In the age of the smartphone, it is getting harder and harder to get human beings to give their all to one person, one subject and one moment. Maybe that’s why a tweet on how various languages express the idea of “paying attention” went viral recently, amassing 28,000 likes and over 7,000 retweets at last…
I met Alice Shalvi in 2009, on my first trip to Israel as editor of the Forward. Honestly, I was apprehensive, unsure of the purpose of my visit other than to connect with a legendary feminist whose backstory seemed brave but vague in my mind. I remember impressions more than details of that first visit….
In the world of pro-Israel activism, Hen Mazzig is an icon. A veteran of Israel’s military, he is a popular writer and campus speaker — a high-profile fighter in the war for Israel’s reputation. His eloquent op-eds, published in nearly every Israeli and American Jewish publication (including the Forward), and his speeches to students across…
“We don’t have rules. We want the women to feel at home here. If someone comes every day or if they haven’t been for a year, it doesn’t matter,” says Sister Azezet Kidane, co-director of Kuchinate, an African refugee women’s collective in Tel Aviv. The women at Kuchinate, which means “crochet” in Tigrinya (the language…
Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Life By Jane Sherron De Hart Alfred A. Knopf, 752 pages, $35 Among the virtues of Jane Sherron De Hart’s magisterial and timely biography of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg is that it prompts reflection on what it takes — for a woman in particular — to reach the…
There’s no reason for anyone to wear a fedora. To me, when a male peer dons a fedora, he is saying either “I have no social graces and mine is a life of constant sorrow ” or “I am aware that fedoras are depraved, yet I flout social convention the same way I would flout…
For 87 years, Signora Speranza Sonnino has awoken to the sounds of the ghetto. Located on the banks of the Tiber near the city center, this area takes it name from the 300-plus years in which the Jews of Rome were penned in here by Papal decree. When the walls of the ghetto had been…
If, as Oscar Hammerstein II wrote in “Oklahoma!”, “the farmer and the cowman should be friends,” a hoedown was probably the least likely place for them to voice their grievances. No matter how catchy Richard Rodgers’ melody for the inviting square dance staged by Agnes de Mille, the menacing menfolk most certainly would have required…
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