Prime Ribs: Gwyneth and Kabbalah; Knesset’s ‘Shiksa’ Debate

By Elissa Strauss April 1, 2011

Apparently a love for Kabbalah runs in the family. Contact Music is reporting that in an upcoming episode of “Who Do You Think You Are?” Gwyneth Paltrow discovers that her great-great-great grandfather was a master of Kabbalah.

In other celebrity Kabbalah news, The Kabbalah Centre has apparently sent out an email to its members explaining that it has formally ended its relationship with Madonna’s charity, Raising Malawi, which the IRS is rumored to be investigating and is being sued by villagers.

The Knesset Ethics Committee is set to debate the use of the word shiksa, a generally derogatory term for a non-Jewish woman. (Reread a Sisterhood contributor’s plea to curb the use of that word.)

Gloria Steinem gives an icon-worthy interview to BlogHer, in which she discusses ways to get girls interested in feminism, and the very real existence of a professional “maternal wall.”

Alina Trieger, who last year became the second-ever female rabbi ordained in Germany, is causing a stir in her native Ukraine, according to the Kyiv Post. Apparently Orthodox Jews there have taken to protesting her ordination. One of her detractors is quoted as saying that a woman is like ” … a diamond ring. You wouldn’t use it to crack nuts, would you? It is too precious.” And he goes onto say, “The main career for a woman is her family. We are against women building careers. Not because we look down on them but because we value them very much.”

In the Los Angeles Jewish Journal, Rachel Heller writes about Jewish women who choose single motherhood — and how these women are finding support in their local Jewish communities.

Over at Tablet, Dvora Meyers writes eloquently about her decision to use the wedding fund amassed by her Orthodox mother to pay back student loans. Meyers explains, “This past summer, I couldn’t stop thinking about the fund. Why did I have to wait until I got married? What if I never got married? If the point of this money was to increase my happiness by giving me the wedding of my dreams — well, I had other ideas about what would make me happy. I kept repeating these arguments to myself until I almost believed them.”

Elissa Strauss has written for the Forward over a number of years. She is a regular contributor to CNN, whose work has been published in a number of publications including The New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and Longreads.

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