Back to school means a few things to this Jewess: buying new white shirts (they never last more than a season) and preparing for the High Holidays. This fall, there may be a few other things on our collective plates, it being an election season and all, but I want to propose that we spend the next few weeks preparing not only for Rosh HaShana (September 29 - October 1) and Yom Kippur (October 9), but also for Love Your Body Day, an annual event (now in its 10th year) sponsored by NOW, which falls on October 15 (also Sukkot, this year).
You may have noticed a former beauty queen in the news lately, but I'm not going to write about her. Instead, I'd like to focus on Bess Myerson, the first and only Jewish Miss American, who won her title on September 8, 1945, just four months after V-E Day. Ms. Myerson's victory was seen as a symbol of America's post-war rejection of Europe's anti-Semitic horrors.
A few years ago, I read Devil in the White City, Erik Larson's non-fiction account of the history of the Chicago World's Fair in 1893, complete with architecture, politics, and a murder mystery. Good stuff. But I didn't realize that the Chicago World's Fair was also the site, 115 years ago this week, of the first Jewish Women's Congress, which was part of the Fair's World Parliament of Religions.
Thirty-eight years ago today, thousands of women nation-wide responded to Jewish feminist Betty Friedan's call for a Women's Strike for Equality. In addition to a huge march down New York's 5th Avenue, women around the country demonstrated in support of three main goals: free abortion on demand, free 24-hour community-controlled child care centers, and equal opportunity in jobs and education.
With the exception of Tisha B'Av, the day of fasting and mourning in commemoration of the destruction of the Temples in Jerusalem, not much happens on the Jewish calendar between Shavuot in May
The ketubah, the Jewish marriage contract, is one of the oldest continuously used documents within Judaism. That said, over the course of the past thirty years or so, many ketubahs have undergone a makeover so that rather than simply act as a business document that lists the items in the bride's trousseau and the amount of zuzim (silver pieces) that the groom has to set aside for her well-being, many contemporary ketubahs reflect the equal partnership that the marrying couple are entering in to.
Usually, we have used this space to review new books (see recent reviews of The Book of Dahlia, Away, and The Zookeeper's Wife), but I can not let the opportunity pass to write a bit about Amy Bloom's non-fiction book, Normal, which was
Those of you whose lives don't involve a weekly update on what new comics have come out this Wednesday might not be familiar with Y The Last Man, a 60-issue comic book (10 volume graphic novel), whose much anticipated final issue just came out last month. The premise of Y The Last Man is that a mystery plague instantaneously wipes out every man and male mammal on planet Earth except for Yorick Brown, a 22 year old magician/slacker, and his capuchin monkey, Ampersand. Chaos ensues and Yorick, along with a mini
Two years ago this week, the indomitable Blu Greenberg, who is best known for her feminist work within Orthodox Judaism, was honored with Hadassah's highest honor
I made the mistake of picking up The Zookeeper's Wife and reading it as though it were a novel. Maybe I was just in that headspace because the first two books on the Jewesses with Attitude Summer Reading List were fiction. The Zookeeper's Wife, however, is a genre-bending piece of prose that de
Pretty much since moving to Boston last summer, my friends have been making weekly pleas that we watch Mad Men on AMC. It took until last week, because in spite of critical acclaim and the insistence of friends whose opinions I trust, who wants to watch a television show about an advertising agency? (Of course, by that logic, who wants to watch a show about a paper sales office, NBC corporate headquarters, or a misanthropic doctor?). But I was wrong, wrong, wrong to delay! Why? Because aside from a smart script, good acting, etc.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted on the horrifying (and ongoing) story of the Agriprocessors kosher meat plant in Postville, Iowa. Since then, the Uri L'Tzedek boycott against the Rubashkins was lifted due to a feeling that the federal compliance officer assigned to the plant was getting the labor practices into the shape they needed to be.
It goes without saying that Jewish women have so many accomplishments to be proud of. A quick search through the Jewish Women's Archive's Discover pages reveals women bot
Never in my relatively short life do I remember a time where there wasn't a sense of urgency, even panic, in the American Jewish community around intermarriage and Jewish continuity. According to Sylvia Barack Fishman of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute,
Summer? Summer is the time that you eat sticky popsicles, ride your bike to the beach, and watch fireworks, right? Oh wait, I think summer is the time that you have to plan six months in advance to find a single weekend that you can go away with your friends because everyone is off traveling. Yes, even this year, with gas prices sky-high. And we are not without good company. Jewish women have made it their business to see the world for hundreds of years.
The Book of Dahlia, by Elisa Albert (Free Press, 2008)
A week into the Jewesses With Attitude Summer Reading List, and I’ve finished The Book of Dahlia and am about halfway through Away.So far, good picks, if I do say so myself.
From a first-grilled Shabbat meal of the summer on Friday night (and my first beef hamburger in maybe a year), to picking up our remarkably green CSA farm veggies (what will we do with so many radishes?), to baking a lemon-blueberry pound cake for my friend's birthday yesterday, for me this weekend was all about food. Which inevitably, in my house, means long, drawn-out discussions about food, kashrut, and ethics. Seriously. Every week we talk about it.
Since leaving my 5th floor walkup apartment building and graduating to a home with enough space for a bicycle, I have been a woman obsessed.Riding my bike is faster, cleaner, and way more fun than riding the subway or the bus.Apparently, I am not the first Jewish woman in Boston to feel this way.Tomorrow marks the 114th anniversary of Annie “Londonderry” Kopchovs
Maybe like me, some of you tried to escape last summer’s heat in the movie theater, where you were privileged to see (about 20,000 times) the music video “I Wanna Have Your babies” by Natasha Bedingfield.You know, the one with the really smart chorus that goes “babies, babies, babies, babies, etc.”I had all but forgotten about that song until recently, when the theme of so much Jewish buzz in the press and on the internet
Normal, by 
The Zookeeper's Wife by 
Last week, I got an e-mail from a Jewish Women'
A couple of weeks ago, I 
Away by 
The Book of Dahlia, by 
Since leaving my 5th floor walkup apartment building and graduating to a home with enough space for a bicycle, I have been a woman obsessed.
Maybe like me, some of you tried to escape last summer’s heat in the movie theater, where you were privileged to see (about 20,000 times) the music video “I Wanna Have Your babies” by Natasha Bedingfield.
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