How Tu B’Av, the ancient Jewish holiday of love, was revived
In 1932, a group of Orthodox girls celebrated the holiday by taking a nighttime hike into the woods.
orthodox women
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Culture Sacrifice through Heresy
Read this article in Yiddish Qorbanot: Offerings Poems by Alisha Kaplan SUNY Press, 2021 Many people believe that sacrificing for a greater good is a virtue. In the Jewish tradition, even martyrdom in the right context is called “the sanctification of God’s holy name.” But what should you do when holiness is weakened — by…
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Life The Lives Of American Jewish Women — As Seen Through Their Glossy Magazines
Rosa Sonnenschein, an Austrian-born, quick-witted rabbi’s wife living in St. Louis in the late 1800s, wore her curly black hair piled atop her head in a chignon, and only the most fashionable gowns of the era. This, however, is an aside: Sonnenschein was a successful writer and journalist; a seminal voice speaking up for women’s…
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Life The Orthodox Woman’s Tireless Search For The Most Natural Wig
On a chilly spring day in March of 2002, Rachel Riss, an Orthodox woman with a fashion-forward sensibility, got engaged. But niggling at the edges of her starry-eyed cloud of happiness was a twinge of worry: she needed to find a wig. According to Jewish law, a woman must cover her hair upon marriage, and…
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Life Why So Many Hasidic Men Are Such Aggressive Drivers
A heated conversation erupted this week after the actress Amber Tamblyn tweeted that she had nearly been hit by a Hasidic man while walking through the streets of Brooklyn’s Hasidic South Williamsburg. She described being sideswiped while walking with her baby, and seemed to feel intentionally targeted because she was a woman. If anyone in…
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Life Why The Women’s Confessional Essay Is Here To Stay
Recently, there’s been a lot of debate about the value of the personal essay – especially the women’s personal essay – a genre which has taken over online media publications with vigor in the last decade. Jia Tolentino, in her New Yorker essay in May, “The Personal Essay Boom Is Over”, wrote about the increasing…
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Life How Israeli Colleges Are Discriminating Against Ultra-Orthodox Women
The segregation of ultra-Orthodox men from women during higher education degree programs is against Israeli law, as well as a violation of educational ethics, claims a group of Israeli professors in a new appeal to Israel’s High Court. Sixteen academics from across Israeli institutions have launched a campaign to close gender segregated college- and university-level…
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Life ‘And He Shall Rule Over You’: The Genesis of #MeToo
It has been both heartbreaking and also oddly unsurprising to see so many women in my Facebook feed identify as victims of sexual assault and harassment. I say unsurprising because, tragically, there is a human propensity to fall prey to the ugliest trappings of patriarchy. Also unsurprising because we’ve been here before – this story…
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