Ever since accidentally sending my gynecologist the crying-while-laughing face on Facebook, I do not care for emojis. They’re eerie. The only exception is the swimmer doing crawl-stroke. Where is he swimming off to? That is what I would like to know. But for a hefty fraction of the world’s two billion smartphone users, emojis are…
When Israeli musician Hanna Goor was booted offstage at a concert in Ashdod for wearing a bikini top, the incident was instantly framed in the international press — including in the Forward — as Israel’s “burkini moment.” The comparison was obvious: in France, Muslim women are being forced by to take off their conservative swimwear…
— A senior Paris rabbi defended a string of controversial municipal bans in France on wearing publically the full-body swimsuit known as burkini. Moshe Sebbag, the rabbi of the Grand Synagogue of Paris, told JTA Tuesday he supported in principle the regulations adopted earlier this month in 15 French municipalities, including the famed beach resort Cannes,…
Call it an anomaly, but the brains behind the splashy, blinged-out bikini swimsuit line Beach Gal, are two Hasidic men. Barry Glick, 30 and Saul Samet, 34 work out of an office in Boro Park, a Hasidic neighborhood in Brooklyn, designing trendy high-end bathing suits with detachable accessories like beads, seashells and fringes. “It isn’t…
In Tablet magazine, Dvora Meyers recently wrote a brief meditation on her conflicted history with skirts and some of their Jewish cultural connotations. I enjoy reading the semiotics of skirts, a fun game to play where I live, which is close to Crown Heights and equidistant from Williamsburg and Borough Park. Young women from Crown…
Is a bikini-clad bum offensive? Does a clothed booty constitute an “inappropriate” image? Probably not in hip-hop videos, vacation ads or swimwear promotions. But on the side of a New York City Transit bus that travels through heavily Orthodox Jewish neighborhoods, it’s a different story, a crusading rabbi says. And the Metropolitan Transportation Authority seems…
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