Welcome to the Forward’s coverage of the robust lives of American Jews. Here there’s a little of everything about the multifaceted world of Jewish life. There are light-hearted Jewish celebrity stories and shocking Jewish celebrity news. Food is also plentiful,…
Life
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Meet The Eligible Israel Haters Of Online Dating
When I moved to a new, Midwestern city to attend graduate school, I did what many young, single people do: I joined a dating website. After a few weeks, I began to notice that the men who messaged me tended to fit a certain type: bookish, serious, and strongly invested in being seen as intellectual…
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Justin Trudeau, Ivanka Trump to Discuss Women in Business. A Feminist Miracle?
Justin Trudeau is two things at once: a real Canadian politician and a dreamboat.* Americans, at least according to the Canadians I know (and I think they’re right about this) are familiar mainly with the dreamboat qualities. Qualities including: a) he is very beautiful, and b) he is not Donald Trump. A Canadian Liberal politician…
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Orthodox Women Rabbis ‘Ruin’ Judaism — Really?
First I saw the headline: “Women Rabbis Ruin Judaism for All Women.” Then the bio, a photo and name confirming a woman author, Rahel Rocklin. The ensuing Times of Israel post was bound to be an odd one, but I could not have guessed how odd, or, rather, odd how. -It is an argument about…
The Latest
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An Orthodox Trans Woman from Kentucky Finds Acceptance (and a Shul) in Chicago
My reality as I knew it ended in early November 2015. Even though I was assigned male at birth, I came to terms with things I started to realize in middle school, if not elementary school: I’m a woman. Accepting all of this wasn’t easy and when you live in a very small Orthodox community…
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How Trump’s Nordstrom Tweet Took the Aspiration Out of Ivanka’s Brand
Imagine the following: You have an important business client, but they’re wavering. There’s a setback in your arrangement. You’re dealing with it. You’re on top of things. And then suddenly, boom, there’s your father — you are, for the purposes of argument, an adult woman, married with several kids — decides to tweet his disappointment…
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Ignore the OU — Orthodox Women Rabbis are Here to Stay
When the Orthodox Union released their statement on female clergy last week, I was not particularly upset. I was not sad, I was not angry, and I was not anxious. I felt perhaps a tinge of frustration, coupled with a disappointment that had been dulled by months and months of expectation. As a staff member…
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Cazzie David’s Instagram Inspires Envy and Admiration
The consensus is in: Everyone wants to be 23-year-old Cazzie David, Larry David’s daughter. Or at least, her life looks pretty enjoyable, as it involves lounging in the sun and mingling with comedy legends. A 2015 Schmooze post by Maia Efrem alerted readers to Cazzie’s (and sister Romy’s) glamorous Instagram presence. Well, Romy’s account is…
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Whose Fantasy is ‘Elle’ (and is Patrick Jewish)?
Because one can only watch so much Poirot, on Sunday night I saw Paul Verhoeven’s award-winner, controversial movie Elle, starring Isabelle Huppert. The film opens with a rape scene; whether the end result is exploitative, empowering, or just Art is a subject of critical debate. In a New York Times profile of Huppert, Rachel Donadio…
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Be Careful When Labeling Social-Justice Concerns ‘Bourgeois’
In an important piece in the Stranger, Dan Savage pushes back against the notion — recently resurfaced, Savage notes, in the New Yorker — that same-sex marriage was and is, in effect, a first-world problem, of interest only to wealthy gay white men, not to the LGBTQ community more generally. As Savage explains, marriage rights…
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The Hypocrisy of the Orthodox Union’s Ban on Women Clerics
I almost didn’t bother to write this piece. I’m not Orthodox, and in any case, the Orthodox Union (OU)’s recent statement barring women from serving as clergy feels like an announcement of its own obsolescence. But as a scholar of Jewish women’s history; as the executive director of the Jewish Women’s Archive which has documented…
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What’s a Nice Jewish Girl Like Julia Hahn Doing in Steve Bannon’s White House?
In the New Yorker, Andrew Marantz reports on (but is unable to directly reach) one Julia Hahn, Steve Bannon’s Breitbart-writer protégée and now a special assistant to Donald Trump, the one who’s technically the president. Hahn, whom a friend describes to Marantz as a “sweet Jewish girl from California,” is 25 and, according to known…
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