In 2010, Leandra Medine Cohen founded the fashion blog Man Repeller from her parents’ house on the Upper East Side.

Now, 10 years later, the publication, which in September changed its name to Repeller, has announced that it will close.

“The company has been self-funded by its operations since its launch ten years ago as a personal blog but due to financial constraints, we are no longer able to sustain the business,” Medine Cohen told the Cut in a statement on Oct. 22. Over the summer, Repeller had faced criticism from former employees and readers for promoting a purportedly exclusionary culture.

Medine Cohen started out as a college student blogging about what she called “sartorial contraceptives,” fashion-forward outfits that functioned to ward off the attention of men looking for conventionally-attired women. Initially focused on her quirky — but still very pricey — outfit choices and self-empowerment-focused approach to style, the site eventually expanded to cover beauty, design, parenting and relationships. Marketing itself as an approachable combination of high-brow fashion inspiration and budget life hacks, the site became a destination for current and aspiring it-girls interested in cultivating a Brooklyn-chic aesthetic on an Upper Manhattan budget.

Over the summer, Repeller was one of many progressive media outlets, including several marketing a kind of consumption-based female empowerment, to face backlash for lack of diversity and racist internal practices. In June, a letter Medine Cohen published in solidarity with protesters against police brutality led to a full-scale revolt in the comments section. Readers accused the site of uniformly promoting the perspectives of privileged and mostly white writers. One Black reader wrote that despite perusing Repeller for years she “never quite saw myself in its definition of ‘women.’”

Former employees of color spoke out about Repeller’s internal climate. One anonymous staffer described to Vox a “culture of favoritism and cliquishness at the company.” Sabrina Santiago, a Repeller staffer who was let go at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, called the outlet’s response to protests over police brutality “another performative attempt to cover racist actions.”

Just days later, Medine Cohen announced that she would step back from her central role at Repeller. “Man Repeller was founded to celebrate self-expression in all of its forms but it has become clear that I’ve failed to deliver on this mission,” she wrote. She’s since turned her professional focus to Instagram, where her account has come to look like an early version of the website: a catalogue of the unexpected outfits she dons every day despite having, presumably, very few places to go.

After Medine Cohen’s departure, the outlet changed its name to Repeller, apparently in a bid to relate to a wider audience. “Being a ‘Man Repeller’ was defined as empowering yourself by deflecting the male gaze when this site began 10 years ago, but today discovering yourself and earning your confidence feels far more multidimensional,” staff wrote in a September 9 letter to readers. The letter promised that Repeller’s voice would remain unchanged, and indeed the headlines populating the homepage — “The Best Vintage Clogs, Laura Ashley Sweaters, and Glass Goblets Just for You!” or “I Put Fall Produce On My Face, For Beauty” — could have appeared any time in the past several years.

Repeller has not said when it will fully cease coverage, but readers looking for trustworthy advice on the best velvet bell-bottoms should start scoping out alternative online destinations.

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com. Follow her on Twitter at @katz_conn.

Last night the Schmooze went to Manderley again … and it was a huge bummer.

Before it even debuted, the Netflix reboot of Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” was slated to go wrong in a lot of ways. A 1938 Gothic thriller with strong “Jane Eyre” vibes, the novel follows a naive 20-something narrator who marries moody widower Maxim de Winter and repairs to Manderley, his drool-worthy Tudor-era track mansion, only to find out that his first wife died in less-than-savory circumstances. It’s basically high-quality fanfiction for people who spent college writing essays about subtextual sexuality in Victorian literature, and it’s already been the subject of an unimpeachable 1940 Hitchcock adaptation starring Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine. Directed by Ben Wheatley, the 2020 remake brought color and a lot of cars to the table; but as soon as we saw the trailer, a Baz Luhrman-style perfume ad that paired nebulously midcentury interiors with a pop soundtrack, we knew it wouldn’t compete.

