In this week’s Reporters Roundtable podcast, host Josh Nathan-Kazis is joined by Forward intern Anne Cohen to discuss the recent graduation of the first class of maharat — orthodox female religious leaders. Then, Yoel Matveev of the Forverts drops by to give a fascinating history of the radical orthodox women who have lead congregations in…
The dust has settled after the June 16 graduation of the first class of female maharats from a groundbreaking Orthodox rabbinical school. But controversy over the role that the newly minted religious leaders from Yeshivat Maharat will play in Orthodoxy — along with 14 more students in future classes — appears to be just getting…
Debbie Stoller, 49, always had lofty aspirations for Bust, the genre-smashing, stereotype-shattering magazine she and Laurie Henzel launched in 1993. “Even though it just started as a [photocopied], stapled-together thing, we always thought it would take its place on the newsstand, next to all the other women’s magazines,” Stoller said. “We hoped it would provide…
Gedalya Gottdenger’s dream is to get a degree in psychology. But unlike most 21-year-olds, Gottdenger lacks a basic education, even though he has been studying since he was a child. Gottdenger, who grew up in a Hasidic community in Brooklyn, is a product of ultra-Orthodox Jewish day schools in which, numerous students report, math and…
As the Internal Revenue Service reels from revelations that it targeted Tea Party groups’ tax-exempt applications for extra scrutiny, Jewish groups from the left and right are seeking to draw attention to a less noticed reality they say they face: Groups with ties to Israel seem to be drawing extra IRS scrutiny, too. Several Jewish…
The debate over Angelina Jolie’s decision to have a double mastectomy in order to reduce her chances of breast cancer from a ‘Jewish gene’ mutation just got feisty. Singer-songwriter Melissa Etheridge, who is herself a breast cancer survivor, said Jolie’s decision was “fearful”, in an interview with the Washington Blade. Asked about Jolie’s decisions, Etheridge,…
Catherine Afarian calls herself a “love child of the ‘70s.” Her mother discovered that she was pregnant after she had broken off a relationship of less than a year. Afarian has never met her biological father, but her mother always said he came from a big Italian family, and Afarian got a kick out of…
Sunday’s inaugural graduation at Yeshivat Maharat was no ordinary cap and gown ceremony. Rather, it was history in the making for Orthodox women. As Ruth Balinsky Friedman, Rachel Kohl Finegold and Abby Brown Scheier prepared to become the first women to hold the title maharat in the Jewish community, faculty members of the school and…
The annual meeting of the Jewish death care radicals is no place for a funeral director. That became clear just after lunch on the second full day of the North American Chevra Kadisha and Jewish Cemetery Conference, when an attorney named Efrem Grail unloaded on the coffin hawkers. “This is about a protected profession which…
What’s the essence of the Jewish father? This was the question the Forward posed to you in a contest to write six-word tributes to your fathers and grandfathers for Father’s Day. Six words may not seem like much to work with for a people with so much to say. And there are few topics that…
This story first appeared in the Yiddish Forverts. It was translated into English by Frimet Goldberger. According to a study by the UJA Federation of New York, the poverty rate of the greater New York Jewish population grew exponentially as of late. More than 560,000 people — 20% of all the Jewish households in the…
