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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How Breastfeeding Israeli Marathon Runner Went From Olympic Hero to Scapegoat
Within less than six months, Lonah Chemtai Korlima has gone from being embraced by the public as she fought the bureaucracy to obtain Israeli citizenship to facing a storm of criticism over her performance at the Olympics. Chemtai arrived in Israel as an employee of the Kenyan consulate and later married track coach Dan Salpeter….
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Orthodox Synagogue Hires Female ‘Rabbanit’ in First for Israel
— In a first for an Orthodox congregation in Israel, a woman has been hired as a spiritual leader at a Jerusalem synagogue. Karmit Feintuch will serve at the Ramban Synagogue in the Old City alongside Rabbi Benny Lau, The Jerusalem Post reported Monday. She will have the title “rabbanit.” A committee of the religious Zionist synagogue in…
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Israeli Women Inch Toward Gains in Religious Divorce Struggle
(JTA) — In this case, the sins of the son are the sins of the father. Israel’s Supreme Rabbinical Court this month sentenced a haredi Orthodox man to 30 days in jail for pressuring his son to withhold a divorce from his wife for more than a decade. By upholding a lower rabbinical court decision,…
The Latest
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I Grew Up in South Korea — Here’s Why I’m Embracing Judaism
I grew up in South Korea until the age of 15, which was when I moved to Ohio to go to a boarding school. South Korea has less than 100 Jews out of a 50 million population, which is composed of 99.9% Koreans. I did read comic books based on the Talmud when I was…
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Engaging Millenial Jews in Chicago with a Boutique Approach to Jewish Life
The posts on The New Spirituality blog are responses to Rabbi Sid Schwarz’s lead essay in his book, Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Future (Jewish Lights). In that essay, which was posted on this site on May 5, 2016, Schwarz argues that any organization that hopes to speak to the next…
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How I Fell in Love With a Nice Jewish Boy Named Christian While in Israel
On the first day of our semester-long Israel program, Chris and I met on the bus. But it’s safe to say that our relationship was not nurtured on wheels, but rather, on foot. Living at the Hebrew University campus, we always had an extra-long walk to our Shabbat hosts. We’d walk along the light rail…
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On the Jewish Valentine’s Day, Creating a Crowdsourced Map of Jerusalem’s Love Stories
The modern city of Jerusalem has been described many ways — divided, religious, tense and inspiring — but romantic isn’t one typically one of them. Now, in time for the Jewish love holiday of Tu b’Av on August 19, the Jerusalem municipality is promoting Jerusalem as a city of love by creating a crowd-sourced map…
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8 Quirkiest Facts About Tu B’Av — the ‘Jewish Valentine’s Day’ You Never Heard Of
Tu B’Av is the quirky Jewish older brother of Valentine’s Day. Here’s what you need to know about this ancient day of love: This romantic holiday used to be the Second Temple period version of a singles mixer. Jewish women would go dancing in the vineyards, according to the Talmud, and unmarried men would go…
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These Hasidic Men Are Breaking Boundaries — By Designing Bikinis
Call it an anomaly, but the brains behind the splashy, blinged-out bikini swimsuit line Beach Gal, are two Hasidic men. Barry Glick, 30 and Saul Samet, 34 work out of an office in Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, designing trendy high-end bathing suits with detachable accessories like beads, seashells and fringes. “It isn’t…
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The Secret to Making My Mixed Marriage Work
“I know my husband uses the microwave on Shabbat,” a friend told me, after I shared my story of being in a mixed secular-religious marriage, “but he makes sure to do it while I’m out of the house at shul.” While this bifurcated approach may work in the short term, where the less observant partner…
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Bambi Sheleg, Lone Gentle Voice in Israeli Media Wilderness, Dies at 58
Bambi Sheleg, an Israeli journalist who devoted her life to healing the divisions in Israeli society after Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination, died on August 15 after a prolonged illness at age 58, Haaretz reported. Soft-spoken and humble, Sheleg cut a drastically different figure from Israel’s hotheaded media personalities. It was an ethos she brought…
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