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For everyone who's ever wondered if Jewish weddings have to be "that way"… Shoshana Jedwab takes us "Beyond 'Belly Joy.' "
The anti-Semitism behind anti-abortion rhetoric. Chilean poet Marjorie Agosin on the evils Latin American Jewish women face. New rituals for divorce, miscarriage and more.
Table of contents Get the issueFor everyone who's ever wondered if Jewish weddings have to be "that way"… Shoshana Jedwab takes us "Beyond 'Belly Joy.' "
“Driving Miss Daisy!’ a skillfully made and beautifully performed movie, is essentially a feel-good film about our most searing problem: race relations. Who wouldn’t wish that current tensions between Jews and Blacks (confrontations around Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan, Ed Koch and many others) could be resolved as sweetly as those between Hoke, an utterly forebearing... Read more »
It’s a bad year for Jewish men. As portrayed on prime-time television this season, they’re a bunch of nice nebbishes. From Miles Silverberg, “Murphy Brown”‘s insecure producer, to contentedly neurotic Marty Gold on “Anything But Lover to sensitive, self-absorbed Michael Stedman on “thirtysomething,” to Stuart Markowitz, “L.A. Law'”s prime nudge, Jewish men are being depicted... Read more »
One of the things that strikes me powerfully about these two rituals — and these rituals are deeply moving to me — is how different they are from rituals that were created in the 1970’s and 1980s. Then, when we chose to “own” rituals by creating versions that experimented with our own voices in the... Read more »
The first time I became pregnant my husband and I were living in a Native American fishing village. Scott, a physician, was serving a two-year stint with the Indian Health Service, while I, a nurse-midwife, was consulting and writing. Our backyard was the Strait of Juan de Fuca off the tip of Washington state’s Olympic Peninsula.... Read more »
When the phone rang with the news that my get (Jewish divorce) ceremony could take place the following day, I was ready. My civil divorce had come through several days earlier, but it hadn’t made me feel divorced. I was the one, not David,* who had insisted that we have a traditional get as part... Read more »
A chronicle of one woman’s year in Jerusalem and her quest for a female model for learning and teaching. I had been hearing stories of the Orthodox Talmud teacher Malke Bina. In Hebrew, her name is both funny and fitting for her profession, much as the name I. M. Fine suits a physician. Loosely translated,... Read more »
The evils Latin American Jewish women confront are inexpressibly different from what scares or angers us in Los Angeles, Tulsa or New York. Agosin, a poet and scholar, tries to tell us about the demons her women face.
What are the anti-Semitic roots of the current anti-abortion rhetoric? We may have more to lose than our right to choose.
DEENA’S ‘FEMINIST’ RETELLING I was repelled by Deena Metzger’s so-called “feminist” retelling of the biblical story of Dinah, our foremother. I thought it was sexists who turned rape stories into “love” stories — i.e., she wasn’t really raped, she wanted it! Add to this a comparison of killing the Hivites with the (Christian) massacre at... Read more »