This is the Forward’s coverage of Jewish women and women’s issues.
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Life In Israel, Jewish and Feminist Selves Do Battle
This is the ninth entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. The first time I entered an Orthodox synagogue and saw a mehitza, or divider separating men and women in prayer, I was a little girl visiting my grandparents in Queens. Their home wasn’t religiously observant in the slightest, but my grandfather had grown…
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Life My Feminist Formation
This is the eighth entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. I’ve always felt that I was born a feminist. Seeing injustice and protesting it as a child, my eyes were too big and my voice was too loud. The disparities were offensive: in the synagogue, at homes of my Hasidic relatives, at my…
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Life Going Gaga for ‘Girls’
I’ve felt for a long time that the problem with the rise of bromance/male slacker comedy isn’t that it elevates immature dudes into leading men, but rather that it pairs them up with too tightly wound ladies. It’s what David Denby called the “slacker-striver” pairing, and it was popularized by Judd Apatow. In short: putting…
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Life A Jewish Feminism for Global Challenges
This is the seventh entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. As a child in the 1940s and ’50s, I unknowingly experienced Jewish feminism before it really existed. Beginning in 1938 my mother, Marjorie Wyler, worked full-time as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s director of public relations, radio and television; it was a position she…
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Life Staying the (Jewish Feminist) Course
This is the sixth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. How I became a feminist and why I have remained one for 40 years are two different stories. In December 1962, returning home from the lecture circuit, my husband purchased for me Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” at an airport bookstore. This was…
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Life Jewish Feminism Means Reaching Out
This is the fifth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. What is Jewish feminism to me? It’s a mission. A calling. An identity. A life purpose. To borrow a French term, it’s my raison d’etre. Or to borrow a Buddhist term, it’s my swadharma, the ideal that connects the work that I do…
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Life Seeing Beauty in ‘Making Trouble’
By fourth grade, I was already a troublemaker ? taking on any boy who dared to challenge, in the classroom or on the playground, girls? equality or worth. I learned from the best of the troublemakers, women who refused to take no for an answer when going after what they want: my mother and my…
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Life Second Edition Feminism
This is the fourth entry of an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism. In the introduction to my first book, “The New Jewish Wedding,” I wrote, “References to the rabbi as him/or her do no more than acknowledge the decision to ordain women by the Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative movements.” That was 1985. When I revised…
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Culture ‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
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Opinion It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
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News How Iran is outsourcing terror plots against Jews
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