Miriam Shaviv
By Miriam Shaviv
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Culture For Women, Middle Ages Might Have Been Golden
Eight hundred years ago, thousands of Jewish Egyptian women refused to immerse in the ritual bath. Only Maimonides’s threat that they would lose their Ketubah money quelled the orchestrated rebellion, years after it began. A century later in Ashkenaz (Christian Europe), rabbis were astonished by the large number of Jewish women who refused to have…
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News No One Loves Christmas Like We Do
Forget about “Chrismukka,” the hybrid holiday invented for intermarried couples. Consider the other December Dilemma, that of thousands of affiliated and even Orthodox Jews like me. Without a history of celebrating Christmas, and with no intention of celebrating it in the future, either, we get a warm and fuzzy feeling from the warm and fuzzy…
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News Still a Little Too Close to God
Still Life with Bombers: Israel in the Age of Terrorism By David Horovitz Alfred A. Knopf, 288 pages, $25. * * *| In the three and a half years since the second intifada was launched, the voice of the mainstream Israeli public has rarely been heard internationally. Television largely seeks out the extremists; terror victims’…
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News Rebel, Rebel: A New Book Plumbs the Life of Chasidic Girls
Mystics, Mavericks and Merrymakers: An Intimate Journey Among Hasidic Girls By Stephanie Wellen Levine New York University Press, 239 pages, $26.95. * * *| Alone among the chasidic groups, Lubavitch is always willing to give access to writers who are irresistibly attracted to the idea of reporting on an apparently impenetrable, exotic sect. Most of…
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