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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Not Sure What to Give This Hanukkah? Have You Considered a Rock?
It’s an annual holiday tradition to circulate and mock outrageously expensive gift guides. (Goop’s being the prime example.) But there’s a new contender: the rock-in-a-pouch. Why was Nordstrom selling a rock in a leather pouch for $85 and more to the point, why is it sold out? (Limited supply, possibly. A good rock is hard…
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Shocking but Unsurprising: White Supremacists Use Photos of Fashion Models as Twitter Avatars
If you ever find yourself trying to explain or just understand the connection between white supremacy, the abstract phenomenon anti-racists sometimes use to describe societal unfairness, and white supremacy, the thing where neo-Nazis (rebranded or otherwise) get together to heil Hitler or Trump or whomever, look no further than the bizarre story of fashion models…
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Hashtag Protests Against IDF Sexual Assault Case Inspire Backlash
With Brigadier General Ofek Buchris, an IDF officer convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault, set to receive a generous plea deal, many Israeli army veterans have taken to Facebook to protest. The most popular expression of protest entails individuals (men and women both) recounting minor infractions they engaged in while enlisted, such as unkempt…
The Latest
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Is Alexander Portnoy White?
It’s struck me lately that the American writer perhaps most deeply associated with White Male Writer-ness is one who made his name writing fiction about identity. Google “Philip Roth” and “white male” and you find an endless stream of essays that offer up Roth as a prime example of the white male literary novelist. As…
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Stop Scapegoating Feminism for Clinton’s Loss
As the election recedes in the collective memory, and as Hillary Clinton gets remembered (called it!) as a you-go-girl abandoner of makeup, what’s left in the rubble is this trickle of feminism-caused-Trump takes. Or maybe not caused, exactly — what’s posited is more that Clinton’s loss invites A Reckoning, and thus an overhaul of feminism…
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Jewish Modesty: Not Just a Matter of Skirt Length
This article originally appeared in Yiddish in the Forverts. What do we mean when we use the Hebrew term for modesty, tznius (also known as tzeniut)? A quick search on Google indicates that the concept most associated with it is how women dress. Countless materials teach Jewish girls exactly how to appear in public; others…
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The Major Jewish Holiday No One Discusses: Non-Celebration of Christmas
On “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, an adolescent Rebecca Bunch refers to herself as “half-Christmas.” In a show full of spot-on moments, this rang especially true to me, for reasons that shall, I hope, become clear. Secular Jewishness, at least in the United States, is grounded in one annual non-act: the non-celebration of Christmas. Yes, some Jews celebrate…
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Why One Holocaust Survivors’ Granddaughter Rejects Proposed Muslim Registry
In late February 1943, the Nazis rounded up the last Jews remaining in Berlin. Of these, two thousand were men married to non-Jewish women. They were interned in the Jewish community center on Rosenstrasse as they awaited deportation. Quickly, their wives began quietly gathering outside the building to learn the fate of their spouses. Over…
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‘Jackie’: Feminist Warning Tale or Tragically Beautiful Diversion?
I saw Jackie yesterday, and have to say the movie succeeds at what would almost have to be its purpose: Making audiences experience a political disaster as the personal family tragedy it also, of course, was. With the right music, the right anguished expression on the right brilliant actress (Natalie Portman), you care. The next…
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‘Rabbi Jacqueline’ Film to Put a Female Spin on a French Classic
The Mad Adventures of ‘Rabbi’ Jacob is a 1973 French comedy starring Louis de Funès. It involves — among so much else, and I don’t want to spoil it! — a racist French man and an Arab revolutionary dressing up as orthodox Jews, which, as I type this, sounds terribly problematic, but has an anti-racist…
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How Should We Feel About Natalie Portman Getting a Christmas Tree?
A commenter to my earlier post about Natalie Portman getting her first Christmas tree writes: “This is what the Forward loves, Jews that celebrate Christmas. Shame on her, a Solomon Schechter graduate who celebrates that holiday and desires a tree. The Forward hates Ivanka because she conve[r]ted to Modern Orthodoxy Judaism and [is] raising her…
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