In families, we’re often called upon to play archetypal roles — the good one, the black sheep, the fun one, the responsible one. And nowhere are those “roles” more carefully scripted and ossified than in the Passover Haggadah, where we read about the Four Sons: the wise one, the wicked one, the simple one, and…
Increasingly, over the past several weeks, I have found the follow question intruding into my thoughts: When, please, will someone make Lena Dunham go away? It’s not that I have anything personal or professional against Dunham herself. I have never seen her breakout film “Tiny Furniture” or her angst-inducing HBO show “Girls.” (Okay, I have…
The 50th anniversary of the publication Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” has inspired many to reconsider the book, warts and all. One of the abiding criticisms of Friedan’s book over the past few days is that it was limited to the worldview of an upper-middle class white woman. Today, Lena Dunham, who very well might…
Who knew Bar Refaeli’s outré Super Bowl ad for Go Daddy would have such pucker power? HuffPo ran a piece on all the lucky guys the supermodel has smooched with, as well as another on nerdy Jesse Heiman who got to play tonsil hockey with her in the commercial. Hillel at Stanford University got in…
The late ex-New York mayor Ed Koch loved the limelight. Entertainment Weekly recalled a number of hizzoner’s forays into pop culture, including acting in a cameo role in “The First Wives Club,” hosting “Saturday Night Live,” presiding as a judge on “The People’s Court,” and strutting the fashion runway on “Sex and the City.” David…
Instagram, the artsy-fartsy photo-sharing app owned by Facebook, skews young. If one were to build a composite of the average Jewish female Instagrammer snapping away with her iPhone, she’d probably be a 16-year-old Jersey girl who collects and distributes “likes” with her #besties (best friends) of #selfies (self portraits) taken posed in front of a…
An election, a superstorm, and high-profile battles over women’s health marked 2012 — not to mention a whole lot of Lena Dunham. In January and February, the birth control wars raged. The year began with a major kerfuffle: Planned Parenthood got dropped as a funding partner by the Susan G. Komen Foundation — an intra-nonprofit…
I learn a lot about leadership by overseeing the painstaking but ultimately rewarding process of compiling the Forward 50 each year, of trying to identify the American Jews who have had the greatest impact on our lives in a variety of fields, from politics to culture to sports. And I learn even more about leadership…
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