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The Miss America contest will no longer continue the bathing suit and evening gown portion of the pageant according to Gretchen Carlson, the new organization’s chairwoman. After all, the idea of men judging a woman’s merits based on how she can fill out a bikini is an anachronism in the era of #MeToo and gender…
The Miss America pageant, to me, is the stuff of funny memes: Young pretty ladies with buff arms and manicured long nails hysterically crying as the crown is placed on their heads. Barbie-like specimens of physical perfection struggling to answer questions about education and geography. It was the biggest joke of all: For decades, since…
Carson Kressley, style expert on the original 2003 “Queer Eye,” said during the Miss USA pageant that choosing a finalist was like “Sophie’s Choice.” Nuh, uh, Carson. Oh boy! Lots to unpack here. “Sophie’s Choice” is, famously, the story of a woman during the Holocaust being forced to choose which of her children will die…
“When you are silent for a very long time, it comes back and bites you in the ass” Alan Cumming Tony Award winning actor-producer-activist told the guests at Safe Horizon’s April 28 Champion Awards Dinner at New York’s Grand Hyatt. The largest victims’ services agency in the United States, Safe Horizon presented “Great Scot” Cumming…
In the wake of Bess Myerson’s death and all the talk about her rise and fall, it’s worthwhile to remember a moment when her fate turned with ours, and her future really began. Immediately post World War II, many of our families were just beginning to understand the enormity of the Holocaust. They knew it…
Bess Myerson, a Bronx-born beauty whose selection as the first — and to date only — Jewish Miss America turned out to be more than a leggy, musically talented woman. Succumbing at 90 to dementia, she left her imprint on the Jewish community as an indefatigable supporter of Israel and never forgot her Yiddish roots. When…
The fact that Bess Myerson, whose death at age 90 on December 14 was recently announced, remains the only Jewish winner in the 90-plus year history of the Miss America pageant surely says more about that contest than it does about her. Social historians have compared Myerson’s victory in 1945 with the contemporaneous on-field triumphs…
Miss America 2014 Nina Davuluri made headlines this past week — not just for taking the crown on Sunday night, but also because of a racist backlash that occurred after she won. The American-born Indian woman representing New York was accused of being “Miss Al Qaeda,” a terrorist, Arab, Egyptian and everything in between. Davuluri…
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