Many little girls grow up on Disney princess cartoons. I grew up on Bollywood films, dancing to the Hindi music, the lyrics to which I had memorized by the time I was six. I was raised in the 1980s in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and Bollywood’s charming wholesomeness was imported in droves. I’d…
Teen Vogue magazine began mysteriously arriving in our mail a couple of months ago (probably because I subscribe to Vogue proper and the algorithms know how old my children are), and I am doing my best to keep it away from my 13-year-old daughter. I take a quick look through it and then tuck it…
‘Tis the season for year-end lists, and the pop culture web site Complex.com has come out with one that places them squarely in skeez territory: the 50 hottest Jewish women, a catalog of actresses, porn stars, and models with Semitic heritage. “As a flame dancing atop a candle gives off heat, so do many of…
Why do we need to tell our kids that they can’t do important things for their own sake, but only to get some kind of reward? The notion of manicures for middle school girls in a Jewish school disturbs me on a variety of levels. Since Elana Sztokman wrote so well about why they are…
The New York Times recently wrote about a Jewish day school program for pre-teen girls which combines Torah study and nail painting. In a response to the piece, Sisterhood contributor Renee Zhert-Gand wrote that she feels torn about the club, which is called “Midrash Manicures.” She explains that while she is always open to new…
Last week, The Shmooze reported on SpaMitzvah, a bodycare company whose new apples-and-honey based beauty products pay “homage to Rosh Hashanah.” Now, a Westchester County, N,Y., rabbi is adding her own gloss on the notion of Jewish glamor. Rabbi Yael Buechler has an unusual hobby: She paints her nails to correspond with a Torah portion,…
Until recently, my relationship with waxing was unemotional. And then I went to a makeup boutique to buy some new foundation. That’s when – during the application of a tint called “Blush Stone,” an incongruous elicitation if ever there was one – that the makeup artist said to me, “We gotta take care of those.”…
There’s almost too much awful male behavior to write about this week, from the sexual assault allegations against Dominique Strauss-Kahn to the admission by Arnold Schwarzenegger to fathering a love child to this gag-worthy article about the rise of dude editors. But a very special prize for awfulness has to go the folks at Psychology…
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