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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Questioning Debbie Friedman’s Private Life
I am disgusted by what someone who goes by “DLevy” has written about Debbie Friedman on the Jewschool blog, breaching basic standards of dignity and respect, and what people are sending around the Twitterverse. As Debbie’s funeral is livestreamed, people watching and posting comments are conjecturing about whether her partner will be named. I’ve been…
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Some Scholarly Looks at Women’s Hair Coverings
Jewish women’s head covering is once again in the news, a heated topic among rabbinic men who are obviously not afraid of a little invective when it comes to women’s bodies. The latest item is an incendiary letter by a Canadian Haredi rabbi named Shlomo Miller. Miller was responding to a scholarly article by Rabbi…
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Sending Our Prayers Higher for Debbie Friedman
As our previous post noted, Debbie Friedman is seriously ill and needs our prayers. She has a special place in my heart, as she does in the hearts of countless others, because Debbie is an extraordinary person with extraordinary gifts and an extraordinarily generous spirit, and she has made a remarkable impact on our lives….
The Latest
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Mi Shebeirach for Debbie Friedman
Fifteen years ago today, Debbie Friedman gave a sold out concert at Carnegie Hall, commemorating 25 years as one of the Jewish community’s most beloved singers. Yesterday, Friedman was hospitalized for pnemonia. JTA reports that she is currently sedated and on a respirator. Debbie Friedman began recording on her own label in 1972 and has…
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Court: Israeli Women To the Back of the Bus … on a Voluntary Basis
Is there such a thing as “voluntary segregation”? Apparently, the Israeli Supreme Court thinks so, according to its disappointing ruling today regarding the ongoing controversy on gender-segregated bus lines in the ultra-Orthodox community. (Previous Sisterhood posts on bus segregation can be found here, here, here, and here.) The bad news for women’s advocacy groups and…
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Prime Ribs: Making Tznius Chic; Why the Recent Decline in Teen Pregnancies?
Haredi stylist Miri Beilin blends tznius and high fashion to make modesty stylish. Phoebe Potts, the Jewish author of the graphic novel “Good Eggs,” is out with a new comic about trying to have a baby and having a book instead. Muslim women feel uniquely empowered in the United States, according to this New York…
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Reforming the Jewish Divorce Laws
Imagine investing in a business; the partnership sours, but the freedom to begin anew depends on your ex-partner honoring his obligation to sign your walking papers. This scenario best describes what confronts a Jewish woman when a marriage is over: a man must give his estranged wife a *get a religious divorce decree, without which…
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Alysa Stanton, First Black Female Rabbi, Will Leave N.C. Congregation
Alysa Stanton, who made headlines when she became the country’s first black woman rabbi, will be leaving her Greenville, N.C. pulpit — after the congregation that hired her less than two years ago decided not to renew her contract. Stanton said the decision to leave was not hers, and that she fully intends to serve…
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The Jewish Woman Behind the Twitter’s #IHadAnAbortion
In a time where social networking is a large part of almost everyone’s life, many activists have found social networking sites to be a successful venue for social action. Steph Herold is one of them. A young abortion-rights activist living in Brooklyn, Herold has worked in direct service abortion care and reproductive health advocacy, and…
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The Most Complicated (and Expensive) Kind of Assisted Reproduction
Best new word of 2011 (okay, so it’s early yet): “twiblings,” a term coined by writer Melanie Thernstrom to describe her two children, a boy and a girl, who were created using Thernstrom’s husband’s sperm and eggs from one donor. The resulting embryos were implanted on the same day into two different gestational surrogates, and…
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When ‘Pre-Simcha Stress Syndrome’ Overcomes You
I was always certain that I was never going to be one of those mothers. A bar or bat mitzvah isn’t a wedding, after all. The important thing is that your child is reaching the age of maturity and reading from the Torah. It’s not about the color of the napkins, the quality of the…
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Fast Forward NYU withholds diploma of student who condemned ‘genocide’ and ‘atrocities currently happening in Palestine’ in graduation speech
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