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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Biblical Heroine Serah bat Asher, a “Nasty Woman” For Our Times
During the first month of the Trump administration, my thoughts turn to Serah bat Asher, the immortal witness to Jewish history. Because of her many good deeds, rabbinical tradition ascribes to her eternal life as one of the seven who entered the Garden of Eden. We first encounter Serah bat Asher in the Torah (Genesis…
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Can a Personal Essay be Honest and Self-Aware?
What does the ideal personal essay look like? “Honest” comes to mind. Also: “self-aware.” The ideal personal essay is extremely honest and impeccably self-aware. Or is it? What if those two goals are mutually exclusive? While a personal essay can be both of those things, and the great ones are both, something happens when the…
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British Judge Forbids Transgender Ultra-Orthodox Mom from Contact With Her Children
In the New Statesman, Etan Smallman reports on an tragic — and evidently unprecedented* — case in Manchester, England. A judge, Peter Jackson, ruled that a trans woman parent cannot see her five children because her estranged wife is part of the Haredi community there, and the family might be ostracized if a second mother,…
The Latest
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Today We Are All Ma’ams: A Call for Old Lady Feminism
In an easily-overlooked story, Nebraska state senator Bill Kintner, a Republican, resigned after retweeting a photo of Women’s March protestors bearing anti-sexual-assault placards. “Ladies, I think you’re safe,” went the accompanying text, a reference to… gee, I wonder what might have been being referenced here? The point was that the protestors in question (who are,…
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Young Jewish Woman Questions Trump’s Supreme Court Pick
On Bustle, Leanne Gale, who is (her words) “a young Jewish feminist organizer,” explains why her identity and family history have led her to oppose Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch: “[A]s a Jewish woman, I see him as a direct threat to my bodily autonomy and religious liberty. Gorsuch is known to be anti-choice, and…
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An Open Letter to Ivanka Trump, From One Jewish Mother to Another
Dear Ivanka-Yael, I’ve been wanting to write. It’s been almost two weeks since you became our first Jewish first daughter, but as a fellow Jewish mother I thought I’d wait until the kids and nanny were settled into your lovel, new D.C. home and Arabella was adjusted at Jewish Primary Day School. JPDS sounds like…
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What Jewish Singles Could Learn from Korean Dating Culture
“I know a great guy for you,” wasn’t what I had expected to hear the first time I met my language partner over coffee on a frigid winter day in Seoul. But it was something I got used to pretty quickly when I studied abroad in South Korea at 21. After growing up hearing about…
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‘White Privilege’ Essay Contest Criticized for Wrong Reasons
Updated February 3, after the Forward had spoken directly with Bari Reiner. I hoped not. Really I did. I hoped, when I saw that a woman named Bari Reiner had told an Associated Press journalist that she found it offensive to have “white privilege” as the topic of an essay contest in her Connecticut town,…
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Trailblazing Initiative Focuses on Jewish Intermarriage
I just read with interest that Hebrew College, in Massachusetts, has introduced “the first-ever graduate school of Jewish Education to establish a specialization in our Master’s Degree program and a standalone graduate certificate in Interfaith Families Jewish Engagement.” IFJE’s director is Keren McGinity, who also — full if not especially scandalous disclosure — edited an…
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Jewish Women: Reject Islamophobia. Make that: Jewish Women Reject Islamophobia.
Are you surprised to learn that the Quebec City mosque attack suspect is, among other things, an anti-feminist troll? Me neither. This particular hate overlap reeks of common-sense of course, and is also consistent with what we know about the relationship between mass shootings and misogyny. And yet Islamophobia’s proponents do enjoy portraying themselves as…
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What the Pussy Hat Debates Reveal about the Desperate Need for (Inclusive) Cis Feminism
When I first noticed concerned social media postings asking whether the pussy hats worn at the Women’s Marches (and, I can now report, by a not insignificant number of pro-immigration protestors this past weekend) had been transphobic, my thoughts quickly turned from the question at hand to, well, where anyone was getting that idea that…
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Yiddish אַ זעלטענע זאַך אין פּאַריז — אַ קאָנפֿערענץ בלויז וועגן די ליטוואַקעסA rare event in Paris — a conference just about the Litvaks
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Fast Forward Who is Marc Rowan, the Jewish investor reportedly in the running for Trump’s Treasury secretary?
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