Still, we had hopes for the one member of the tribe among the cast: Armie Hammer, best known for playing emotionally available Jewish hotties in “Call Me By Your Name” and “On the Basis of Sex,” playing Maxim de Winter. With the looks of a WASP princeling and the fighting Twitter spirit of your most Jewish uncle, Hammer seemed like a good pick for a character who exudes equal parts repressed British sex appeal and serious relationship red flags.

And there’s a delicious irony in the prospect of a Jew taking center stage in a story that serves as a sort of 20th-century coda to the Victorian era, which was not a particularly fun time for Jews in literature. (Du Maurier’s grandfather George du Maurier, a fellow novelist, invented Svengali, a caricaturish Jewish hypnotist whose name has since become shorthand for controlling, devious behavior.) Manderley’s real-life equivalents wouldn’t likely have been welcoming to Jews, so it’s fun to see a Jew — especially one whose ancestors include an espionage-prone oil baron and a founder of the American Communist Labor Party — take charge of the fictional estate. Not to mention the fact that the character he plays is obsessed, to his detriment, with the purity of his own bloodline: of the possibility of bequeathing Manderley to his sister’s sons, Maxim remarks that, while they boys are nice, “they’re just not de Winters.”

We would have loved to see Hammer reinvent Maxim for the modern day: While figured sympathetically in the novel and the Hitchcock adaptation as a tortured hero, he’s also a dangerously entitled petty tyrant whose temper flares whenever he realizes he can’t dominate the women around him. Hammer is no stranger to imperious, well-heeled characters — he did, after all, play a Winklevoss twin — and we know he could have done it.

Instead, more than anyone else, Hammer portrayed Laurence Olivier.

Just as the screenplay painstakingly retraced Hitchcock’s steps, Hammer replicated Olivier’s mannerisms, down to the rapid-fire line delivery and angry about-faces every time his first wife is mentioned. Those gestures seem logical in a classic film but, in 2020, read as manically unappealing. In the words of one member of my Netflix watch party: “Get out, girl.”

And while the one thing Hammer should have going for him is relentless sex appeal, the film strips that away too. Hammer is several years younger than the man he’s supposed to portray, an inconsistency the film crew resolved by outfitting him with a Colonel Mustard suit and an incel’s crewcut. The film’s ability to make Hammer less than indisputably sexy was one of the only surprising turns of this so-called thriller, but it also undermines one of the story’s key premises: the idea that Maxim’s wife is sufficiently wowed in bed to overlook the increasing evidence that he’s both a felon and an incredibly wet blanket.

Hammer’s poor showing as Maxim is probably a function of the broader movie’s flaws, not his own acting prowess. The next time a media conglomerate dumps several million dollars into a “Rebecca” remake, we hope they find someone better to helm it (ideally, an English major who has completed at least four single-sitting readings of the novel) and give him the second try he deserves.

In the meantime, we’re holding our breath for “Find Me,” when Hammer will return to the theatrical territory he knows better than any other: gentle Jewish lovers.

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com. Follow her on Twitter at @katz_conn.

“The Great British Baking Show” is supposed to calm you down. With its bespectacled judges and decidedly low-stakes narration — “For some bakers, bread is a new challenge” — it’s earned a reputation as a self-soother for the pandemic era. At a time when reality increasingly resembles dystopian prestige TV, “The Great British Baking Show” is one of the few options on Netflix that can still be termed escapist.

But just as Jews would need Tums on hand to enjoy most of the show’s creations, it looks like we’ll have to pop some Xanax to make it through the current season, given the serious shade judge Prue Leith just threw at our favorite Jewish bread.

In case you missed it: She said she’s just not that into babka from New York City.

In the show’s latest episode, contestants were asked to make a chocolate hazelnut babka as part of a series of chocolate-themed challenges. For the British bakers, the challenge created confusion: A contestant named Dave said he’d “never heard of one,” while Linda fretted that she “wished she knew what it looked like.”

