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Getting Intimate at the Airport

Wed, 16 May 2012 14:50:00 GMT-5

Airport “pat-downs” have been the set-up for too many jokes to count. But the much-ridiculed security measures have also provided the inspiration for a new series of paintings by the Israeli-born, Brooklyn-based artist Tirtzah Bassel, 33. In “TSA Chapel,” featured at the 14th Street Y’s LABA Festival — the event begins tomorrow, and runs through May 19 — Bassel’s paintings of people inside an airport are arranged in a chapel-like setting. The artist spoke recently with The Sisterhood about seeking intimacy in the most banal of spaces, how growing up Orthodox has influenced her work, and what’s ahead for her.

Gabrielle Birkner: Why did you decide to set this series inside an airport?

Tirtzah Bassel: I’ve been interested in spaces that dictate a particular type of movement or choreography — in particular ones that involve physical contact between people or between a person and the space. The airport is one of these places, along with subways, hairdressers, cafés and [public] bathrooms that I have been exploring recently in my work. Perhaps at the core is my attempt to approach the banality, apathy or loneliness that is often experienced in these spaces, and to look at how we create or experience intimacy within them.

In what ways — besides the pat-downs — are airports intimate spaces?

I wouldn’t say that airports are intimate spaces, but they do inform the ways in which we experience intimacy in them. My starting point for this project was the security pat-down, which is a series of gestures that in a different place would take on completely different meanings. As I was developing TSA Chapel I spent some time at JFK Airport just observing, and I became interested in the idea of waiting. As they wait, many people, myself included, will almost immediately reach for the solace of the smartphone. Partly this comes from our expectation to constantly be stimulated, as well as a need to feel somewhat in control even as we are at the mercy of a bureaucratic system. But it is also often the most immediate source of intimacy available to us in that space.

Intimate, I get. But sacred? Tell me about the chapel setting.

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Reviving Dona Gracia

Wed, 16 May 2012 13:40:00 GMT-5

Before Golda, and even before Herzl, there was Dona Gracia Nasi, the 16th-century Zionist, feminist, and the Harriet Tubman of the Jewish people. She is one of the most remarkable women in Jewish history — and in history, period. It’s a tragedy that so few people know her name.

Dona Gracia — the inspiration for my latest album, out next week — was one of the wealthiest women in Renaissance Europe. Born in Portugal in 1510, she grew up in a family of conversos, Inquisition-era Jews who were forced to convert to Catholicism. But Dona Gracia was always aware of her Jewish roots. She married into a prominent banking family and when she found herself widowed at age of 28, she used her business acumen to court kings and popes all the while developing an escape network that saved hundreds of other conversos.

After inheriting her husband’s trading business, Dona Gracia ammassed an empire which included a private merchant fleet, and an immense fortune to match. Today, she would be worth more than Warren Buffett and Bill Gates combined. And what did this single mother do with her wealth? She used it to preserve her culture and provide safe passage to Jews escaping the Inquisition. She made it happen by strategically giving loans and paying bribes to kings, popes and sultans. She risked her life, fortune and reputation to save her people.

Dona Gracia’s ultimate dream was to create a Jewish national home in what is now Israel — and this was some 350 years before Herzl planned the First Zionist Congress. She leased land in Tiberias from the Ottoman Sultan, and became a one-woman Jewish Agency, settling hundreds of conversos there. She also spearheaded the effort to translate the Bible into Ladino — the translation is now known as the Ferrara Bible — and to distribute it throughout Europe during the Inquisition.

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Silencing Little Girls

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:21:00 GMT-5

As the Israeli national-religious population continues to lurch rightward, the belief that for an Orthodox man, the sound of a woman’s singing voice is inappropriately erotic and therefore violates Jewish law has gone increasingly mainstream. This lies behind the ongoing dispute over whether IDF soldiers have the right to walk out when women sing in army ceremonies, and whether government ceremonies that include the religious public can legitimately eliminate female singers.

This time, the dispute involves of school-aged children, and it’s not taking place in the usual flashpoints of Jerusalem or Beit Shemesh. The controversy erupted full force in the largely secular city of Kfar Sava, over the issue of the annual “Youth Movement Day”: a wholesome unity event held by all the city’s youth movements. At the event, various ideological stripes of scouts, boys and girls, participate in joint activities such as dancing and singing, all in the city’s main square.

