Sarah Seltzer
By Sarah Seltzer
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Life Begging for Boundaries
The High Holidays are a beautiful but complicated time for me. Besides Passover and Hanukkah, which I pretty much celebrate the same way each year, the Days of Awe are the only time when I get “the itch” to observe, the only time when I feel like if I don’t do something Jewish and highly…
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Life A ‘Vows’ Column Acknowledges Abortion
There was something a little bit different about a “Vows” column that showed up in last weekend’s New York Times. One chapter in a long, hurdle-filled, but ultimately fruitful story of love between athletes Faith Rein and Udonis Haslem was the termination of a pregnancy — an abortion that led to the blossoming of a…
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Life Judging Miley Cyrus’ Sexed Up VMA Performance
The internet brouhaha over Miley Cyrus’ fascinating and disturbing performance at the VMAs — the tongue! the teddy bears! the awful molesting of her backup dancer! — has reached maximum overexposure. My social media feed became a stream of long think pieces, most of them searing and brilliant. I don’t want to repeat what’s been…
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Culture As Teens Defect from Shul, Congregations Find Ways to Revamp Programming
At Reform Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, Mass., high school students can go on weekend wilderness adventure trips in lieu of attending Hebrew school. At North Shore Congregation Israel, a Reform synagogue in the Chicago area, they can join a musical group where they jam together — and prepare to lead an alternative High Holy…
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Life Why Alice Walker and Michigan Are Both Wrong
Alice Walker and the University of Michigan Center for Education for Women — which disinvited her from a speaking engagement at its 50th anniversary celebration, as the Sisterhood’s Erika Dreifus recently wrote about, then later re-invited her to speak at a public forum on campus — are both misguided. It was foolish of Alice Walker…
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Life Feminism’s Race Problem Surfaces (Again)
Last week Twitter blew up with the hashtag #solidarityisforwhitewomen. The discussion began after a notoriously abusive “male feminist” had a very frightening and nasty public breakdown. But the hashtag itself, started by blogger Mikki Kendall, contained tweets expressing frustration, hurt and, at times, some withering intellectual takedowns of aspects of mainstream white feminism — and…
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Life Opting Back In Reveals the Perils of Opting Out
When women stay home with the kids, men may start to view them differently. That’s one of the many takeaways from Judith Warner’s revelatory second look at the “opt-out generation” a decade later, published this weekend in the New York Times Magazine. A particularly noteworthy quote came from the spouse of one of the women…
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Life Acknowledging Privilege, Surrendering Struggle
I recognize Caroline Rothstein’s tears. So, probably, do a lot of well-meaning progressive Jews. Those tears of guilt and misunderstanding are the outward manifestation of an inner struggle to accept, as she writes, being both inside and outside: oppressed and privileged. Today, Ashkenazi and some Sephardic Jews in America are white. We weren’t always, but…
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Holy Ground A Jewish farmer broke ground on a synagogue in an Illinois cornfield. His neighbors showed up to help.
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point
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Opinion I discovered anti-Zionism at the University of Michigan. I’m glad it lives on there
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Opinion An alarming new battleground in campus fights over Israel
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Music He may be country music royalty, but his heart belongs to Leonard Cohen
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News Amid Jerusalem’s Flag March, police remove activists aiding Palestinians
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Opinion I run The Jewish Theological Seminary. Here’s the real story about President Isaac Herzog speaking at our commencement
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Opinion Outrage over Nicholas Kristof’s op-ed on sexual assault of Palestinians is missing the point