In 1936, 12 young Jewish girls in Hillside, NJ, faced a dilemma. At ages 7 and 8, they were interested in joining their local Brownie troop—but they and their families felt less than comfortable with troop’s choice of a local church as a meeting place when secular spaces were available. Worse, having faced some anti-Semitic…
Scanning her inbox last fall, Becky Benson happened upon an unusual request from a pregnant friend, Emily Rapp: Would she mind if Rapp gave the baby a middle name to honor Benson’s younger daughter, Elliott? If the proposition sounded weird to her, the email went on, she should just feel free to forget it. “I…
Does a woman need to give up friendships with members of the opposite sex when she marries a man? For Rabbi Rachel Miller Solomin, the answer is yes. In a piece for Tablet, she writes about the decision to write a friend — a Catholic priest with whom she said explicitly she would never have…
According to Ann Friedman in her post “Shine Theory: Why Powerful Women Make the Best Friends,” over at NYMag.com, we should seek out women who are more together or successful than we are. She writes: Approaching and befriending women who I identify as smart and powerful (sometimes actively pursuing them, as with any other crush)…
During his July experiment with international diplomacy, Mitt Romney’s encomium about the Israeli health care system provided a delicious illustration of one of our few remaining bipartisan sports: pandering to all things Israel. “Do you realize what health care spending is as a percentage of GDP in Israel? Eight percent,” Romney intoned. “You spend 8%…
I will always remember this one Shabbat dinner in my tiny studio on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. It was wintertime and I had been preparing the meal for three days: shopping for groceries after work, hauling heavy bags up to my fifth-floor walk up, and chopping, slicing and simmering into the wee hours…
If the new HBO series “Girls” lives up to its breathless early reviews, Lena Dunham’s Hannah and her tight-knit group of self-reflective friends seem bound to join the television canon alongside Lucy and Ethel, Laverne and Shirley, and Carrie and Co. In advance tonight’s “Girls” premiere — see The Sisterhood preview here — I spoke with…
I hadn’t realized how significant Passover has been in forming friendships in my life. Two different friends reminded me this week about how the holiday was significant in the creation of our relationships. They both bave had such big influences on me that I thought it is worth talking about them both. Dr. Chaya Gorsetman…
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