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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Rabin, Rachel and Modern Orthodoxy’s Confusions
I spent the anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination at a mother-son learning event at my son’s yeshivah. Well, it wasn’t officially a Rabin memorial event; it was more like the not-Rabin event. It was advertised as an evening to commemorate the yahrtzeit of Rachel — the matriarch, not the poet. Yes, she’s been dead a…
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Torah Study Devalued When We Bribe Our Kids
Why do we need to tell our kids that they can’t do important things for their own sake, but only to get some kind of reward? The notion of manicures for middle school girls in a Jewish school disturbs me on a variety of levels. Since Elana Sztokman wrote so well about why they are…
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Katie Roiphe’s Sexual Harassment Problem
In a New York Times opinion piece, Katie Roiphe writes of her longing for the good old days when sexual harassment in the workplace was just the way things were. Ah, for those not-so-long-ago days when, as she writes, there were: colorful or inappropriate comments, with irreverence, wildness, incorrectness, ease. But whose ease was it?…
The Latest
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Gabby Giffords Dreamed of Becoming a Mother
In the months before she was shot in the head and critically wounded, Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband, retired astronaut Mark Kelly, had been undergoing fertility treatment with hopes of becoming pregnant via in vitro fertilization. That’s one of the revelations in “Gabby: A Story of Courage and Hope,” the new memoir that the…
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Protesting Paucity of Women on Israeli News
Women are being kept out of public space in many ways in Israel. We have heard lately about women missing from advertising posters and newspaper ads in Jerusalem, and about female soldiers being marginalized from military activities for fear of offending Haredi men. Now, there is an additional — related and unrelated— focus on the…
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Books Girls Celebrating Bat Mitzvah, Around the World
My Dear Sweet Daughter: We’ve come a long way in making our place in the synagogue. When I was a little girl I once told my grandfather—my very old-fashioned Abuelo — that I wanted to be a rabbi. “That,” he said to me, “is very ugly.” He said the word in Spanish—fea. I despaired. The…
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These Women Should Be in the Forward 50
As it does every year, The Forward recently published its Forward 50 — and just like every year, the list is short on women. Forward editor Jane Eisner notes the lack of female names on the list, saying “it also could be because we weren’t looking in the right places” for women worthy of inclusion…
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Israeli HMO Puts Only Boys on Kids’ Stickers
Any parent will tell you that there is no easier way to motivate young children than rewarding them with a sticker for good behavior. The sticker can have anything on it — puppies, kittens, smiley faces, hearts, flowers — as long as it is colorful and cheerful, kids will work to earn it. The Israeli…
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We Won’t Sit in the Back of Jerusalem’s Bus
One issue I never quite thought I would experience in 2011 is bus segregation. I am not referring to blacks and whites, because, after all, this is not 1960 in Mississippi. I am referring to the gender segregation of men and women on buses with routes originating from the predominately Orthodox neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo…
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Prime Ribs: Is Sexy Anne Frank Costume Kosher?
Producers of “180,” a short documentary that compares abortion to the Holocaust and has been viewed 1.5 million times on YouTube, are now lobbying to show their film in high schools, reports the Washington Independent. The Religion News Service writes that Ray Comfort, the man behind the film, was born to a Jewish mother and…
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American Jewish Pioneer With Lessons for Today
The opening scene of Anna Solomon’s new book “The Little Bride” is one of the most harrowing that I’ve read in a novel. The reader meets 16-year-old Minna Losk in a dank basement where she is ordered to undress and then inspected like an animal. Orphaned at 11 and sent into indentured servitude to a…
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