What must it be like to be a citizen of the country that invented spotted dick, whose citizens have apparently never encountered the gleaming pile of saturated fats that is a well-constructed babka?

We pitied the bakers, but the final blow to our dwindling post-Megxit goodwill towards the Commonwealth came when Leith tasted the sample chocolate hazelnut babka created by fellow judge Paul Hollywood. “It’s lovely, much lighter than I thought it would be,” she said, tucking into a thinner slice than has ever been seen on a Jewish breakfast table. “I have had it in New York, and it’s not nearly as nice as this.” (Italics and associated rage are ours.)

A sweet braided bread originating in Eastern Europe, babka is described by Wikipedia as “popular in the Jewish diaspora.” That’s a nice way of saying it’s a caloric extravaganza through which our elders transmit cultural knowledge and an inescapable reliance on emotional eating. While New York isn’t the birthplace of babka, it’s here that Jews replaced Old World fillings of seeds and nuts with the chocolate and cinnamon on which we gorge today. So when she dissed New York babka, Leith was dismissing the culture that created it.

Reached by the website Insider for comment, Breads Bakery, one of the city’s foremost purveyors of babka — they pioneered the chocolate-hazelnut flavor combo that Hollywood copied — diplomatically refrained from telling Leith to choke on her non-tristate-area pastries. Instead, owner Gadi Peleg invited her to pay the bakery a visit, where she can “taste Breads Bakery’s babka, right out of the oven, as they come out all day, every day.”

On social media, the show’s Jewish viewers were less tactful.

“IVE HAD IT IN NEW YORK AND THIS WAS BETTER”

I CAN ONLY TWEET IN ALL CAPS I AM SO ANGRY— Alex (@JewishWonk) October 19, 2020

prue saying with full earnestness that paul’s babka was better than any she’d had in new york was an act of violence— amanda (@motelamanda) October 17, 2020

Prue suggesting that Babka she had in New York is not as good is frankly blasphemy.— Dr. Tori (@vbarber820) October 17, 2020

This isn’t even the Jewish people’s first beef with the show’s take on a Jewish bread. Back in 2018, Hollywood asked contestants to create a “plaited loaf,” which sounds fancy but is actually just an eight-stranded challah. Though challah is basically its own food group for millions of Jews around the world, the judges described braiding as a “skill which is dying off,” evidently in need of preservation by skilled British bakers with no Jewish friends.

“This is a great thing to make for a festive occasion,” observed “Baking Show” stalwart Mary Berry — umm, like Shabbat, the festive occasion that happens 52 times a year?

But Paul’s wide-eyed wonder over the novelty of braided bread shouldn’t really surprise anyone. In his 2012 cookbook “How to Bake,” he proffered a recipe for something called a “cholla loaf,” ostensibly created by a Jewish friend named Sylvia Woolf. Paul correctly noted that challah is a “traditional Jewish loaf” — but he also said it was most commonly served on Passover.

And let’s not forget the show’s periodic forays into bagels. During a challenge last week involving rainbow bagels, an abomination that should not exist, Hollywood called the crispy — a.k.a., ideal — exterior of one contestant’s creation “overdone,” causing the Nosher to question whether he “has ever visited New York City, or even tasted a bagel.”

Are Leith’s comments the worst aspersions cast against New York Jews? Unfortunately, no. Do we think they share the potentially antisemitic undertones of Ted Cruz’s “New York values” jibes? Not really — it doesn’t seems like anyone associated with the “Great British Baking Show” knows enough about Jews or New York to effectively deploy a dog-whistle. Still, it’s aggravating to see a beloved dish featured on a beloved show, only for a judge to insist she can do it in a better and more refined way than the people who have honed the recipe for centuries. Whether you get yours from a bakery or bubbe’s kitchen, you can find any kind of babka you want in New York: light, dense, fluffy, succulent, or any kind in between.