The head of the Kfar Sava Women’s Council reacted with fury after it was revealed that a decision had been made by the city ‘youth council’ which organizes the event, to ban girls from singing solo, at the request of the national-religious youth movement B’nai Akiva, which said it would not participate in the event if female singing voices were part of it. The head of the council, Sheli Amrami-Buzaglo, released a statement condemning it, calling it “a clear-cut case of excluding women. Our girls must be allowed to sing, dance, and dress as they please. These are basic rights.”

As word spread quickly across the largely secular city that girls would not sing, a large demonstration was organized — on Facebook, naturally — that took place at the same time as the event and the issue became the talk of the town.

Grandmothers, You're Scaring Me

Tue, 15 May 2012 13:00:00 GMT-5

Grandmothers and more experienced mothers: You’re starting to scare me. I appreciate the constant cooing over my little girl, I do. But the nostalgia you regularly voice is worrisome.

My year-old daughter, Lila, and I are regularly stopped by women who identify themselves as having “older” or “grown” children, and most don’t sound so happy about it. More experienced mothers constantly urge me to “enjoy this time” with my baby — as if I’m not — always assuring me “it goes fast.” As you say these things, you sound either wistful or like you’re delivering a warning.

Is it adolescence that everyone has in mind, when I fully anticipate Lila’s being in full teenage-rebellion mode — mortified by my every comment and very existence? Or is it something else, something more enduring? Perhaps it varies by mother.

On a recent outing to the supermarket, Lila was wearing her eye-catching pink floral hat. “Take pictures,” a woman told me. “When she’s older, she’ll never believe she wore that. I know. I used to dress my kids in special clothes like that when they were younger, but now they’re teenagers.”

She looked unhappy as she said it — her voice betraying the sentiment of my own mother’s oft-repeated maxim: “Bigger kids, bigger problems.”

Upon seeing Lila, a grandmother we often bump into in our neighborhood talks about her grandson. Apparently, he was a few years behind me in college. Standing before me, his mother – who also lives nearby – seems lost in her memories, recalling how she stayed home to raise her two sons. It sounds like those were cherished days.

Truth is, some of you sound almost heartbroken.

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Rabbinic Sister Act

Tue, 15 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT-5

There have been countless examples throughout Jewish history of children following parents into the rabbinate. There have even been instances in which two or more siblings, especially male ones, have chosen to become rabbis. But a family in which all three daughters get ordained? There have been no documented cases — until now.

The Reform movement’s flagship seminary, Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, has just released this video, which celebrates that Ilana Mills has newly joined her sisters, Mari Chernow and Jordana Chernow-Reader, in the Reform rabbinate. That apparently makes them the first family to have scored a female rabbinic hat trick.

Having grown up immersed in Reform Jewish life in Sherman Oaks, Calif., it seemed natural to the sisters to go into the rabbinate. It’s really all in the family: The women’s father, retired Superior Court judge Eli Chernow, serves on the Union for Reform Judaism’s national board, and their mother, Arlene Chernow, is a URJ outreach coordinator.

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Haredi Dolls Show Boys Learning, Girls Serving

Mon, 14 May 2012 16:36:00 GMT-5

It’s not even Shavuot, but if you’re already worrying about what to give the Haredi children in your life for Hanukkah, not to worry: Mitzvah Kinder dolls are here. As reported recently on Failed Messiah, the little plastic figurines come pre-labeled with various tasks for boys and girls, Totty [Daddy] and Mama. In one set of the plastic series, Totty “learns Torah,” little boy Tuli “learns with Totty,” and little girl Faigy “serves Totty and Tuli.”

In the “Seforim (Book) Room” set, Tuli sits on a chair holding a book, just like his Totty. And Faigy holds a tray, ever at the ready to serve. At least women are part of this Mitzvah Kinder “shul set,” replete, sigh, with plastic mechitzahs.

