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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The ‘Shidduch Crisis’ Has Led to an Orthodox Obsession with Female Beauty
“We usually don’t take a car,” the yeshiva boy says to the driver, an older Irish man with a hearty laugh and a dapper straw hat. “But the lady was inappropriately attired (he winks at his date), in her heels I mean, so we had to…” The yeshiva boy’s date cuts him off and leans forward to the…
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What the VMAs Taught Us About Female Friendship
On Sunday night, Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood,” a song about friends-turned-enemies, won Video of the Year at the MTV Video Music Awards. The video features a parade of female celebrities (Lena Dunham, Karlie Kloss, Ellen Pompeo, Jessica Alba, Cindy Crawford, Cara Delevingne) that highlights Swift’s “squad,” her group of female friends she has been promoting…
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When High-Profile Sexual Predators Find High-Profile Support
Many members of the Jewish community are scratching their heads these days about the seemingly bizarre decision by the board of the Riverdale Jewish Center to keep on Jonathan Rosenblatt as their communal rabbi despite significant evidence that he has been acting inappropriately in his leadership role. To be fair there are people like Dr…
The Latest
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How We Lost Leah
At first reading, the Torah appears essentially to ignore the Leah in telling the pivotal story of Jacob and his complicated family. The biblical text affords Leah only two lines of dialogue (Genesis. 30:15-16) and a single, ambiguous word of physical description — Leah had rachot [tender] eyes, Gen. 29:17 — scarcely the kind of…
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Why the Morality Police Needs to Stop Judging Ashley Madison
Ahh, nothing like the smell of Schadenfreude in the morning. The Ashley Madison saga continues as CEO Noel Biderman after a third wave of client and website data was dumped, exposing Biderman’s very own alleged extramarital affair along with the other 37 million users of the adultery website. According to BuzzFeed News, nearly 300 leaked…
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The Jewish Woman Who’s Seriously Planning To Live on Mars
(j weekly via JTA) — Dr. Sheyna Gifford — a Jewish medical doctor, science journalist, astrophysics researcher and space enthusiast — is preparing to live on Mars. Gifford, 36, will join five other crew members in the NASA-funded Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS) habitat for a simulated space mission to Mars, slated to…
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Erasing Women From Photos — and the Conversation
The annoying thing about the Internet (or one of them) is that when ridiculous posts go viral, the kind of posts that are full of lies and misconceptions, you may find yourself in the no-win situation of figuring out how to respond. This is especially true when those posts are about you, or about something…
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Why You Don’t Need ‘Female Viagra’
Let’s start by de-mythologizing flibanserin, approved by the FDA last week. Despite headlines to the contrary, this drug, to be marketed as Addyi, has nothing whatsoever to do with Viagra. Erectile dysfunction drugs are purely physiological i.e. they give men erections. For women, the “little pink pill” has long been an elusive profit-making dream for…
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Washington Jewish Women Reclaim Mikvah with Mural
(Washington Jewish Week via JTA) – When prominent Washington rabbi Barry Freundel was arrested last year for secretly videotaping dozens of women using the mikvah adjacent to his Orthodox synagogue, the sense of sacredness of the ritual of mikvah immersion was shattered for some local Jewish women. Local artist Rena Fruchter recently spearheaded a community…
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Why I’m OK Staying Out of The ‘Orthodox Boys’ Club’
This week I read Rachel Rosenthal’s open letter to Rabbi Willig expressing her frustration and anger about his views on women learning Talmud. I have sympathy for Ms. Rosenthal’s frustration and agree with her that it is in everyone’s best interest to have smart, educated observant Jewish women. But Rabbi Willig’s main point was that…
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Spreading Shabbat Joy from the Upper East Side Around the World
(JTA) — To Jewish parents of young children on Manhattan’s Upper East Side, Karina Zilberman is something of a celebrity. She is the tall, blonde, guitar-strumming founder of the 92nd Street Y’s Shababa, a multigenerational musical celebration of Shabbat whose name is a mash-up of the modern Hebrew word “sababa” (meaning “cool” or “chill”) and…
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