And who wants light babka, anyway? Babka is more than the sum of the hazelnuts twisted into its core: it’s a whole-body experience of emotional nourishment and physical disquiet, one that you just can’t enjoy while nibbling off a china plate on a manicured British estate.

So here’s my invitation to Leith: Come to New York City on a rainy day. Experience a personal or professional crisis that can only be resolved by ingesting 800 extra calories before dinner. Head to your nearest legacy appetizing store and purchase a Saran-wrapped slice of babka thicker than Timothée Chalamet’s neck. (Do not, under any circumstances, remember to take napkins.) Consume the babka while sidestepping exploded garbage bags or sitting in a stalled subway car with no cellphone reception — extra points for landing crumbs on your neighbors. Savor the palpable pit that will form in your stomach and remain there for at least 24 hours.

If you’re not eating it like that, are you even eating babka?

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com. Follow her on Twitter at @katz_conn.

Today, Doug Emhoff — Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris’ husband and Forward-certified “Hot Jewish Dad” — marks his 64th turn around the sun. So how is the potential Second Gentleman celebrating?

By registering voters in Virginia, of course.

Emhoff, who has not been seen sans Biden-Harris paraphernalia since sometime in August, started out the day by launching a Charlottesville voter registration drive with University of Virginia students for Biden. Later, he headed out to Fairfax County to preside over a yard sign pick-up event. On Instagram, he posted a picture of his stump speech with a characteristically cheerful caption: “What a great way to spend my birthday. Talking about Joe and Kamala in Virginia. Let’s do this!”

It should surprise absolutely nobody that Emhoff chose to spend the day this way. When Biden tapped Harris as his running mate in August, Emhoff switched from professionally kvelling for his wife to professionally kvelling for her campaign. Pretty much Emhoff’s entire social media presence is devoted to boosting Harris’s political profile. Per Instagram, he can usually be found having a “great day” participating in campaign activities from carving brisket in battleground states to posing with Gretchen Whitmer’s dog.

View this post on Instagram

Great day in Mich and awesome seeing the incredible Gov @whitmermi and her new puppy named…Doug!

A post shared by Doug Emhoff (@douglasemhoff) on Oct 12, 2020 at 6:18pm PDT

Practically, nothing Emhoff does for his wife should strike us as more than mildly heart-warming. In a male candidate’s wife, such behavior wouldn’t even be surprising. Just consider Emhoff’s campaign counterpart, Jill Biden, who has been spreading the “No Malarkey” gospel for years. But the only political phenomenon rarer than a woman on a major-party ticket is a political husband who is so fully and publicly obsessed with his wife — which makes Emhoff a seriously trailblazing dude.

In honor of the birthday of a nice Jewish man who loves his wife very much, here’s a roundup of the best things we’ve written about Doug Emhoff.

We polled Emhoff’s friends and learned why they already consider him the “Second Mensch.”

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

We investigated the Harris-Emhoff origin story. (Hint: it involves a Lakers game and a rambling voicemail that Harris replays every year on the couple’s anniversary.)

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

We revisited Harris’s first encounter with her in-laws, a nice Jewish couple with no reservations about touching the faces of complete strangers.

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

We got the skinny on Emhoff’s kids, Cole and Ella, who are definitely way cooler than you.

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

And, of course, we said it loud and proud: Doug Emhoff is our hot Jewish dad crush. Sue us. We’ll have good representation.

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com. Follow her on Twitter at @katz_conn.

Susan Page, a “Midwest nice” native of Wichita, Kan. asked some good questions during Wednesday night’s vice presidential debate. But when it came to holding her ground against overtalking from Vice President Mike Pence, she failed miserably.

While the ground rules stipulated equal speaking time for each candidate, Pence, who delivered each answer in the form of a 15-paragraph essay, proved difficult to stop once started. Senator Kamala Harris too ran over her time, especially when she realized the moderator was far too — well, moderate.

Time and again, Page tried in vain to shut Pence down with a polite, “Thank you, Mr. Vice President,” which only seemed to encourage him and enrage viewers, who took to social media begging for better-run a debate.