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Forgiving Anna Quindlen

Mon, 14 May 2012 15:50:00 GMT-5

I’m surely not the only girl with literary tendencies to have come of age in the 1980s assiduously following Anna Quindlen’s journalism career — reading her columns in The New York Times and pretty much wanting to be her when I grew up. Back in the Stone Age, before the Internet, before blogs and their informal, chatty tone, Quindlen’s combination of reportage, observation and personal insight felt exciting, fresh and new. I admired her so that I didn’t even resent the fact that she was able to waltz into The Times at age 25 with no previous journalism experience and land a job, an accomplishment she credits to affirmative action for women.

Reading her on the Times Op-Ed pages, as she offered her pointed views on current events and trends seen through the lens of her own life, she was like the older sister I never had — stepping into the minefield of combining career and family, sending back dispatches on what lay ahead and where to be careful.

And then, in 1994, she stopped writing her column. I took it as a personal betrayal when she walked away from her career at The Times to write fiction from home. At the time, I was an ambitious 20-something launching my own journalism career. How could she abandon ship just when I needed her the most? It also felt like a surrender, a tacit admission that you couldn’t be a fully engaged mother and head out the door to the office every day.

I continued to seek out her writing wherever I could get it. I dutifully bought and read every novel she wrote. Sure, they were good, but I was still mad that I had to navigate my own work-life balance in the new century without her reassuring pearls of wisdom to guide me.

Now, finally, I can say that she’s redeemed herself. I’d like to say that it’s because I’m older and wiser and understand that not everything revolves around me. But the real reason is, that she’s offered me some of her wisdom at another key juncture in my life. Just as I’m facing down middle age comes her new book of essays “Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake.” For me, the timing is perfect. Quindlen, nearing the threshold of 60, has offered younger women a road map for the upcoming decades, just as she did for young womanhood.

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After Fertility Battle, a Sweet Mother’s Day

Sun, 13 May 2012 05:00:00 GMT-5

I am a new mother, but I am not a young mother. I am an old enough new mother, in fact, that my formative Mother’s Days date back to a hippie household in the early 1970s. Inside the walls of our little bohemian family enclave, calendar-driven sentiment was discouraged, even disparaged. But it wasn’t quite forbidden — if only because no behavior was really forbidden. So I always made a point of presenting Mom with handwritten poems and handmade cards on Mother’s Day.

I’m convinced my DIY tokens of affection kept the inevitable discourse on consumerism shorter than store-bought gifts might have prompted. Nevertheless, over the years I became well versed on the dubious origins of the holiday and the part it played in the grand conspiracy to impoverish working families at the expense of corporate interests.

Later, as a young bride — and I was a young bride — one of the things I found most charming about my in-laws was their rigid obeisance of holiday ritual. Not only do they observe all the major public holidays with family get-togethers, they do so in a nearly identical manner each and every time — a small home-cooked meal prepared by the woman of the house and served as close to 2 p.m. as possible.

I love to cook and I like to fete others. So, for the first few years of my marriage, I enjoyed preparing and presiding over these small elegant Mother’s Day gatherings. Then, as my own quest to become a mother hit the brick wall of infertility, the ritual of Mother’s Day became bittersweet once again. As I rolled out the piecrust, stirred the gravy, and set the table these past few years I couldn’t help wondering, “When will it ever be my turn?”

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Marriage, Evolved

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:51:00 GMT-5

The public acceptance of gay marriage by the President of the United States — a position that most Jews support — is hardly the end of the struggle for full equality for LGBTQ citizens, who continue to lack many of the same enshrined rights and protections as other minority groups. Similarly, Barack Obama’s historic announcement of what many of us long suspected lay in his heart already will have almost zero impact on policy, and likely little impact on the election, since the issue ranks far below economic ones with most voters at the moment.

Instead, it represents a benchmark. Because his choice of words does show that both feminism and the gay rights community have made inroads where it matters most: our definition of relationships. Obama’s evolution echoed ours.

After all when Obama spoke about the “committed, monogamous” relationships of his gay friends, he was positing marriage as a simple, straightforward commitment between two equal people, not as a patriarchal social construct with the man as the head of the household, literally receiving his wife from her father. That very different vision, after all, is what marriage used to be (after, of course, it evolved from Biblical-era polygamy). Marriage once was a transaction between a bread-earner and a child-bearer. And yet when Obama spoke of marriage, he said:

As I have talked to friends and family and neighbors when I think about members of my own staff who are in incredibly committed monogamous relationships, same-sex relationships, who are raising kids together, when I think about those soldiers or airmen or marines or sailors who are out there fighting on my behalf and yet feel constrained, even now that Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is gone, because they are not able to commit themselves in a marriage, at a certain point I’ve just concluded that for me, personally, it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.

