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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How Etan Changed Us
A renewed search for Etan Patz’s remains has concluded. Nothing was found. The 6-year-old boy allowed to walk to his school bus in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood on a May morning in 1979 never made it. Instead, he was kidnapped, and his parents had ripped from them the chance to tuck him into bed each night…
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The Spiritual and Physical — What Makes Us Happy?
In today’s world, our lives revolve around technology and social media. Day in and day out, we text, Tweet, and see what other people are doing through a constant flutter of photos and status updates. We long to be connected to everything and everyone, feeling naked without our phones or compulsive checking of Facebook. But…
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Q&A: Deborah Copaken Kogan on ‘The Red Book’
Every five years, Harvard graduates send their alma mater a few paragraphs (or a few pages) about their lives. These updates are compiled in what’s known as “the red book.” When it arrives in the mail, alumni not only devour it like a gossip magazine, they also use it as the yardstick by which they…
The Latest
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Hamas Chief on ‘Noble’ Women Rabbis
The opportunity to interview the second-highest-ranking official in Hamas came suddenly, unexpectedly and at the very worst possible time: just before Passover. The Forward staff was shorthanded. Worse, at home, we were shifting into full Passover house-cleaning mode. I tried hard to argue for doing this any other week. But Stanley L. Cohen, the attorney…
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Where ‘Girls’ Fails
A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the hype surrounding Lena Dunham’s new HBO show, “Girls,” I noted that there might be a forthcoming critique of the show’s “overwhelming whiteness.” Now that the premiere has aired, the looming quibble has blown up to a full-blown controversy — and understandably so. One of the show’s writers,…
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Wrong, Again, on Breast Cancer
A look back at breast cancer news from the past year reveals that a lot of what we thought we knew about the disease and the advocacy work surrounding it has been wrong. First an ASME-nominted story by Lea Goldman in Marie Claire pointed out that, despite the roughly $6 billion raised annually for breast…
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Bringing Up Boris
I read an article last month in Philadelphia magazine about how American men aren’t growing up. These kinds of trend pieces aren’t new. Neither are pieces examining why Americans are raising their kids the wrong way. Just look at Amy Chua and the “bringing up the French bébé” phenomenon. But seeing this last one in…
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Kitty Genovese on a Tel Aviv Beach?
When I first came to Israel as an American college student in the 1980s, I was frequently drawn into long discussions comparing Americans and Israelis. Back in the old days, before cable television and the Internet, many Israelis were exceptionally defensive about being viewed as a member of a primitive Third-World culture, and eager to…
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Lessons in ‘One Million Hijabs’ on Facebook
Is there value in having women of all faiths — women who don’t usually cover their hair — don a traditional Islamic hijab? I ask because my Facebook feed has been filled with photos of women in hijab. Like those who wore hoodies in solidarity with Florida shooting victim Trayvon Martin, my friends are covering…
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When Orthodox Men Get Personal
The strangest part of Monday night’s panel discussion of my new book, “The Men’s Section,” about partnership synagogues, or Orthodox congregations in which women play key roles in leading communal prayer, wasn’t that the four-person panel was made up of all men. All-male panels are so common — to wit, I passed by a poster…
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Why My Daughter Isn’t Bilingual — Yet
The other night, I handed my daughter, Mika, a plate of chicken and carrots for dinner. She glanced at it momentarily before professing snidely, “Mama, this is not delicioso!” The declaration was remarkable for two reasons: The first was that I had made dinner, the second that my 2.5-year-old cracked a joke. Her hero, Dora…
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