Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Digest: When Is It Okay to Laugh at Jewish Women?

The Sisterhood Digest:

• Haaretz profiles Tzvia Greenfield of Meretz, the first Haredi female Knesset member. Greenfield, a peace activist and mother of five, says she is troubled that Orthodox women today are expected to bear more children than they were in decades past: “Large families thirty years ago was six children; now there’s 13 or 14 — from one wife.”

• The new issue of 614 is all about Jewish women in comedy; it features an interview with Fran Drescher, and an essay by Sisterhood contributor Rebecca Honig Friedman, in which she opines on this question: “When is it OK to laugh at, or with, Jewish women?”

• MyJewishLearning is in search of a name for its soon-to-be-launched Web site geared toward parents of children ages 0-5. Email [email protected] with your ideas. The person who suggests the winning entry gets a $500 American Express gift card. That will buy you half of a Bugaboo stroller. Happy brainstorming!

• There’s good news for single Israeli women who conceived using donor sperm, and for divorcées and widows raising children on their own. Israel’s Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry has raised their stipends for day care, early childhood education and tutoring — benefits that are available to single mothers for three years after she returns to work.

• On Zeek, Jewish Renewal Rabbi Chaya Gusfield discusses why she embraces the moniker “lesbian rabbi.”

• The Los Angeles Times tells a heart-rending story of a Lubavitch woman who was severely disabled while giving birth to triplets four years ago. Now, her ex-husband is denying the woman visitation rights and is asking for child support, to be paid from her multimillion-dollar malpractice settlement.

• The Jewish Journal of Los Angeles has an absorbing Q&A with Ms. Magazine founder Gloria Steinem. In it, Steinem discusses the Superwoman myth that just won’t die, the destructive nature of female guilt and her own Jewish heritage. She even quotes from the “Book of Ruth.”

• Tablet weighs in on the rise of the female nerd.

• Over at Jewcy, Emily Goldsher writes a love letter, of sorts, to actress Sarah Michelle Gellar, whose “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” character she related to, as a young yeshiva day school student.

• Our incomparable Web producer (and Sisterhood contributor) Nadja Spiegelman is out with a new children’s book that makes learning science fun. “Zig and Wikki in Something Ate My Homework”(TOON Books) is geared towards kids ages 4–8, and contains all sorts of fascinating facts about the animal kingdom. We’re so kvelling.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Explore

Most Popular

In Case You Missed It

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.