His words reflect nothing of these old visions of marriage. Instead these images conjure up love, commitment, raising kids as partners (not one person raising kids), and even an unspoken freedom from “constraints.”

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The End of Women-Only Torah Study?

Thu, 10 May 2012 11:50:00 GMT-5

It is a sad week for women’s Torah study, with the news that the Advanced Talmudic Institute at Matan — founded 24 years ago by Rabbanit Malke Bina — is closing its doors.

Matan did not confirm its reason for closing, but I suspect that the approaching sunset of one of its main funders, the Avi Chai Foundation may be part of it.

Situated in Jerusalem, Matan was one of a very small handful of programs that made the full-time pursuit of Talmud study available to Orthodox women. Nishmat and Bar-Ilan University’s Midrasha are the other major programs in Israel (along with Pardes, which attracts a primarily non-Orthodox crowd).

In the U.S., Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women offers a master’s in Biblical and Talmudic Interpretation, and last year YU awarded its first-ever doctorate in Talmud study to a woman.

And there’s also Drisha, a Manhattan center for women’s Torah study, which offers a Scholars’ Circle for the most advanced female Torah students, but does not grant academic degrees. When visionary Rabbi David Silber opened Drisha in 1979, it was the only game in town for women thirsty for in-depth, text-based Torah study. Today, there are other options, like the traditional egalitarian Mechon Hadar, which also offers full-time learning fellowships.

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How Ex-Frum Women Learn To Date

Wed, 09 May 2012 15:58:00 GMT-5

Israel Irenstein, who has become something of a relationship guru for formerly Orthodox men, was the focus of a recent Slate article detailing the dating challenges of individuals who grew up in the Orthodox community, but have since left. Among those challenges: “Inexperience, having no identity, and having no understanding of the opposite sex.”

But the story all but overlooks the experience of formerly Orthodox women. And you can’t just ignore the issue of gender — particularly when an individual comes from a community in which ideas about gender roles and personal agency are outside the mainstream.

Alex Newpol, intake coordinator for Footsteps, a group that provides support services to men and women who have left the ultra-Orthodox community, explains that many women in Footsteps struggle with interpreting male advances.

A female member of Footsteps who asked not to be identified because of the insular nature of formerly Orthodox community said the biggest issues she faces are: “How do I say no? How do I decline someone? How do I know if this is a date?”

The woman explained how activities as mundane as shopping for a new outfit can create anxiety over how much skin they should be exposing. She also said that coming from a community in which women often defer to men, learning how and when to be assertive is also challenging.

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Celebrate Childless Mothers, Too

Wed, 09 May 2012 14:00:00 GMT-5

Crossposted from Jewesses With Attitude

It’s Mother’s Day, and the way this secular holiday is celebrated in the Jewish media reveals a range of beliefs and attitudes towards Jewish motherhood and the role of women in the Jewish world.

On one end of the spectrum, Mother’s Day is an opportunity to recognize Jewish mothers as unsung heroes of the domestic sphere — as the cherished, revered, spiritual and moral compass of their nuclear families. This is exemplified in a new commercial for Wissotsky Tea called “Tribute to the Jewish Mother,” shared with us via Twitter.

Obviously, this video by Shmuel Hoffman was intended for an Orthodox audience. It was commissioned by the Ptex Group, Wissotzky’s ad agency in Brooklyn. While it recognizes the dedication and hard work of religious Jewish homemakers, which should be recognized and valued, it is limited by its reductive definition of Jewish motherhood. The whole story of Jewish motherhood is so much broader than that.

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My Feminist Foremothers

Tue, 08 May 2012 16:00:00 GMT-5

This is the eleventh entry in an ongoing series exploring Jewish feminism.

My own attachment to Jewish feminism arose from my relationship to the women in my family — my grandmothers, my mother, and my sister — during my childhood and teen-age years. I was very close to my two bubbes (grandmothers), both of whom were Eastern-European Jewish immigrants to the United States.

