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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The Next Jewish Miss America?
In the 89-year history of the Miss America pageant, there has been only one Jewish winner: Bess Myerson, in 1945. On January 15, there may be another: Loren Galler Rabinowitz, Miss Massachusetts. The 24-year-old Harvard University graduate from Brookline is the daughter of two doctors, the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors and a novice when it…
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The Case Against ‘Don’t Worry, Be Happy’
For the New Year, a Facebook friend wrote as her status, “My New Year’s resolution is to be Happy all Year!” That sounds lovely, I initially thought. It’s almost Oprah-ish, a vision for living one’s best life, joyously. Or perhaps it’s more like what Dennis Prager advocates — the idea that we all have a…
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A Mitzvah Project With the Help of Online Crowd-Sourcing
How does an 11-year-old girl raise nearly $9,000 for a worthy cause in just over two weeks? By tapping the power of online crowd-sourcing. A couple of months ago, Abby Hofstetter began volunteering at the Masbia soup kitchen with her parents and younger brother at two of their four “restaurant without cash register” locations, which…
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Why Is This New Year’s Eve Different?
It started about two weeks ago — the instant messages while I was at work, asking me about my New Year’s Eve plans and the incessant text messages, sending my phone into a vibrating jig while I made the rounds at holiday parties. I was shocked at the extent to which the simple question, “What…
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Realizing That It’s Not My New Year
Until I was a teenager, I had little interest in large social gatherings featuring other people, with one exception — the all-night New Year’s Eve skating party in town. This happened every year at the local rink, and I was never allowed to go. In the revisionist history in my head, everyone I knew was…
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Former Israeli President Katsav Convicted of Rape
Former President of Israel Moshe Katsav was convicted Thursday on two counts of rape and other counts of sexual harassment and indecent acts by force against three women who worked for him while he was in government. The conviction, which caps a 19-month-long trial, concludes the first criminal trial of a former Israeli president in…
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Response to the Rebbetzins
The “rebbetzin” is a specious title. The wife of a rabbi, she gains her status from nothing more than the happenstance of marriage. Although a person seeking out medical counsel from a doctor’s spouse is likely to be met with curiosity if not an actual straitjacket, we in the Jewish community have a cultural history…
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Top 10 Moments for Jewish Women in 2010
I am one of those retrospective people who loves to reflect and analyze the events of the past 12 months at the end of each calendar year. So this weekend, while snowed in at my parents’ home in western Massachusetts, I set out to answer this: What were the top 10 moments for Jewish women…
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‘Unexpectedly Eighty’: Judith Viorst’s Poetry of Aging
Judith Viorst has long been an eyewitness to the quirks of the human life cycle. She is a renowned children’s author — producing such gems as the storybook “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day” — and has written several adult nonfiction books, including the best-selling “Necessary Losses: The Loves, Illusions, Dependencies,…
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Inspiring Jewish Women Who Died in 2010
As the year comes to a close, the New York Times Magazine published “The Lives They Lived,” an annual feature celebrating the lives of people who died over the last year. The collage is a mix of people known and unknown. This assortment of stories is more gender-balanced than the regular obituary section of the…
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Male Doula Charged With Sexual Assault
A Rehovot man who has been working as a doula, or birth coach, for the past nine years was arrested this morning on charges of rape and sodomy of dozens of women. According to police Lieutenant Commander Yigal Ben Shalom, who is coordinating the investigation, the man would ask women to undress, explaining that this…
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