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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Gay Surrogacy Gets a Boost in Israel
Back in 2011, I wrote about a ruling by Israel’s High Court of Justice that allowed couples that already had several children to apply to have an additional child by surrogacy. Until the ruling, preference had always been given to childless couples by Israel’s surrogacy approval committee overseeing applications and protocols. I wondered whether this…
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Q&A: "The New Soft War on Women" Authors
In their latest book, “The New Soft War on Women”, academics Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett take on the notion that the end of men is imminent — as posited in Hannah Rosin’s book. They argue that while women have made some gains, particularly early on their careers, we are still a long, long…
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Throwback Thursday: Guyana’s Jewish President
Throwback Thursday is a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Born in Chicago, Janet Rosenberg was the first female president of Guyana, the country’s first Jewish and U.S. born leader and the third woman elected as chief executive of a country in the…
The Latest
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Birth Control is Not a Cadillac
Last week, my post on why Jews should care about the Hobby Lobby contraception case, and my subsequent defense of its points, caused a furor on right-wing Twitter. The collectivist principles inherent in insurance, the fact that the Affordable Care Act’s expanded coverage is associated with President Obama, and the promotion of women’s bodily autonomy…
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The Jewish Women Who Worked Alongside Mandela
As a young Jewish woman privileged to have grown up in the new multi-racial South Africa, I like most of my fellow citizens, mourn Nelson Mandela’s passing like that of a family member. Mandela brought out the best in those around him. Women and children always held a special place in our beloved Madiba’s heart,…
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Edie Windsor on TIME’s Top Five
Edie Windsor, the plaintiff who toppled the Defense of Marriage Act before the Supreme Court, was named the number three runner up for Person of the Year by TIME magazine; she’s also the only woman on the list of five. (Number one was Pope Francis, and number two was NSA leaker Edward Snowden.) The Forward…
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Pressure for Mastectomies
The recent New York Times story about breast cancer in Israel focused, in part, on the low percentage of women who undergo the surgery after being told they’ve tested positive for BRCA1 or 2, which indicate a much greater risk for breast cancer. The story suggests that this is in part because doctors in Israel…
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Books Randi Zuckerberg’s ‘Dot Complicated’
It’s been a good (or perhaps bad) year for normal-woman outrage. I’m still pretty irked about being told to “Lean In,” and now there is yet another book by an uber-successful (and uber-lucky) woman who thinks her life lessons apply to the rest of us. If you haven’t guessed, I’m talking about former Facebook marketing…
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Enough With the Stay-at-Home Dads
Can we please stop pretending that stay-at-home-dads are a viable, large-scale solution for gender equality? Fifty years after Betty Friedan encouraged women to get out of the house, men have not, in any statistically significant way, come to take their place. And yet, the stay-at-home dad continues to live on in our cultural imagination as…
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The Rise of Ultra-Orthodox Beauty Salons
According to the BBC, a quiet revolution is taking place among ultra-Orthodox women in Jerusalem. They have discovered the power of mascara. There are, of course, numerous strict restrictions on these women when it comes to their appearance. They must wear modest clothes — no elbows, no collar bones — cover their heads, and many…
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Throwback Thursday: Globetrotting Yiddish Reporter
Welcome to Throwback Thursday, a weekly photo feature in which we sift 116 years of Forward history to find snapshots of women’s lives. Born in Lithuania in 1900 and raised on the Lower East Side, Jean Khyene Jaffe was a globetrotting reporter with a 30-year career in journalism. After graduating from Hunter College and Columbia…
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