Life

Digest: WSJ on Sara Hurwitz; Bat Mitzvah Girl in a Catsuit

By Gabrielle Birkner April 23, 2010

The Sisterhood Digest:

• In advance of next week’s RCA convention, at which women’s leadership is slated to be discussed,The Wall Street Journal has a piece on the maharat-rabba-back-to-maharat debate.

• Rachel Lester, a 15-year-old who attends a Modern Orthodox high school, has been elected Los Angeles’ youngest-ever public representative.

• The New York Post reports on the rise of million-dollar bar and bat mitzvahs. Among the lavish affairs that the paper details is one bat mitzvah at which the guest of honor emerged from behind purple lamé curtains “dressed in a cropped circus ringleader jacket — a duplicate of the one worn by Britney Spears on her ‘Circus’ tour — a top hat, and fishnet stockings. A troupe of Cirque du Soleil performers surrounded her…” and another in which the bat mitzvah girl “descended from the ceiling of Cipriani Wall Street harnessed to a wire and dressed in a catsuit. Then she was serenaded by Jon Bon Jovi for 45 minutes.”

• A new exhibit on Jewish ritual baths at the Jewish Museum in Hohenems, Austria, “plays with issues of purity in a country where anti-immigrant rhetoric is part of the political debate and the ‘cleansing’ of Jews once meant more than going to the mikvah,” Ruth Ellen Gruber writes on Tablet

• Our very own Shmooze blog has the story of how Orthodox basketball fans and feminists have teamed up to ensure that Israeli basketball teams are not forced to employ cheerleaders.

• And why, as the 50th anniversary of the birth-control pill approaches, do nearly half of all pregnancies remain unplanned?

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