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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A First-Time Mother, at Age 73
Is 73 too old to become a first-time mother? Not for the trailblazing Marylin Berger, who is now raising an 8-year-old boy from Ethiopia. The New York Times describes Marylin Berger as “someone who knew her own mind.” Long before it was normal to see women on the news, Marylin Berger was the White House…
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Jewish Feminists Take on the RCA
In a bold and passionate move, the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance (JOFA) has sent two letters to the Rabbinical Council of America (RCA), a leading Orthodox rabbinic organization, in an attempt to advance women’s leadership roles in synagogues and communities. One of the letters reads: As the major rabbinic arm in the Orthodox world, the…
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On ‘CSI,’ Evidence of Feminism’s Unfinished Work
The scene is riveting: The body of a murdered woman has been discovered in the middle of the city. Throngs of professional men and women — detectives, crime scene investigators, and the coroner — scurry around collecting evidence, analyzing the circumstances of the crime, and comparing theories. Then, someone discovers the victim’s handbag. “Oh, this…
The Latest
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Debut Novel ‘Kapitoil’ Produces a Surprisingly Likable Jewess
In his new debut novel “Kapitoil” (Harper Perennial), Teddy Wayne tells the story of Karim Issar, a young man who relocates to New York City from Qatar to help a big financial firm prepare for the Y2K bug. Though shortly after beginning his new job, Karim ends up creating a computer program that helps his…
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A Chat Show for Jewish Women
The Salon, The Jewish Channel women’s issues chat show, is out with a new episode — featuring actress Tovah Feldshuh (of “Kissing Jessica Stein” and “Golda’s Balcony” fame), Lilith magazine editor Susan Weidman Schneider, and comedy writer Julie Klausner. Panelists discuss whether women’s milestones, like Kathryn Bigelow’s historic Oscar win, should necessarily be celebrated as…
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New Men’s Club Publications Make Room for Men’s Voices
The Conservative movement’s Federation of Jewish Men’s Clubs has a new Web magazine, Mentschen. Co-editor Dr. Robert Braitman,, a Massachusetts pediatrician, is a former FJMC president, and hopes that it will both provide a forum for virtual conversation around topics meaningful to Jewish men, and that it will attract younger men to the organization, he…
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PBS’s Anne Frank and the Heroine Canon
There’s been a lot of fantastic Web writing around this week’s PBS premiere of a brand new version of “The Diary of Anne Frank” (see the Forward’s interview with star Ellie Kendrick here). On PBS’s blog, Remotely Connected, author and researcher Alexandra Zapruder, who compiled a collection of Jewish children’s Holocaust journals, wrote about the…
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Teaching Four-Year-Olds About Hitler
I’ll never forget the spring day many years ago when my 4-year-old son began coming home from kindergarten chattering about someone named “Eet-er.” This kid, whoever he was, seemed make everyone miserable. I wondered who he was and where he came from. Who in the world was “Eet-er” and why was he getting away with…
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Religious Girls’ School Fails To Integrate Ashkenazic and Sephardic Students
A religious girls’ school in the Israeli town of Emmanuel — a school that first made headlines in 2008 when it was discovered that Sephardic students were separated from Ashkenazic students both in and out of the classroom — is back in the news. Though its ethnic segregation was declared illegal by the Supreme Court,…
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Merissa Nathan Gerson: A ‘Yenta’ for a New Generation
By her own admission, Merissa Nathan Gerson’s qualification as an advice columnist is mainly “10 years of talk therapy.” “Add a few rabbis, a Buddhist-inspired education, monks, stupas, shrine rooms and the like, stir, and you get a 28-year-old Yenta,” writes the former farmer, waitress, teacher, lamp-maker, and creative writing teacher at a juvenile detention…
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Digest: Yanklowitz on Feminism, and the Fruit of Egalitarian Marriages
The Sisterhood Digest: • It is a rare thing for a man to publicly identify as feminist and to advocate on behalf of equitable pay, women’s lay and professional leadership, and increased paid maternity leave at Jewish organizations, but in The New York Jewish Week, Shmuly Yanklowitz does just that. In his essay “Jewish Feminism…
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