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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What Would Tevye Say (About Santa Claus)?
Illustration by Lior Zaltzman When a grown woman and her seventy-something mother engage in yearly debates about the existence of Santa, I think we can agree: there’s a problem. Of course, my mother believes the problem is mine, while I tag her as the source of the annual angst. But who’s telling this story? My…
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Gertrude Weill Klein’s Socialist Yikhes
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. If Socialists borrowed more from Jewish dynastic traditions, and had been in the habit of producing a yikhes briv charting one’s pedigree, Gertude Weil Klein’s would be pretty impressive. Her father, Joseph…
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The Women of ‘Letters to Afar’
Oszmiana, Poland. Still from Polish home movie c. 1920s-30s. From the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research Most of the figures who appear in Péter Forgács’ collages of films, which American Jews took in the 1920s and 1930s of family and friends in Poland, are men. They don and remove hats; they horse…
The Latest
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Learning to Conquer My Daughter’s OCD — And My Own
Photograph via wikicommons (JTA) — As I lay in the hospital bed with my new daughter Sonya’s slippery skin pressed to mine, I knew this would be the scariest day of my life. It was the first day in 25 years that I ever willingly skipped prayers. I’d been in treatment for severe obsessive-compulsive disorder…
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Embrace Changing Jewish Family — Don’t Denigrate It
Illustration by Lior Zaltzman In last week’s editorial, Jane Eisner once again fretted about the state of contemporary American Judaism, most pointedly about the purported declining fertility rate amongst non-Orthodox Jews as touted by the infamous (and frankly overplayed) 2013 Pew survey. While she proposed no actual, feasible solution to this problem (or rather, this…
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Why Do We Skip the Sex in the Bible?
Lot And His Daughters by Joachim Antonisz Wtewael (c.1600) If you ever wonder why a movie got the rating it did, there’s a box at the bottom of every movie poster that explains not only what the rating is, but also its reason. So, if you object to violence but not sex, or drugs but…
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Forward Welcomes Sisterhood Editor Sarah Breger
Ever since our Naomi Zeveloff moved to Israel in August to be a full-time Forward correspondent, we have been looking for the right person to take over one of her important duties: editing The Sisterhood blog. I’m happy to announce that we have found that person in Sarah Breger. Sarah is a skilled journalist —…
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5 Stories About Dinah Way Crazier Than ‘The Red Tent’
Seduction of Dinah, Daughter of Leah by James Tissot For some, Anita Diamant’s retelling of the biblical Dinah story — and adapted Lifetime miniseries — takes too many liberties with the biblical text. But Diamant’s version of events is almost banal compared to stories regarding Dinah found in midrash and other biblical commentaries. Here are…
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I Don’t Want Kids, Thanks for Asking. And Asking.
Creative Commons I know you said “please,” Jane Eisner. But the answer is still no, I will not have a baby because you’re nervous about Jewish birthrates. I’m not going to have a baby, period, which I’ve said about 1 million times, on this site and others. This is the thing about people who don’t…
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Her Yiddish Majesty
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. In 1926, Berta Gersten was photographed to publicize a play she was starring in called ‘Gevald—When Will He Die?’ a three act comedy by Forverts humorist Khone Gottesfeld, produced by the Yiddish…
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7 Things To Know About Helena Rubinstein
Helena Rubinstein reads in her bed in the late 1930s. Copyright Getty Images My first introduction to Helena Rubinstein came in the form of a small, white tube with a red and fuchsia logo that was no bigger than my thumb. It was waterproof mascara, hidden away in my mother’s bathroom drawer. She never actually…
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