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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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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A Better Bat Mitzvah
Days before Pesach we celebrated Girlchik’s bat mitzvah. Becoming bar or bat mitzvah is always cause for celebration, but hers was particularly sweet, since she had suffered a brain bleed around the time of her birth and her prognosis then was uncertain. Moments after telling me that my week-old daughter had suffered a major stroke,…
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Girlfriend TV — From ‘Lucy’ to ‘Girls’
If the new HBO series “Girls” lives up to its breathless early reviews, Lena Dunham’s Hannah and her tight-knit group of self-reflective friends seem bound to join the television canon alongside Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, and Carrie and Co. In advance tonight’s “Girls” premiere — see The Sisterhood preview here — I spoke with…
The Latest
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The Feminist Case for ‘Fathers’ and ‘Kings’
No Haggadah in recent memory — or, perhaps, ever — has generated the kind of interest that the “New American Haggadah” has. When I began looking it over in preparation for a review of it, I was surprised by the unabashedly masculine way that Nathan Englander’s compelling translation refers to God. But as I thought…
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What We Are Reading at the Blognik Beat
Gal Beckerman, Forward’s opinion editor and author of “When They Come For Us We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” the defining book on Soviet Jewry, talks about meeting the refuseniks who attempted to hijack a plane and draw attention to the troubles of Russian Jews. What is life like for the…
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Ann Romney, Economic Advisor?
There was a major Twitstorm yesterday, after CNN pundit and political strategist Hilary Rosen criticized Mitt Romney for referring to his wife, Ann, as his link to the struggles of working women. Rosen, speaking with Anderson Cooper on “AC360,” said: “Guess what? His wife has actually never worked a day in her life. She’s never…
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It’s 5:30, and Sheryl Sandberg’s Going Home
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg has come out of the closet. No, not that closet, but rather the one in which she’s been hiding the fact that she leaves the office each day at 5:30 p.m. so she can have dinner with her children. In this new video, Sandberg says that she wasn’t confident enough, until…
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Marking the Exodus With Kukush and Calamari
What does the path to freedom look like? In the Haggadah it says: “Once we were slaves, now we are free.” That transition is recounted and celebrated in a “Seder” — literally an “order” of fifteen sequential steps. Freedom means different things to different people. My great journey to freedom was wresting myself out of…
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In Seders and Springsteen, Secular Spirituality
This past weekend, the New York Times wrote about a group of Jewish Bruce Springsteen fans who rented out a room at a Madison Square Garden restaurant this past Friday night so they could participate in a Seder and still make it down to “the pit” (the general admission area) in time for their rock-and-roll…
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Hebrew Needs ‘You’ To Be Gender-Neutral
Ido Plazental, a history and civics teacher at Ziv High School in Jerusalem, has an innovative way of raising gender awareness among his students: He addresses them all as female. Native English speakers who are not familiar with Hebrew may miss the inventiveness of this form of speech. In Hebrew, as in many European languages,…
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What Banning Facebook Is Really About
Facebook is forbidden among Chabad teenage girls, as The Sisterhood told you — and as the Forward reports here. This reflects a blatant double standard, the report points out, because the movement has widely embraced technology to spread its message, but refuses to allow its own youth to use these tools. But Chabad’s double standard…
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