My father’s mother, Bubbe Ellenson, lived in my hometown of Newport News, Va., while my maternal grandmother, Bubbe Stern, lived in Cambridge, Mass. They were both wonderful and loving companions to me. Bubbe Ellenson would eat dinner with my family three nights every week, and every Saturday night of my childhood I slept at her apartment.

Each summer, for a decade of my childhood, I went to Cambridge and stayed with Bubbe Stern, who would talk to me into the night and tell me stories — often harrowing ones, of pogroms — of her life in Russia and how grateful she was to America for the gift of freedom it allowed. She was a stately and educated woman. (She could read and write Russian as well as Yiddish. I remember fondly how she would take me at least once each summer to the statehouse in Boston, and would tell me how wonderful this country was. I would go with her to shul in Cambridge every week and watch her prepare traditional Jewish foods in her kitchen as she magically transformed her home for Shabbes. I cannot calculate the impact the love these two women shared with me had upon my life. I still feel it every day.

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How To Know When You're Ready for Baby

Tue, 08 May 2012 15:43:00 GMT-5

Have you ever noticed that some of the juiciest conversations seem to pop up instantly? This mother and her twenty-something daughter frequently find themselves working in front of the computer when an instant message appears on their screen. Here’s one recent back-and-forth that grew out of an IM conversation between mother and daughter.

Alexis: So it’s official, I’m off birth control! Crazy, huh?

Sharon: Wow, you really did it. So exciting. How are you feeling?

Alexis: I’m freaked. I’m happy, of course, to get off the hormones after all this time, but not sure I’m really ready for this whole baby-making business. James just emailed me our health insurance benefits with all of the maternity coverage highlighted. Aah!

Sharon: Well, I had no idea how long it was going to take for me to get pregnant, so your dad and I just jumped in. We didn’t realize it was going to happen so fast. Remember, I told you, after only 6 weeks you were on the way—so watch out!

Alexis: I really hope it comes that easy for us. I thought all my oogling over pregnant women and babies meant I was ready. But when I think about it seriously, I’m not so sure.

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Celebrity Motherhood Is a Dangerous Distraction

Mon, 07 May 2012 09:21:00 GMT-5

Moms are everywhere these days: The Tigers, The French, The Sling Aficionados and Ecological Purists. It seems like there is nothing as endlessly fascinating or controversial as the decisions women make about raising their kids. I wish — wish! — I could have written “men and women make” in the last sentence, but mums the word on dads these days.

Motherhood is so compelling that it has turned into a marketable skill, particularly for floundering celebrities who see motherhood as a last ditch effort to hold onto the spotlight. And, according to the New York Times style section, it works. For stars like Jessica Simpson, Tori Spelling, Bethenny Frankel and “Snooki” “parenthood has become a viable Plan B.” “Being a celebrity mom has more business opportunities than ever before,” Peter Grossman, the photo editor of Us Weekly, told the Times. “Now, it’s not just about selling your baby pics. It’s starting a clothing line or endorsing a stroller. The value of a celebrity mom has never been higher.”

The Times story outlines all the various celebs that have taken this route, but fails to acknowledge the larger societal fascination, or obsession, with motherhood and child-rearing that is behind the rise of the “momprenuer.”

I don’t know why mothering is of such interest right now, but I do know that it isn’t good for moms, no matter which “side” of the various debates they fall. All the chatter — breastfeeding until age 3 vs. formula, lavishly praising your kids for their efforts vs. pushing them harder, epidurals vs. “natural” birth — only serves to convince all of us that these are the most important decisions in the world, and that one false move will mess up us or our kids, possibly forever.

Ultimately, most moms aren’t as doctrinaire as attachment disciple Mayim Bialik or tough-love queen Amy Chua. Few of us have the time or stamina to see any of these “parenting styles” out to their fullest.

So what do we get from these debates? Stress. Insecurities. Competitiveness. Oh, and distraction!

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Adam Yauch, Feminist Ally

Fri, 04 May 2012 15:34:00 GMT-5

The world of music lost a treasured star today, when Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, of the Brooklyn-born hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died of cancer at the far-too-young age of 47.