The answer, of course, is to set each presidential debate at a Shabbat dinner table.

A super cut of Susan Page failing to enforce the debate rules as Pence just barrels over her pic.twitter.com/AKUIj35atJ— Parker Molloy (@ParkerMolloy) October 8, 2020

As any Jew who has ever mentioned a single current event at a gathering of more than three people knows, on Shabbat the phrase “thank you” does not exist, there’s no such thing as being too emotional and all talking is overtalking.

We understand this solution isn’t for everyone. We’ve even heard (although we can’t quite believe it) that in some quarters Jews are considered “pushy” or “obnoxious” for our conversational style. But if America wants better debate, run them according to these five Shabbat table rules:

1. No more “Thank you, Mr. Vice President.”

Non-Jews compare an ideal conversation to a game of tennis, in which one ball is swatted gracefully back and forth. Jewish conversation is dodgeball, with wrenches.

At your next debate, Ms. Page, instead of “Thank you,” try: “Hey, am I gonna get a word in edgewise?” or “Enough already!”, or — especially if guests are visiting — “Never once in our 35 years of marriage have you stopped to listen.”

But the surefire Shabbat table technique to get someone to stop talking is simple: talk louder. But, you ask, if everyone talks over everyone won’t the dinner table become a cacophony of simultaneous screaming voices that cancel one another out? Yes it will. Is that a problem?

2. No segues.

When’s the last time you sat down to Shabbat dinner and heard someone turn the discussion by saying, “You’ve given me a perfect segue into my next topic?”

Exactly, never.

Actual scientific research shows that hallmarks of Jewish communication include “abrupt shifts of topics, unhesitating introduction of new topics and persistence in reintroducing a topic if others don’t immediately pick up on it.” In other words, if you don’t like what people are talking about, you can feel free to introduce a new topic ASAP. The more unrelated, the sooner your interlocutors will understand that you found what they were saying to be boring. Connecting different strands of conversation is a sign of weakness at the Shabbat table and should never be attempted.

Yet the key to any Shabbat conversation, however hectic it may seem, is balance. The unhesitating introduction of new topics must be matched by equal persistence in reintroducing old ones. “Let it go!” may have ended up on Broadway, but it started at a Shabbat table.

3. No, you can’t “finish your point.”

In the 3,000-year history of Shabbat meals, no one has ever finished a point. King David reportedly got close once — that’s why they made him king. You will be interrupted at the end, so make your point up front, leave the long stories for people who care, and — Ms. Page — when a guest asks, “Can I have 15 seconds?” the correct answer is, “You just had two minutes!”

4. Answer the question!

Shabbat rules: you are allowed to scream, “Answer the question!” as much and as often as you want. If the person still refuses to answer the question, the moderator can choose from the following standard Shabbat table responses: a) ”What are you afraid of?” b) “Stop changing the subject, you always change the subject.” c) “Am I talking to myself? Can you not hear me?”

5. If you see a fly, say a fly

Did Ms. Page see the fly land on Pence’s head? Of course she did. Did she say anything? Of course not. If the fly lands on a Shabbat guest you care about, like a work colleague or your child’s Hinge date, the correct response is to lean over, say, “Eiuww, stay still,” and swat the bug right out of their hair.

(Feel free right after to comment, “Your scalp’s a little dry” or “Mmm, you smell good.”)

But if you don’t like the guest, do what will now be known as “The Momala.” Don’t say a word, let the thing nest there, lay its eggs, whatever and— this is a must — laugh about it all the way home.

The TLDR: Anyone who thinks civil discourse died recently should just please attend a Shabbat dinner, where they can see that nice Jewish families have been feasting over its cold dead corpse for millennia.

Man Repeller, the Jewish it-girl blog that spanned a decade, is no more

Irene Katz Connelly is an editorial fellow at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com. Follow her on Twitter at @katz_conn.