New feminist ritual: a little girl’s first haircut. Visiting the old old. Targeting “disability oppression.” Ayelet Waldman on psychoanalysis, Hungarian suffragists and Zionism. Liana Finck graphically envisions the family sagas behind the Yiddish advice column "A Bintel Brief."
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a slave breathing limestone dust, carries a heavy stone for a backpack. Waiting to set it down for generations, waiting to rest it by the foot of a quilted bed.... Read more »
Hungarian filmmaker Diana Groó sees herself as part of a “traumatized third generation” of Jews who refused to speak about their past. She’s breaking that mold with her bold new films.
She smells like sour milk and she looks like loneliness. I am tasked with meeting her and coming up with a written plan. She is all of 80 pounds sitting on... Read more »
Juggling three children under age three and her publishing job, she breaks her arm. Kurshan reflects: “In order to heal, bones have to set, and so I find myself wondering what has set in my life in the time between my two encounters with the Talmud tractate Yoma.”
Waldman talks about the drama folded into her new novel: corset-shedding early European feminists, tender Freud-era psychoanalysis, looted art, the complex schemes of post-Holocaust Zionism, and the family life of Syrian Jews.
At the turn of the [last] century, Jewish immigrants wrote for advice to the Yiddish Forward. In A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York, Finck graphically envisions the mini-dramas these letters limn.
Author Susan Nussbaum, paraplegic and a fierce activist for girls in chairs, tells Susan Weidman Schneider why “access” is just another term for disability oppression.
Five years ago, when a new Jewish geriatric campus opened in Dedham, Massachusetts, I grabbed a friend and we started a “Dear Abby” group. I don’t remember how we got... Read more »
In my grandparents’ house, a 1950s rambler in Toronto’s Downsview neighborhood, nearly every surface was decorated with photos: children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren; bar and bat mitzvahs, graduations, weddings. One black-and-white photo,... Read more »
In 1983, my father sent me to Miami to check on my grandmother, Jean Weinstein, who had just lost her youngest son, my uncle Jerry, and before that her husband... Read more »
Traditional (male) upsherins are generally held near boys’ third birthdays, but historically they were also held on two other days: on Lag b’Omer, 33 days after Passover, when haircuts and... Read more »
