Welcome to the Forward’s Jewish News coverage about feminism and womens issues.
Feminism
The Latest
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Life Untold Story of Jewish Feminist Pioneers
Historian Melissa R. Klapper recently won a National Jewish Book Award for “Ballots, Babies, and Banners of Peace: American Jewish Women’s Activism, 1890-1940.” In the book, Klapper, a professor of history at Rowan University in New Jersey, shows us that decades before Steinem and Friedan became households names, Jewish feminists were already working to make…
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News High School Tefillin Debate Just Tip of Iceberg for Orthodox Jewish Women
(JTA) — The announcement this week that SAR, a modern Orthodox high school in New York, is allowing girls to lay tefillin is helping expose an increasingly sharp fault line within Orthodoxy. For decades, it has been difficult to sort out the precise dividing lines between the varieties of Orthodoxy — ultra, haredi, centrist, modern,…
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Fast Forward Ramaz Would Also Allow Girls To Use Tefillin — Joins SAR
Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox school in Manhattan, has joined SAR in agreeing to allow girls to pray with tefillin, although the school’s principal reportedly says no students are currently doing so. “If a young woman wanted to put on tefillin and tallit, she could daven with us in our school minyan,” Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, the…
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Opinion My Fight To Lay Tefillin At an Orthodox School
A young woman prays wearing tefillin on April 11, 2013 in Jerusalem, Israel. / Getty Images On December 8, 2013, SAR High School principal Rabbi Naphtali Harcsztark permitted students Ronit Morris and Yael Marans to lay tefillin in the school’s daily women’s prayer group, allowing them to do so within the school building. While this…
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Life Elana Sztokman To Leave Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance
Elana Sztokman is leaving the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance after a year and a half as executive director. “It is a mutual parting of the ways,” she told the Forward. She would not elaborate on the reason for her departure, saying that her separation contract prohibits her from talking about the split. Sztokman said she…
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Life ‘Lean In,’ Orthodox Style
Editor’s note: This post is the third in a three part series answering the question, “How should Jewish feminism change in 2014 to be more effective?” Read the first post here and the second post here. It’s no secret that women have a hard time supporting one another. Sure, we’ll bring each other lasagnas and…
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Life How Can We Make Online Feminism Better?
Editor’s note: This post is the first in a three part series answering the question, “How should Jewish feminism change in 2014 to be more effective?” This past year was an extraordinary one for digital feminism. Debates and ideas that originated on the feminist Web became national news, as the generation of activists weaned on…
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Life Should Feminists Go on Diets?
In the past 20-some years, women have “taken back” many things from the patriarchy. These include lipstick, the words “lady” and “slut,” and knitting. But there is one last thing feminists have yet to re-appropriate, and that, according to a new essay in Elle magazine, is dieting. In this month’s magazine Marisa Meltzer writes about…
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