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Life
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Reading New York Magazine in Phnom Penh
Jennifer Senior’s recent New York magazine article about parenting and its discontents (an article that The Sisterhood weighed in on here) made it to Cambodia — or at least to the terrace of the apartment that my family and I rented during our recent month-long stay in Phnom Penh. (Read my previous dispatches here and…
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Code Pink: Slinging Mud and Hate at Ahava
I sent Boychik off to his summer program in Israel with an extra $100 in his pocket and instructions to bring me back as much Ahava hand cream as that will buy. Ahava is my favorite — smells nice, absorbs quickly and does what it’s supposed to — but it’s too pricey here in the…
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Fired for Being a Religious Feminist?
The recent legal victory of Hana Kehat, founder of the Orthodox feminist Israeli organization Kolech, has implications for working women in Israel and for feminists worldwide: The courts ruled that she was fired illegally from the Orot Teachers’ College in 2005, and that she must be immediately reinstated. Kehat, who was described by her employers…
The Latest
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More Men See Marriage, Family as the ‘Ultimate Male Status Symbol’
Well it looks like the emasculated husbands who appear in the bulk of beer and car ads aren’t too representative of the typical American male. Men, it turns out, actually like being married and having a family. In a new survey from Askmen.com, 85% of men said they still believe in marriage, with 67% believing…
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Abortion Coverage Excluded from ‘High-Risk’ Pools
My inbox was flooded with emails from outraged readers this week from pro-choice and civil liberties groups demanding action on abortion coverage in health reform. It felt a little déjà-vu. After the healthcare reform process, which brought us Bart Stupak and months of controversy over whether abortion would be sidelined as a different kind of…
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Israel’s ‘Rape by Deception’ Verdict Belies Racism
An Israeli judge this week convicted Sabbar Kashur, a 30-year-old Jerusalem man, of rape and sentenced him to 18 months in prison. But his real crime was lying. Kashur met a Jewish woman in September 2008 in downtown Jerusalem. He told her that he was single, Jewish and interested in a romantic relationship. The woman…
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Sara Hurwitz: An Inspiration to Catholic Women?
As executive director of the Women’s Ordination Conference, Erin Saiz Hanna is front and center in the fight for women’s ordination in the Catholic Church. It’s been an uphill battle; just last week, Church officials warned that ordaining women as priests was as serious an offense as sex abuse. Founded in 1975, the Women’s Ordination…
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On Becoming Sarah ‘Is Anyone Here Jewish?’ Seltzer
When I arrived last week for a writing residency at Vermont College of Fine Arts, I sat with my fellow new students in a basement room getting “oriented” and kvetching about the poor quality of the accommodations. But as we began to introduce ourselves and each other during a “getting to know you” game, I…
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Shiva in Phnom Penh
On a recent Friday afternoon, here in Phnom Penh, my husband, Jeremy, and I went to visit the family of one of his former employees, Mak Lavin. Jeremy started an NGO called Digital Divide Data (DDD) that is based here, so, as I wrote in my last dispatch, we and our two young children are…
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Jewish Women’s Archive on ‘Women’s Pages’ the Success of The Sisterhood
Recently, Ruth Rosen wrote in the Ms. Magazine blog that the “women’s pages” of the 1950s and 60s have been reincarnated on the Internet. While she acknowledges the differences in content between those women’s pages (society, cooking, and fashion) and today’s “women’s pages” (analytical coverage of events, trends or stories overlooked by mainstream news), she…
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Taking On The Difficult Obligation of Brit Milah
Mention circumcision in a crowd — even a virtual crowd — of liberal Jews (or liberal anything, I guess) and it never fails to spark rhetorical fire. And so, when I saw a recent post on the Park Slope Parents listserv from a woman whose daughter is pregnant and not sure about having a son…
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