The announcement this week that Mattel is launching a new line of Barbie dolls with “realistic” bodies was greeted with cheers in the feminist community. It was a welcome response to a decades-long struggle against the ubiquitous commercial messages that an ideal woman should have a ridiculous body size and shape – unattainably thin limbs,…
At the Central Conference of American Rabbis, we have to wrestle with the question “What does it mean to be Jewish in America today?” beyond the theoretical. In our charge is the basic structure and tone of worship for the largest group of Jews in the country, the Reform Movement. And when we took a…
The Ruderman Family Foundation recognized five Jewish organizations that integrate people with disabilities into their services and programs. The Ruderman Prize in Inclusion, which awards $50,000 to each recipient, aims for communities around the world to replicate the integration models created by the prize winners. This year’s recipients are: The Yavne Institute in Montevideo, Uruguay,…
More than two-thirds of Israelis object to the removal of a Conservative rabbi from a bar mitzvah ceremony for disabled children intended to take place at the Israeli president’s residence. The ceremony has been run for 20 years by the Conservative movement and was scheduled to take place at the end of June. It was…
Leah Meyerhoff is tired of the straight, white, male perspective. The 35-year old director sat in a small back room at the IFC Center on Tuesday morning and emphatically expressed her desire for new voices to populate the big screen. “I think female filmmakers who have been shut out of the process and whose voices…
You’d have to be made of stone to remain unmoved by the special bar and bat mitzvah ceremonies run Israeli children with disabilities At the event I attended a few years back, four boys and girls, dressed in their finest clothes, most in wheelchairs, others standing and walking, guided by family members took their place…
Eytan Yammer, William Tepper, Carnie Shalom Rose We expect a lot of our rabbis and most of them do their best to deliver. They head our congregations and often become public faces of the community. They are dedicated to the physical and spiritual wellbeing of their members and can be exemplars of service. But some…
Growing up, many girls have a Prince Charming in mind. So did I. I knew exactly that I wanted to marry a handsome, Jewish boy one day. I was determined that he should not only be clever and well-educated, but also funny — and look like Paul Newman in Exodus, where he plays the Jewish…
