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
-
Sisterhood Call For Submissions
Hello and welcome to the Sisterhood, a blog at the Forward, a venerable Jewish publication based in New York, but with contributors around the world. Want to write for us? Fabulous! The Basics -Please email pitches to Batya Ungar-Sargon and Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt, at [email protected] and [email protected] -As “Sisterhood” would suggest, the blog has a women’s…
-
The GOP Picked a Hypocritical Moment For an Anti-Porn Crusade
I don’t believe in kinkshaming – sexpert shorthand for demeaning people for their personal sexual proclivities. Whatever turns people on is their own business, as long as they honor consent. Although the most recent news cycle has spawned thousands of “golden showers” jokes, the act Trump is claimed to have enjoyed is not the problem….
-
German Court Ponders Whether Synagogue-Burning Is Always Anti-Semitic, Decides Nah
If there were ever a clear act of anti-Semitism, it would be a synagogue torching in Germany. Attacking a synagogue in Europe is about as definitively anti-Jewish, as versus anti-Zionist, as it gets. And Germany! Case closed, one might imagine. Not so: In the Jerusalem Post, Benjamin Weinthal reports that a court decision in Wuppertal…
The Latest
-
Israeli Court Ruling Gives Women Long-Sought Access to ‘Sacred Space’ at Western Wall
Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel famously made a distinction between sacred space and sacred time. Jews – who for much of history were itinerant, kicked out of one country, and expelled from another – sanctified time, unlike Christians, who sanctified space. Sacred space took a back seat to sacred time and Shabbat, he argued, no matter…
-
Links for Later: Lepenisation Edition
-What’s French far-right politician Marine Le Pen doing at Trump Tower? Drinking a warm beverage out of a paper cup like some kind of American? I believe this isn’t my first time introducing Sisterhood readers to a certain French word: lepénisation, a (real) word used to describe the influence of the far-right Le Pen family…
-
Jewish Women Well Placed to Help Sort Out Conflicts Over Women’s March on Washington
Women. Remember women? We were #trending for a while there. But then Hillary Clinton, woman, lost the presidential election, and all that women stuff got returned to the niche concerns folder. That was on the main stage. On the ragged square-inch platform where women concerned with women-specific issues talk amongst ourselves, the conversation continued and…
-
President Obama’s Farewell Speech Made the Best of Strange Circumstances
It began, as evenings usually do, with a downpour (sorry) of pee jokes on Twitter. By the time I’d just about sorted out the background (a dubious source; Russia; the president-elect mixing hatred of his predecessor and a predilection), President Obama was about to give his farewell speech. And so my Twitter feed went from…
-
Meet the Women Who Use Snarky Ad Campaigns to ‘Save Judaism’
For almost two decades, Archie Gottesman and Stacy Stuart wrote the snarky ad campaigns for Manhattan Mini Storage that reached cult status with New Yorkers: “Why leave a city that has six professional sports teams, and also the Mets?,” one read. Another: “Let your personality be the reason people don’t want to come to your…
-
HBO’s ‘Bright Lights’ Documentary Brings Comfort to Mourning Fan of Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds
Six months ago, I wrote an open letter to Carrie Fisher, for the Sisterhood, asking Fisher and her mother Debbie Reynolds to Mother’s Day lunch with me and my mother at Steven Spielberg’s mother’s restaurant on Los Angeles’s Pico Boulevard. The abruptness of their deaths was a shock. “It’s a tragedy,” my own still vibrant,…
-
In Defense of Expressing (Career) Jealousy
In a Buzzfeed excerpt of the new anthology Scratch, about the financial side of writing, Emily Gould describes the pressure on women writers (in the NYC publishing world) to be likable. As someone on the periphery of the world Gould describes, I found the essay both fascinating and a bit terrifying. It had never occurred…
-
In Essay, Novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld Reconsiders Her Class Origins
I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent New York Times essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld. In “Notes on the Upper Muddle,” Rosenfeld describes imagining she “hailed from the lower end of the middle class,” only to realize later in life that she had grown up “a bona fide member of the bourgeoisie.” She’d failed to…
Most Popular
- 1
News What a Secretary of State Marco Rubio would mean for American Jews and Israel
- 2
News Your complete guide to Trump’s Jewish advisers and pro-Israel cabinet
- 3
Fast Forward Trump AG nominee Matt Gaetz has left a trail of antisemitic comments
- 4
Opinion Trump’s first picks are die-hard Israel supporters, mocking the pro-Palestinian protest vote
In Case You Missed It
-
Fast Forward Biden administration sanctions Israeli settler group, in move that Trump could reverse
-
Culture Is RFK about to ban goyslop — and what on earth is that?
-
Fast Forward Why Neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the U.S.
-
Yiddish אַ זעלטענע זאַך אין פּאַריז — אַ קאָנפֿערענץ בלויז וועגן די ליטוואַקעסA rare event in Paris — a conference just about the Litvaks
צוליב דעם וואָס ס׳רובֿ פּאַריזער אַשכּנזים שטאַמען פֿון פּוילן, קומט די ליטוויש־ייִדישע קולטור נישט אָפֿט צו רייד
-
Shop the Forward Store
100% of profits support our journalism