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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Lesson from Elul: No One Should Dance Alone
Summer is hard to take seriously with nobody in the office, and everybody running around half-dressed. No wonder High Holidays fall when school resumes and the air grows brisk — when life starts taking itself seriously again. In the 29-day lead up to cracking open the book of life for the first time this year,…
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‘Millionaire Matchmaker’ Should Take Own Advice
Patti Stanger should take her own advice. The “Millionaire Matchmaker” was on Bravo TV’s “Watch What Happens Live” Sunday night (unfortunately I can’t find a video version to share with you), talking with host Andy Cohen, who seemed by turns disgusted and perplexed by what Stanger had to say. Now, unlike Ilana Angel from the…
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American Soap Operas Taught Me Yiddish
The language of soap operas is universal: vexing vixens, meddling matriachs and busy men with even busier zippers. When All My Children joined numerous cancelled soaps with its final episode on September 23, it prompted me to reflect on how the voices gone silent did more than entertain; they helped teach me Yiddish. Like monarchies…
The Latest
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Sex Manual for Orthodox Newlyweds Is Too Modest
The Newlywed’s Guide to Physical Intimacy, a new book published in Jerusalem and authored by Jennie Rosenfeld and David Ribner, leaves me feeling conflicted. As someone whose patient base includes a not-insignificant number of ultra-Orthodox Jews (I don’t particularly like that title for the right wing of the Orthodox community, but it’s a shorthand I…
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City Council Member Making Change for Women
It seemed as though Rachel Azaria, then a 30-year-old mother of two, came out of nowhere to run on a grassroots, independent party ticket and win a seat on the 31-member Jerusalem City Council in 2008. Although this was her first foray into politics, she was already a recognized figure in the world of Israeli…
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Woman Heading Labor Has New Vision for Israel
“Shelly Yachimovich is the woman for this Israeli moment. Yachimovich is the one and only promise of contemporary politics,” wrote Ari Shavit in Haaretz earlier this month. Not everyone agrees with Shavit, but we all get to see just how Yachimovich will do now that she has been elected leader of Israel’s Labor Party. Yachimovich,…
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Bucking Tradition in a Bikini
For Huda Naccache, Israel’s 2011 representative in the Miss Earth beauty pageant, wearing a bikini is important for career advancement. The 21-year old Christian Arab from Haifa has modeling ambitions, and in order to get noticed, she posed in a bikini for the cover of the Arab Israeli women’s magazine Lilac. This may not sound…
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Raising Jewish Daughters in Germany
Myriam Halberstam had very personal reasons for establishing Ariella Books, the first post-Holocaust Jewish children’s book publishing company in Germany, in the spring of 2010. The German-American documentary filmmaker and children’s book author and editor simply could not find any decent German-language Jewish children’s books for her two young daughters, who are growing up in…
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Leah Shakdiel: Still Making Waves for Women & Peace
Leah Shakdiel is a modern Orthodox Jew, feminist and peace activist who first became widely known in 1988, when she won an Israel Supreme Court case that allowed her to become the first woman to be allowed to sit on a local religious council. Those councils supervise and dole out funding to local synagogues, cemeteries,…
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What the HPV Vaccine Flap Is Really About
Thanks to a [heated debate][1] between GOP Presidential Candidates Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry over his 2007 executive order mandating that girls in Texas receive the HPV vaccine (though the state legislature later overturned his order), it’s been a topic of much conversation. But much of the buzz has been based on innuendo and rumor,…
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Throwing Eggs and Jeers at Little Girls
It’s not right that the denim-skirted young girls of the Orot Banot school in Beit Shemesh should be the front-line soldiers in the battle for religious tolerance and co-existence in their city. But as they face jeering men and hurled eggs, and tomatoes as they walk to and from their classrooms, that’s exactly what they…
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