Media Roundup: Mikveh and the Single Girl, Nude Ladies Parties

Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
• “The Good Body,” a follow-up to “The Vagina Monologues” by playwright Eve Ensler, top right, centers on a Jewish woman of a certain age who undergoes surgery to make sex more pleasurable for her husband.
• Rabbi Andrew Sacks thinks more mikvehs should open their doors to non-married women.
• Jeffrey Zaslow, the Forward’s guest Bintel Brief columnist in March, is out with a new book, “The Girls from Ames” (Gotham), about the enduring friendship of 11 women who grew up together in Ames, Iowa.
• The global recession could usher more Haredi women into the workforce.
• What goes on at Israel’s Nude Ladies Parties? One writer finds out.
• Jessica Queller, bottom right, a former “Gossip Girl” writer who had a prophylactic double mastectomy after finding out she had a breast cancer gene common in Ashkenazi Jewish women, discusses her pregnancy triumph.
• Amy-Jill Levine, a Jewish woman who has become a prominent New Testament scholar, speaks with The Kansas City Jewish Chronicle about why “churches are increasingly recognizing Jesus’ Judaism.”
• Phyllis Chesler pays tribute to Holocaust heroine Irena Sendler.
• The Jerusalem Post has an essay about women behaving badly on JDate.
• The Chabad-sponsored Annual Jewish Women’s Parenting Conference, to be held May 14 in Westport, Conn., will feature Rebbitzin Esther Jungreis’s daughter Slovi Jungreis Wolff, out with the new book “Raising A Child With Soul” (St. Martin’s Griffin), and Rosalind Wiseman the author of “Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends, and Other Realities of Adolescence” (Crown, 2002).
• Israeli filmmaker Nurit Kedar’s new documentary “Chronicle of a Kidnap” focuses on the tireless work Karnit Goldwasser to free her husband, Ehud, who, in 2006, was kidnapped by Hezbollah near Israel’s Lebanese border.
Why I became the Forward’s editor-in-chief
You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.
And what a time to step into the leadership of this storied Jewish institution! For 129 years, the Forward has shaped and told the American Jewish story. I’m stepping in at an intense time for Jews the world over. We urgently need the Forward’s courageous, unflinching journalism — not only as a source of reliable information, but to provide inspiration, healing and hope.
— Alyssa Katz, editor-in-chief
