylike
Fourteen years after its first performance, “The Vagina Monologues” has become a February tradition. Eve Ensler’s award-winning play is a series of monologues drawn from interviews with hundreds of women of all ages and nationalities about that most intimate part of themselves — their vaginas. The resulting monologues are funny, angry, triumphant and painful. They…
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Life How Jean Carroll Changed the World of Stand-Up
Legendary comedian Jean Carroll (née Celine Zeigman) passed away on New Year’s Day at the age of 98. A pioneering stand up comedian, Jean Carroll was a regular headliner in nightclubs and theaters in the ’40s and ’50s. She was featured on the Ed Sullivan Show, and she even had her own sitcom on ABC…
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Life Jewish Women’s History — The Decade in Review
Since we celebrated the beginning of a new millennium, Jewish women have continued to make important “firsts” in a variety of fields, and have made their voices heard in the Jewish community, in American culture and politics, and in forums around the world. Here are just some of the important events of this decade in…
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Life Disney’s (Jewish American) Princess?
In response to this post about the “What’s a Coastie?” song, Renee Ghert Zand of Truth, Praise & Help shared this video. Landline TV spoofs classic Disney “behind the scenes” shorts about the making of a fictional new animated film about a Jewish American Princess called “Rachel and the Dragon.” Watch the video here. This…
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Life Fetishizing Jewish Women
Jewish women are hot right now. According to an article in the men’s magazine Details, “Jewish women have become the ethnic fetish du jour.” And in true men’s magazine fashion, Christopher Noxon revels in the opportunity to eroticize and exoticize Jewish women; using dehumanizing terms like “cultural mutt” and “JILF,” meaning “Jew I’d like to…”…
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Life Is ‘Imposter Syndrome’ Really a Women’s Issue?
Have you ever acted confident when deep down you felt unqualified or incompetent — in short, like an imposter? Have you ever felt that someday you would be discovered as a fraud? A blogger for Psychology Today linked this “imposter syndrome” to women, asking “why do so many successful women feel they are frauds?” It’s…
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Life Musings on ‘Jewish Hair’
The buzz about “Good Hair,” Chris Rock’s new documentary about black hair, has got me thinking about “Jewish hair”: what it is, what it means, and where I — a straight-haired woman — fit into this curious piece of Jewish identity. “Jewish hair” is a tricky thing to define, since Judaism can include people from…
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