As a Jewish Soviet immigrant living in a tony New York City suburb, I don’t always fit in. Smalltalk in our WASPy town tends to center around real estate prices, traffic, and sports scores. Even the Jewish moms have impossibly shiny hair and perfect, glossy nails, their toned bodies forever clad in yoga pants. My…
What does the typical Billy Joel fan look like? It’s a serious question. We can, I think to at least a small degree of accuracy, guess what the typical Sex Pistols fan looked like back in their heyday, or the typical Spice Girls fan in theirs. But, what about Billy Joel? His music is so…
The Jewish psychologist Joyce Brothers, who died May 13 of respiratory failure at age 85, was a peacemaker in the emotionally fraught field of pop media therapeutic counseling. Born in Brooklyn as Joyce Bauer to a married couple of attorneys, Brothers became a primary authority on how to live in the mid-century suburban age. Although…
In the spring of 2011, Adam and Justine Amdur were heartbroken over having to give up their home in Marin County’s Terra Linda, just north of San Francisco. The sale had nothing to do with the sustained economic downturn or the depressed housing market plaguing the nation. In fact, as spring house sales get under…
Crossposted from Haaretz New cottage neighborhoods in west Rishon Letzion symbolize the suburbanization of Israel. The process can be found in stretches between Hadera and Ashdod, where middle-class residents chase their dream of a high quality of life near cities. The most visible traits of this phenomenon are conformism and uniformity: the same furnishings, the…
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