This is the Forward’s coverage of Orthodox Judaism, which aims for a stricter observance of halachic law than Conservative or Reform Judaism. It includes Modern Orthodox Judaism, as well as Haredi (sometimes called ultra-Orthodox) Judaism,…
Orthodox Judaism
The Latest
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Opinion Diva of the District
Mindy Meyer is a 22-year-old Orthodox law student who went to Prospect Park Yeshiva in Brooklyn, wears knee-length skirts — and is running for New York state Senate. Her website, pink and flashy, incorporates glitter and leopard print. Campaign slogan? “I’m Senator and I know it.” “I’m trying to appeal to the younger population,” explains…
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News Most Brooklyn Abuse Cases Involve Kin
Recent media accounts of child sexual abuse in Brooklyn’s Orthodox community have highlighted the threat victims face from teachers, rabbis and yeshiva staff as perpetrators, and the special pressures — even intimidation — they face from community leaders not to report such cases to secular law enforcement. But a list of child sexual abuse cases…
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News Hynes Brings Longtime Critics Into Fold
After years criticizing Brooklyn’s district attorney, a group of advocates for victims of childhood sexual abuse has joined a new committee set up by Charles Hynes to collaborate on combating such abuse in the ultra-Orthodox community. The advocates, who include longtime community activists Asher Lipner, Mark Appel and Joel Engelman, met with Hynes and several…
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Life Delivering a Baby in Silence
Can you imagine giving birth in silence? Me neither. But at least one woman so driven by piety (and perhaps mental illness) did so, staying silent through the rest of the day, apparently because she made a vow of silence, or taanis dibur. While her husband was at synagogue, one recent Shabbat morning, this woman…
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News World’s Strongest Girl Lifts Twice Weight
Video: Nate Lavey The strongest girl in the world is an Orthodox Jewish 10-year-old from Fair Lawn, N.J. Naomi Kutin, a soon-to-be sixth-grader at the Yeshivat Noam day school in Paramus, can lift more than twice her own 99 pounds. In January she set a world record for women in her weight class (then 97…
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Culture The Liberation of Helène Aylon
Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist By Helène Aylon The Feminist Press, 350 pages, $29.95 Walking through the “Too Jewish?” exhibit at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum back in 1997, surveying the artistic commentaries on popular tropes of American Jewish culture — big noses, Barbra Streisand,…
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Israel News Document Trove Raises Abuse Questions
A trove of newly-released documents has raised questions about the Brooklyn District Attorney’s handling of one of the most notorious Orthodox sex abuse cases, the New York Times has reported. The documents relate to the case of Avrohom Mondrowitz, an alleged sex abuser who fled New York in 1984 to avoid prosecution, eventually winding up…
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Life Feminist, Orthodox, Engaged and on the Pill
This post is the first in “Feminist, Orthodox and Engaged,” a series by Simi Lampert on love, sex, and betrothal in the life of a Modern Orthodox woman. This month, 11 years after my bat mitzvah, I finally feel like a real woman. Joining the ranks of liberated women throughout the Western world, I took…
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