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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New York’s First Female Crime Boss
The press called her a “Queen Among Thieves” and the person who “first put crime in America on a syndicated basis.” In 1884, The New York Times named her “the nucleus and center of the whole organization of crime in New York City.” During the Gilded Age, Fredericka Mandelbaum, a German-Jewish immigrant, rose to power…
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A First in the Jewish World
Jordan Cassway Rabbi Deborah Waxman has been many firsts in her life. She was one of the first bat mitzvahs to be celebrated on a Saturday morning in her hometown of West Hartford, Connecticut in 1979 and now she is the first female rabbi, and the first lesbian, to lead a Jewish congregational institution. Waxman,…
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Throwback Thursday: From Stalinist to US Spy
Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Seemingly waiting for her thoughts to fuse, Ruth Fischer’s photo in our archive depicts her with notepad in hand at the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1946, in a…
The Latest
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Malala Gives $50K to Gaza Schools
Getty Images Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai said she will donate $50,000 to a U.N. agency in the effort to rebuild damaged schools in Gaza. Yousafzai, an advocate for worldwide access to education, was awarded the World Children’s Prize on Wednesday and promptly said she would donate the prize money to the United Nations…
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When the Mikveh Is an Ordeal of Faith
Mayyim Hayyim Community Mikveh The first time I prepared to immerse in the mikveh, the Jewish ritual bath, I was 18 years old and four days away from my wedding. I sat naked in a white bathtub as the mikveh attendant scrubbed my back with a washcloth and a dollop of baking soda. “You’re lucky…
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The Bat Mitzvah Girl Who Made Kotel History
Bat mitzvah girl Sasha Lutt reads from a tiny Torah scroll smuggled into the Kotel / Haaretz I am sitting in front of my computer, talking via Skype with three women in Israel — Irina Lutt, her 12-year-old daughter Sasha, and Shira Pruce — who are kicking back after a day of school and work….
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So a Jewish Woman Got on an El Al Flight …
So a man boards his El Al flight from New York to Tel Aviv, but when he sees that Elana Sztokman is in the seat adjacent to his, he refuses to sit next to her. Was she holding a howling baby? Did she have a hacking cough? A touch of Ebola, maybe? No. The problem,…
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Books Throwback Thursday: Novellas About Sexy Tel Aviv
Regina Kolitz // Copyright Forward Association Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Publisher Heinrich H. Glanz created the Juedisch-Politische Bibliothek [Jewish-Political] series of books in Vienna before it was “confiscated” after Nazi Anschluss in 1938. After emigrating to…
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Gossip Queen Margo Howard Talks Serial Marriage
Margo Howard (JTA) — When your mother is the world’s most famous advice columnist you wouldn’t think you’d have to learn any lesson the hard way. But Margo Howard — daughter of the late Ann Landers and the niece of Landers’ twin sister Dear Abby (née Esther and Pauline Friedman) — had to marry four times…
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Did Rabbi Freundel Build Mikveh for Own Fantasy?
Photo by Nir Keidar/Haaretz (Haaretz) — When I first heard about Rabbi Barry Freundel’s arrest on grounds of voyeurism, I was upset, but not horrified. If the allegations are true, I thought, we have a case of a sick man who couldn’t control his sexual urges. Sad. Especially since he carries a title that would…
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After Mikveh Scandal, Make Us Feel Clean Again
It’s time for Simchat Torah, but I don’t feel much like dancing. A promise I made long ago has been broken. In the summer of 1986, I wrote what many consider the first piece about non-Orthodox women using the mikvah. Published in Lilith Magazine, in “Take Back the Waters” I proposed a feminist re-appropriation of…
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