Mira Fox is a reporter at the Forward. Get in touch at [email protected] or on Twitter @miraefox.
Mira FoxStaff Writer
By Mira Fox
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Culture Ken Jennings opens up a whole other can of beans defending co-host’s antisemitism
Would you let your daughter spend six hours figuring out how to operate a can opener so she could eat baked beans, without helping her? And would you consider someone who did this an abusive parent? This was the topic of this weekend’s Twitter kerfuffle, now trending as “Bean Dad.” John Roderick tweeted about his…
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Culture The weirdest habits we’ve developed during this weirdest year
We’ve all found ourselves doing unprecedented things during these unprecedented times. So you can feel affirmed in whatever oddities you’ve found yourself reaching for to occupy your time — or just laugh at our plight — here are some of the weirdest things the Forward staff, and those in our orbit, have found ourselves doing…
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Culture Christmas was my favorite holiday — until I got too Jewish
When I was a child, Christmas was my favorite holiday. My dad isn’t Jewish, but that’s not even why we celebrated Christmas; my Jewish mom grew up celebrating too. Her mother had been jealous of how much fun it seemed, so she insisted on having trees and stockings and carols. When I was growing up,…
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Life Memo to The New York Times: Hanukkah, like Judaism, is about bucking tradition
“I am not Jewish and it doesn’t feel authentic to celebrate a Jewish holiday religiously,” read a recent New York Times article titled “Saying Goodbye to Hanukkah.” Jewish Twitter took offense, half railing against the author’s interfaith background and the dangers of assimilation, and the other half upset that a woman who does not consider…
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Opinion Why millennial Jews like me aren’t ‘Jewish voters’
When I sat down to write a piece about the millennial Jewish reaction to the election results, I found myself surprisingly stymied. I work in Jewish media for goodness sake; I must have a reaction on the Jewish issues in this election. Which were what, again? It’s not that I’m unfazed by the election; like…
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Culture In Judaism, even God respects the vote
The story of Akhnai’s oven is one of my favorite Talmud passages to tell non-Jews, because it so perfectly captures the contrast between Judaism and the dominant understanding of religion in the West. In it, a group of rabbis disagree with God, and God, in response, smiles and states, “My children have triumphed over Me;…
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Culture The scariest part of ‘The Vow’ is that it makes a cult look consensual
“There’s a Jewish word, mishpucha, which means family. As soon as I met Lauren, I knew she was mishpucha,” Sarah Edmondson says of Lauren Salzman, the woman who would eventually coerce her to brand her pelvis in an excruciating initiation rite into a secretive enclave billing itself as a women’s empowerment group. It’s a particularly…
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News Orthodox Jews quietly defy coronavirus restrictions to celebrate last of the High Holidays
Orthodox Jews in Brooklyn proceeded with some indoor and outdoor holiday celebrations in their synagogues over the weekend, in defiance of restrictions limiting all religious gatherings to 10 or fewer people in neighborhoods where the rates of coronavirus infection have gone sharply up in recent weeks. On Saturday evening in Borough Park — a neighborhood…
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