Sarah Seltzer
By Sarah Seltzer
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Life Even Atheists Love Passover
I have been reading Passover reflections on womanhood, liberation and the holiday’s meaning by Elana Sztokman here at the Sisterhood and by Elyssa Cohen at Jewesses with Attitude. It seems that for so many of us, Passover serves as a time of reflection and rebirth, a call to free ourselves from dismal patterns of indifference…
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Life The Looming Government Shutdown, and the War on Women’s Health
If the government shuts down today, we’ll have come to a new zenith of institutionalized misogyny in American government — a level of disregard for women that is so powerful it might bring that government to a halt. Even if it doesn’t and a deal is reached, the fact that women’s health was the last…
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Life At August Ivies, a ‘Hostile Sexual Environment’?
A federal complaint against Yale by a group of students, accusing the university of creating a “hostile sexual environment,” is making big news this week. The substance of the accusation is that by failing to take instances of public and private harassment and assault seriously, the university is violating Title IX. The press coverage has…
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Life The Times’s Infatutation With the Blogosphere’s Boys Clubs
This weekend, The New York Times profiled four prominent young, mostly progressive bloggers: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Dave Weigel and Brian Beutler. The hook? They are all friends, they hang out together in DC and they have all emerged quite quickly in the media world — moving from bloggers to serious members of DC’s pundit…
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Books Esther vs. Vashti, Austen vs. Brontës
As I prepared for the beginning of the perennial Purim question of “Esther vs. Vashti” at the same time as I delved into Jane Eyre-mania, I began to think about how women are always pushed into dichotomies. I wondered cynically how soon someone would write about the new Brontë films by declaring Jane Austen passé….
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Film & TV In Defense of Jane Eyre’s Rochester
My mom handed me a copy of “Jane Eyre” when I was 10, after she had finished re-reading it herself. Despite some rough going at first, I pushed my way through it and have a distinct memory of finishing it behind my prayerbook in the women’s section of an Orthodox synagogue in Rochester, N.Y. At…
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Culture Jewish Men Stand Up for Reproductive Rights
I was among some 6,000 reproductive-rights advocates who attended a rally for women’s health over the weekend to stand up for Planned Parenthood and a woman’s right to choose in the face of the most dangerous political assault on women’s rights we’ve seen in years. The signs in the crowd were witty, the long and…
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Life Does Generation Y Have a Union Problem?
Jewish women have a long and storied history in the American labor and worker’s rights movement, from Emma Goldman to Rose Schneiderman to Betty Friedan (yep, she was a union rabble-rouser first) and beyond. This excellent article at the Jewish Women’s Archive gives a partial overview of Jewish women’s involvement in the movement: the good,…
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