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 ‘Mad Men’ Finally Poised To Tackle Race?
AMC’s “Mad Men,” which returned last night with a two-hour premiere, is a show with a relatively small audience, but a disproportionately active one. Sometimes it feels that 99% of that viewership consists of media professionals who look forward to writing their own recaps and tweets the next morning — not to mention designing animated…
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Finding a Mate Without Getting a Facelift
I had wondered whether Yitta Halberstam’s “Plea to Mothers of Girls in Shudduchim” [the process of dating for marriage], published recently in the Jewish Press, was really a Purim spoof, even if it did come out well after the holiday. Alas, no. Her suggestion that Orthodox women of marrying age should take any and all…
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Keeping Feminism Off the Style Pages
Sarah Hepola, in a recent — and ill-headlined — New York Times article explored whether feminists have and/or need a another leader like Gloria Steinem. Hepola writes that nobody has emerged to take Steinem’s place as feminist team captain, and she arrives at the conclusion that feminism has been replaced by feminisms — that feminism is now a…
The Latest
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My Passover Wish for Russian Jews
There is nothing more Jewish than Passover, the holiday of hope. There is nothing more Russian than trying to get a little something extra from the U.S. government. So I thought I’d take this time leading up to Pesach to talk about my hope that the Russians who keep defrauding the government cut that out….
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Why We Pay More for Deodorant
The debate over birth control has made many of us think about how much money we as women spend on our reproductive health care — between birth control pill co-pays, visits to the gynecologist, cancer screenings, and all the necessary pre-natal care. Because of issues attendant with our fertility and reproduction, insurance companies have regularly charged…
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Staying the (Jewish Feminist) Course
This is the sixth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. How I became a feminist and why I have remained one for 40 years are two different stories. In December 1962, returning home from the lecture circuit, my husband purchased for me Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” at an airport bookstore. This was…
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Israel’s Euro-Asia Interconnect
Recent breakthroughs in Israel’s relations with its neighbors in southern Europe point to a sanguine outlook on the future for its economic relations in the Mediterranean, and Europe in general. Greece, Cyprus and Israel signed an agreement on March 4 to develop an underwater electric cable linking Israel’s energy reservoirs to the European continent, with…
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How Women’s-Only Spaces Change Us
During the winter of 1996, I told a Smith College admissions officer that I didn’t believe in single-sex education. At the time, I was telling the truth. I could not imagine any merits to not going to school with boys. I had always attended coed schools, and had never thought about how having boys in…
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Jewish Feminism Means Reaching Out
This is the fifth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. What is Jewish feminism to me? It’s a mission. A calling. An identity. A life purpose. To borrow a French term, it’s my raison d’etre. Or to borrow a Buddhist term, it’s my swadharma, the ideal that connects the work that I do…
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IVF Babies Denied U.S. Citizenship
For American-Israeli women like me, having a baby means a trip to the U.S. Embassy. Once you are home from the hospital, and once your newborn?s Israeli birth certificate is granted and health care benefits are in order, you head to the embassy to apply for U.S. citizenship on behalf of your infant. With the…
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Israeli Politics at Brandeis University
For a period of a few weeks the Jewish community followed the events of Israel Peace Week and Israel Apartheid Week at my school, Brandeis University. Looking back, there seems to have been a large disconnect between the amount of attention the events received in the Jewish press and the reality that exists on my…
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