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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Reviving Dona Gracia
Before Golda, and even before Herzl, there was Dona Gracia Nasi, the 16th-century Zionist, feminist, and the Harriet Tubman of the Jewish people. She is one of the most remarkable women in Jewish history — and in history, period. It’s a tragedy that so few people know her name. Dona Gracia — the inspiration for…
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Silencing Little Girls
As the Israeli national-religious population continues to lurch rightward, the belief that for an Orthodox man, the sound of a woman’s singing voice is inappropriately erotic and therefore violates Jewish law has gone increasingly mainstream. This lies behind the ongoing dispute over whether IDF soldiers have the right to walk out when women sing…
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Grandmothers, You’re Scaring Me
The nostalgia you regularly voice is worrisome
The Latest
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Haredi Dolls Show Boys Learning, Girls Serving
It’s not even Shavuot, but if you’re already worrying about what to give the Haredi children in your life for Hanukkah, not to worry: Mitzvah Kinder dolls are here. As reported recently on Failed Messiah, the little plastic figurines come pre-labeled with various tasks for boys and girls, Totty [Daddy] and Mama. In one set…
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A Call for Education Reform
After finishing my first year of college and returning home happily to see my family and friends, I have been thinking about the level of education given at the university level and the preparation that secondary schooling gives in the United States. The result: we need to change the way we educate children in our…
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Forgiving Anna Quindlen
I’m surely not the only girl with literary tendencies to have come of age in the 1980s assiduously following Anna Quindlen’s journalism career — reading her columns in The New York Times and pretty much wanting to be her when I grew up. Back in the Stone Age, before the Internet, before blogs and their…
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After Fertility Battle, a Sweet Mother’s Day
I am a new mother, but I am not a young mother. I am an old enough new mother, in fact, that my formative Mother’s Days date back to a hippie household in the early 1970s. Inside the walls of our little bohemian family enclave, calendar-driven sentiment was discouraged, even disparaged. But it wasn’t quite…
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Marriage, Evolved
The public acceptance of gay marriage by the President of the United States — a position that most Jews support — is hardly the end of the struggle for full equality for LGBTQ citizens, who continue to lack many of the same enshrined rights and protections as other minority groups. Similarly, Barack Obama’s historic announcement of…
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The End of Women-Only Torah Study?
It is a sad week for women’s Torah study, with the news that the Advanced Talmudic Institute at Matan — founded 24 years ago by Rabbanit Malke Bina — is closing its doors. Matan did not confirm its reason for closing, but I suspect that the approaching sunset of one of its main funders, the Avi Chai…
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How Ex-Frum Women Learn To Date
Israel Irenstein, who has become something of a relationship guru for formerly Orthodox men, was the focus of a recent Slate article detailing the dating challenges of individuals who grew up in the Orthodox community, but have since left. Among those challenges: “Inexperience, having no identity, and having no understanding of the opposite sex.” But…
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Celebrate Childless Mothers, Too
Crossposted from Jewesses With Attitude It’s Mother’s Day, and the way this secular holiday is celebrated in the Jewish media reveals a range of beliefs and attitudes towards Jewish motherhood and the role of women in the Jewish world. On one end of the spectrum, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognize Jewish mothers as…
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