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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Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech May Not Change Minds But Isn’t Fueling Trumpism
OK, so I did not watch the Golden Globes, but I did find my way to Meryl Streep’s political, discussion-provoking, and controversial speech: Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump speech at The Golden Globes touches on protecting journalists RT @goldenglobes: pic.twitter.com/FTubRjDN5T — Dan Rather (@DanRather) January 9, 2017 As one would imagine, the president-elect came through on Twitter…
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The Self-Deprecation Paradox
The most popular story on the New Yorker’s website at the time of my writing is a Daily Shouts piece by (Jewish!) humor writer Bess Kalb: “A Selection of the 30 Most Disappointing Under 30. It’s good. The piece ends on a self-deprecatory note, adding her own name and age (“Bess Kalb, twenty-nine”) to the…
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The Third Neapolitan Novel Ended How?! A (Spoiler-Filled) Reaction to Ferrante
The first and second Neapolitan novels inspired me to write fiction of my own. The third had the opposite effect: If Elena Ferrante can write that well, why bother? It’s hard for me to say whether Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is better than the previous two installments, or whether the issue was…
The Latest
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Single Orthodox Women Could Be Happy — If Only We’d Let Them
Ever since reviewing Ruth Whippman’s book, America the Anxious, I’m attuned to the concept of happiness, and to its centrality in American life. I thought of it most recently when reading Heather Havrilesky’s recent Ask Polly column, “Ask Polly: I’m Pretending I’m Happy Single, But I’m Not!” The letter-writer may look like a proud, independent…
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Tiffany Charm Bracelet Evokes Memories of Bat Mitzvahs Past
What does “Tiffany” mean to you? Is it a place to breakfast with Audrey Hepburn? Or does it evoke the plight of the younger Trump daughter? There’s yet another meaning to the brand, which Joanna Rothkopf lays out at Jezebel: upscale bat mitzvah gift bracelets. First, Chavie Lieber had tweeted the following: OK, I’M SORRY…
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Anti-Oppression ‘Cleanse’ Takes Activism in the Wrong Direction
Drawing a connection to the Safety Pin Box (patronized by at least one woman rabbi, and discussed here earlier; see also Jesse Singal’s critique for New York magazine), Slate’s Christina Cauterucci highlights another new project along the same lines: The Complicity Cleanse: “Billed as an ‘anti-oppression diet,’ the cleanse runs from Jan. 1 to Jan…
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Second Thoughts From a Member of Pantsuit Nation
Full disclosure #1: I am a member of Pantsuit Nation, that Hillary Clinton adoring Facebook group that has, more than anything else in the past few months, served as testimony to the viral power of the internet and the upside to armchair activism. Full disclosure #2: I loved (past-tense) Pantsuit Nation. For weeks, just after…
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Links for Later: New Years 2017 Edition
So 2016 ended, after all that. 2017 thus far? A mixed bag: -Lindy West has had it with Twitter trolls and, more to the point, with Twitter’s failure to crack down on trollishness as the phenomenon moved from the platform to, uh, the presidency. –Exercise is exclusionary. Especially the kind that involves putting on high-end…
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Vice Video Uses Woman Rabbi as Exhibit A of White Liberal Guilt
Via journalist Jesse Singal’s Twitter, I found one heck of a recent Vice story and video about something called the Safety Pin Box, a subscription service for white people who want to learn how to be better allies to people of color. “This is literally everything I have been whining about about corporate woke liberalism…
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Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Lady-Lacking Reading List
As I was perusing the New York Times book reviews this weekend (yes, the section whose cover features a review by Woody Allen), I happened upon an interview with French-Jewish writer and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. As someone with an above-average interest in French and Jewish (I’ve got a doctorate in just that topic, and…
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Women of the Wall Fight Sexism With a Smuggled Menorah
A few weeks ago I ventured out into the cold, trudged over to my nearest Home Depot and bought enough PVC to redo an entire bathroom. My bathroom is just fine, thanks. So why did I do it? The truth is, the rabbis made me do it. Let me explain. Hanukkah, the festival of lights,…
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