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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For Ex-CNN Anchor Who Converted, Judaism Sharpens Focus On Kids
(JTA) — “The public school system in this country is broken,” says Campbell Brown, education-reform advocate and former NBC and CNN news anchor. It’s this sentiment that led Campbell to create The Seventy Four, a nonprofit, nonpartisan educational news site launching Monday. The name refers to the 74 million school-age children in the United States….
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A Nazi Refugee Transforms Her Trauma Through Art
After Swiss psychiatrist and psychologist Carl Jung died in 1961, his family kept a manuscript of his “Red Book,” a dream journal which he said recorded his “confrontation with the unconscious” and which the New York Times would later call “the Holy Grail of the unconscious,” locked away in a bank vault. Family members were…
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Lessons of Tselofehad Resound in Modern-Day Botswana
While most of us take women’s inheritance rights for granted, women in many countries in our contemporary world are still caught in a thicket of competing national, regional, local, ethnic, tribal, and religious systems. Land titles and inheritance rights are vital in helping them achieve economic security. Even when secular laws grant them equality, social…
The Latest
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Rabbi Finds Her Place in Big Sky Country
(JTA) – Until last year, Rabbi Francine Green Roston was among the Conservative movement’s rising stars. The first woman in the movement to head a congregation with more than 500 members, Roston, the spiritual leader of Congregation Beth El in South Orange, New Jersey, also published Op-Eds in local newspapers, gave talks at the Jewish…
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Taking Back Ownership of Women’s Sexuality in Judaism
Elana Sztokman is one of the most proactive Jewish feminist thinkers on the scene today. An award-winning author of three books on gender equality in the Jewish world, a PhD in sociology and a former executive director of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Association (JOFA), Dr. Sztokman seeks the edge. This past spring, she inaugurated a…
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Aly Raisman’s Nude Photoshoot Isn’t As Scandalous As You Think
In October 1977, Barbra Streisand asked, “What’s a nice Jewish girl like me doing on the cover of Playboy?” Now with Jewish two-time Olympic medalist Aly Raisman posing naked for ESPN The Magazine’s Annual “Body Issue,” we’re asking a similar question. “It sounds like a Jewish mother’s nightmare,” writes JTA’s Andrew Tobin about Raisman’s photo…
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In Israel, Sexism Starts Early
It was the end-of-year party at my daughter’s religious preschool in the Israeli city of Modi’in, where we live. Raising cardboard Torahs aloft, around 15 children jumped up and down beneath a tallit held up by some of the dads. In a mixed-gender class of 35, not one of those children was female. The theme…
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How to Fix Orthodox Conversion in America
Last year I discovered that my rabbi, Barry Freundel, filmed me naked while I was in the mikveh bathroom preparing to convert (during a “practice dunk”) and while converting to Judaism. After outrage and sorrow, I felt fear. Fear for the integrity of my conversion with his name at the top of my documents. At…
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A Single Mother Takes On the Chief Rabbinate
Martina Ragacova had never planned to become the symbol of a growing uprising against Israel’s draconian conversion laws. All this Czech-born woman wanted was to have her conversion recognized so that she could live and work in Israel like any other Jew. Neither did Ragacova have any intention of challenging the Orthodox-run establishment that controls…
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The Rosa Parks of Israeli Cemeteries
Susan Ahyed’s long fight for justice, culminating in an Supreme Court victory last week, began with a rather morbid thought. A former New Yorker, Ahyed had been attending an old friend’s funeral in her hometown of Netanya in early 2011, when she suddenly noticed the signs pointing women in one direction and men in the…
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In Israel, Love is Not Love
In his characteristically crisp manner, President Barak Obama summed up the recent US Supreme Court decision acknowledging the right of gays to marry: . The Constitution is about individual liberty. And change is possible. Good for you, citizens and residents of the United States of America. An important job, well done. And while this Constitutional…
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