Shoshana Kordova
By Shoshana Kordova
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Life How To ‘Marie Kondo’ Your Purim
The Purim food packages I have the fondest memory of making are the impromptu mishloach manot (as they’re called in Hebrew) that I put together as a freshman in college, when my supplies were limited to the home-baked hamentaschen my mother had mailed me in a tin, the kosher caramels available at the convenience store…
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Life A New Guide To The Mikveh — For Those Facing Infertility
Immersing in the mikveh is often portrayed by its advocates as a woman’s rebirth — not merely a religious commandment, but a spiritual experience that sustains marital harmony. Jewish tradition holds that couples are forbidden to have sex during menstruation and for a week after, until the woman immerses in a ritual bath, or mikveh,…
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Life Why Women Don’t Always Feel Welcome In Synagogue, And What We Can Do About It
There’s something compelling about the idea that as an Orthodox Jew, no matter where I am in the world, all I have to do to feel at home is find a synagogue. But after nearly four decades of as a female Jew in synagogues in the United States and Israel, I am finally, belatedly, starting…
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Life I’m Orthodox — but I’ll Never Let My Kids Use ‘Secular’ as an Insult
My oldest daughter, who is going on 9, was tossing insults at her younger sister, Moriya, heedless of my exhortations to cease and desist. The usual deprecatory remarks that fly around our Israeli apartment like arrows include “stupid,” “liar” and “crybaby,” in various combinations of Hebrew and English. This time, though, there was a zinger…
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Life The Costs of Women’s Synagogue Participation
When my family walked into our Orthodox synagogue on Monday, the first day of Sukkot, we got there in time to see women holding their own lulav and etrog and performing the processional of “hakafot” on the women’s side of the mechitza as the men made the circuit on their side. This tandem march is…
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Life In Israel, Sexism Starts Early
It was the end-of-year party at my daughter’s religious preschool in the Israeli city of Modi’in, where we live. Raising cardboard Torahs aloft, around 15 children jumped up and down beneath a tallit held up by some of the dads. In a mixed-gender class of 35, not one of those children was female. The theme…
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Life The Eshet Chayils of Facebook
Courtesy of Shoshana Kordova There’s a photo of an apron that’s been popping up in my Facebook feed recently, an apron worn by a woman with her head cropped out of the frame, an apron with big black letters that say: “Eshet F*CKIN chayil” (asterisk included). When I first saw it I just laughed, struck…
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