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 High Holy Days With ‘Debbie and Danny’
I missed Debbie and Danny. They were my childhood friends with whom I used to celebrate the Jewish holidays. I lost touch years ago with Debbie and her brother Danny. So, I was thrilled to recently find them again and reconnect with them … on the pages of a series of children’ books published by…
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‘I Love Daisy Khan!’ the Seminary President Gushed
After weeks of waiting for a chance to publicly express solidarity with the folks behind Park51 a friend and I cut out early from the Brooklyn Book Festival on Sunday. Swag in hand, we met up with J Street’s contingent to attend the Liberty Walk for Religious Freedom, which started at St. Peter’s Church in…
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Ray Frank’s Historic High Holy Day Sermons
One hundred and twenty years ago this week, Ray Frank delivered a historic sermon on what was the first night of Rosh Hashanah in Spokane, Wash. Ray Frank, featured in JWA’s History Makers exhibit, is one of those “complicated” heroines. She is a pioneer in that she is thought to be the first woman to…
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Mourning My Mother — on Yom Kippur and Throughout the Year
Sitting around the table — four young women, all of us had lost one of our parents — we told the stories that we always tell or never tell: when we knew it was inevitable (cancer was the cause of death in every situation), where we were when we had to drop everything and come…
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Is It Easier To Be Plus-Sized in Israel or America?
When Tali Giat was picked as the winner of the show “More to Love” by bachelor Luke Conley, she became the first Israeli to win any American reality show, and the first plus-size woman to win any of the bachelor shows. Late last fall, Giat and Conley broke up. Since then she has focused on…
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Penina Roth: The Brains Behind NYC’s Most Diverse Reading Series
Penina Roth is an atypical Lubavitcher; she once worked as a wardrobe stylist for music videos and was a literary groupie before launching the popular Franklin Park Reading Series last year. Located at a bar of the same name in the steadily gentrifying neighborhood of Crown Heights, Brooklyn the series boasts an impressive collection of…
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‘The Velveteen Rabbi’ on Raising Money for Mosque Repair
It’s not every day that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cites a rabbinical student, but Rachel Barenblat won that distinction on Sunday, when the writer mentioned her recent success raising money so that a vandalized Queens mosque could replace its damaged prayer rugs. On August 25, a drunk man entered an Astoria, Queens mosque,…
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What I Learned From Making a Mauian Minyan
Last week, for the first time in my life, I was the tenth man for a minyan, so to speak. Although on the first night of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish Congregation of Maui, the Jewish Congregation of Maui had a packed house, by the second morning, the dropout rate was noticeable. So when I walked…
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Yes, Jewish Women Do Wear Lilly Pulitzer
When Lisa Birnbach’s “The Official Preppy Handbook” was published in 1980, the tongue-in-cheek “field guide” to preppy behaviors became a generational phenomenon, spending a year on the New York Times bestseller list and inspiring American fashion for decades to come. Now Birnbach is back with “True Prep: It’s a Whole New Old World,” an updated…
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Prime Ribs: Prosecution for Hoffman?; Soap Opera Politics; ‘Birth Rape’
Jerusalem police are recommending prosecution for Anat Hoffman, the Women of the Wall leader who was arrested in July while carrying a Torah in the Western Wall plaza. Read The Sisterhood’s interview with Hoffman — her first following the arrest — here and view our slideshow of women around the world holding or reading from…
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Shofar as Midwife
There are some Jewish holidays where the feminine aspect is front and center, as on Passover, which counts women are pivotal characters and when we remember coming through “the narrow place” in our exodus and re-birth from Egypt, and Purim, whose heroine, of course, is Esther. I hadn’t thought of Rosh Hashana as one of…
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