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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Is Free Really the Way To Go?
At around this time of year the Tel Aviv beaches are filled with foreigners, hotels are booked to the last room, and thousands are floating their troubles away at the Dead Sea. Many programs have brought Jews, specifically those of college age, to Israel. The most popular of these programs, of course, is the Taglit-Birthright…
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Feminist, Orthodox, Engaged and on the Pill
This post is the first in “Feminist, Orthodox and Engaged,” a series by Simi Lampert on love, sex, and betrothal in the life of a Modern Orthodox woman. This month, 11 years after my bat mitzvah, I finally feel like a real woman. Joining the ranks of liberated women throughout the Western world, I took…
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Watching My Daughter Graduate
Thank you for asking; the graduation was lovely. But you can probably sense that’s the party line. The ceremony was actually surreal, emotional and intense. We are, as the old saying goes, in the big leagues. Next stop, university. In the mix of growing up together these kids have loved each other, hurt each other,…
The Latest
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Why Alice Walker is Wrong
I love Alice Walker. I love her prose style, I love her ultra left-wing politics and the way they fuse with her artistic sensibility. I just finished her extremely complex time-spanning epic novel “The Temple of My Familiar” with my thoughts thoroughly provoked and her images in my head. But I don’t love her decision…
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The Rise of Jewish Women in Comics
Steven Bergson has loved comics since he was a kid, but over the past decade and a half his interest has been focused on a particular subject: Jewish women. The 42-year-old librarian, who works in the research department of Toronto’s UJA Federation, has several blogs on Jewish women in comics, both as characters and creators,…
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What ‘Having it All’ Really Means
One of the threads of the heated discussion surrounding Anne-Marie Slaughter?s new Atlantic article, ?Why Women Still Can?t Have It All,? is whether feminists should rid themselves of the phrase ?having it all.? Rebecca Traister at Salon writes: Here is what is wrong, what has always been wrong, with equating feminist success with ?having it…
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Female Bloggers for Sale?
Jewlicious, the Jewish pop culture blog, is offering an unusual incentive for its first online fundraising campaign: dinner with two of its “gorgeous” female bloggers. The company of “Jessica” and “Michelle” — the women’s last names don’t appear on the site — is available to donors willing to spend the big bucks. For $5,000, Jewlicious…
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Male Reform Rabbis Earn More than Women
A recent article by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Atlantic provides a thoughtful look at the struggles of women committed to both their careers and their families. These same struggles have come up in the Jewish professional world over the last couple of decades, particularly in regard to women in the rabbinate who have yet to…
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Why Our Sons Should to Learn to Bake Challah
Debra Nussbaum Cohen recently wrote a wonderful and impassioned post about teaching our daughters to use tefillin. As the mother of a daughter who has indicated interest in wearing tefillin when she reaches Bat Mitzvah age, I was glad to see others thinking about this issue. Yet as important pieces like this are, the challenge…
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The Halachic Condom
Through my reporting on my recent story about “halachic infertility,” I had some frank, and often personal, conversations with rabbis, doctors, and ultra-Orthodox women about Jewish law, medicine, menstruation, and sex. But the phone interview that made my coworkers raise their eyebrows the most was the one I conducted with Mark McGlothlin, the San Diego-based…
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The Case Against ‘Opting Out’
Get out your virtual pitchforks. I’m about to defend Elizabeth Wurtzel. Last week, the writer-turned-lawyer curried ire with many a stay-at-home mother (#sahm, in Twitter verse), when she denounced “1% wives”–referring to America’s most privileged, educated women–as collaborators in the “war on women.” In her red-meat-for-the-blogosphere polemic, Wurtzel argues that “being a mother isn’t really…
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