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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Interfaith Caravan Is Full of Female Rabbis
As the first woman to be ordained a Conservative rabbi, Amy Eilberg occupies a major place in the annals of Jewish women’s history. She has recently been squeezing her self into a very small space in the hopes of making another kind of history. Since September 11, she and seven other interfaith clergy have been…
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Rebbetzins Blog About Changing Role
Jessica Cavanagh-Melhado and Melissa Scholten-Gutierrez are the authors of Redefining Rebbetzin.com, a blog featuring the perspectives and experiences of both women as they make the journey “from wives to rabbis’ wives.” In the blog, they are confronting the stereotypes and expecations that come with the title of rebbetzins, and they write on a variety of…
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The New York Times and Gendered Editing
I used to roll my eyes when my mother would point to someone on television and say, “He’s Jewish!” or, “She’s Jewish!” Now I’m that person, thrilling to the news of a Jewish woman’s rise to a position of prominence and influence, like when Elena Kagan was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, or when…
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A ‘Rosa Parksenstein’ Moment for New Israeli
Rachel Levin Weinstein, a social worker who made aliyah to Israel from Chicago just two months ago, has faced her share of challenges recently, as does every new immigrant – everything from learning how to pay her bills in a new language, to getting her four kids settled in school, to figuring out how to…
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‘Dirty Dancing’ Remake and Female Hollywood
Elissa Strauss hopes that a new remake of the movie “Dirty Dancing” keeps our beloved heroine, Baby, Jewish. In addition to preserving Baby and her family’s ethnic authenticity, which is important in grounding the film in a real milieu, I should add that I hope the remake keeps the essential, devastating abortion plotline, which is…
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A Jew, a Muslim and a Christian Woman Dialogue
Just before the tenth anniversary of 9/11, I noticed that a new blog called “SheAnswersAbraham” went live on the Web. The timing was not coincidental, as it is a deliberate effort by a group of three women – a Jew, a Christian and a Muslim – to put an interfaith conversation about sacred texts out…
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Prime Ribs: More Jewish Docs Perform Abortions
Only a small fraction of obstetrician-gynecologists provide abortions, reports Reuters, but among those Jews are more likely to perform the service than doctors from other religious groups. Anna Solomon writes about Jewish women pioneers and mail-order brides in the Old West at Tablet. Rachel Held Evans, an evangelical blogger, is spending a year following all…
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9/11: A Mother’s Memories
I didn’t lose anyone I personally knew in the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11th, 2001. But it changed my family nonetheless. My oldest child, now a college freshman, was a new 3rd grader in a Jewish day school in downtown Brooklyn just around the corner from Atlantic Avenue, which was then…
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Celebrating a Birthday in the Shadow of 9/11
I was busy blowing up balloons, hanging streamers and assembling goody bags when I heard about the September 11 attacks. September 11, 2001 was my son Eitan’s fifth birthday. Just a few weeks earlier, I had returned to my home in Israel from a year-long sabbatical in Connecticut, and, with the house full of unpacked…
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Men Protest Panels Excluding Women
It’s nice to see influential men increasingly protest the absence of women presenting at major Jewish events. In the publication eJewishPhilanthropy.com, Shaul Kelner writes a powerful essay about his pledge to refrain from participating in any all-male panel discussions, and to make his involvement conditional on the inclusion of women. Kelner, an assistant professor of…
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LGBT Heroes Posters: An Outdated Approach?
Keshet, an organization that works for the full inclusion of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender Jews in Jewish life, has issued its first three “Jewish LGBT Change Makers” posters through its Hineini Education Project. When I took a look at them online, I was immediately reminded of the Jewish Women’s Archive’s “History Makers” (formerly “Women…
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