Hundreds of thousands of fans who grew up with the Beasties are mourning Yauch’s musical contribution: the memorable rhymes and beats that provided a soundtrack for the seminal moments in our lives.

But in recent years, the group also displayed a commitment to progressive causes, including feminism. They didn’t have to be feminists for any commercial reason — in the world of popular music, feminist credentials don’t matter at all. In fact they might be demerits. But these Brooklyn boys simply grew up, realized that their youthful attitude had been wrong and spoke up about it.

When I think about the Beasties, I think first about the rebellious, obnoxious kids who first became famous. Then I inevitably remember their ability to move forward way past that phase, with rhymes like this one from MCA in the song “Sure Shot”: “I want to say a little something that’s long overdue/ The disrespect to women has got to be through/ To all the mothers and sisters and wives and friends/ I want to offer my love and respect to the end.

They also changed their offensive lyrics in concert and began to chastise regressive content in music — even their own.

Here’s part of the 1999 letter the Beasties sent to Time Out New York, apologizing for their previous homophobia:

I would like to … formally apologize to the entire gay and lesbian community for the sh—y and ignorant things we said on our first record, 1986’s “Licensed to Ill” …There are no excuses. But time has healed our stupidity. … We hope that you’ll accept this long overdue apology.

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Emily Yoffe's, Randy Cohen's 'Advice To Live By'

Fri, 04 May 2012 11:30:00 GMT-5

“I recently met a good girl but there is a problem. She has a dimple in her chin and people say that if someone has this, their husband will die early. So I don’t know if I should keep on seeing this girl — please help me.” … “A pogrom took place in Bialystok, where my old parents and a sister with three children live. Should I try to bring them here, or go there and help my brothers in their struggle?”

These questions were answered, in the early part of the 20th century, in Yiddish Forward’s legendary advice column, “A Bintel Brief.” Today the questions posed to columnists are more likely to deal with JDate stalkers and Facebook etiquette, but the appetite for good advice is no less voracious.

Advice is a field in which Jews, particularly Jewish women, have long excelled. Two prominent (and, yes, Jewish) advice columnists, Emily Yoffe, Slate’s “Dear Prudence,” and The New York Times Magazine’s former “Ethicist,” Randy Cohen, joined me last week to discuss why people like reading answers to problems they don’t have, the ways in which Judaism influences their work and how we can all be better advice-givers.

Here are some highlights from our public discussion, held at New York’s Museum at Eldridge Street. The museum is currently hosting an exhibit, inspired by the Bintel Brief, featuring the work of graphic artist and Forward contributor Liana Finck.

Gabrielle Birkner: The media has changed drastically since [the Forward’s founding editor] Ab Cahan answered Bintel Brief letters, and since Ann Landers became a household name in the mid-century. But the advice column has endured. What gives it such staying power?

Emily Yoffe: I think there are two things: 1) “Oh my God, the same thing happened to me,” and 2) “Oh my God, my life is so much better than this person’s. Thank goodness I didn’t have an affair with my stepmother, and now I have to tell my father.”

Gabrielle Birkner: So there’s something in it for everyone.

Emily Yoffe: I was re-reading [“A Bintel Brief”] and the human drama, the desire to get a peek into other people’s lives never changes, even though there are some letters in here about pogroms, the grinding poverty of the immigrants who were shipped here — that’s different — but there are other letters in here very similar to the ones that come into my inbox.

Randy Cohen: My experience is very much yours when you use the word “drama.” In 75 words, the questions in my column do what Tolstoy would do in 100,000 words. In drama, someone has to want something. And how you feel at the end is different from how you feel at the beginning. It’s a glimpse into other people’s lives. The same reason that pornography is popular, I was popular.

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Bollywood's 'Snow White Syndrome'

Thu, 03 May 2012 16:23:00 GMT-5

Many little girls grow up on Disney princess cartoons. I grew up on Bollywood films, dancing to the Hindi music, the lyrics to which I had memorized by the time I was six. I was raised in the 1980s in the former Soviet republic of Georgia, and Bollywood’s charming wholesomeness was imported in droves. I’d wager that it was Bollywood’s lack of anti-Communist messaging — rather than its family-friendly nature — that appealed most to the Soviet government.

Only as I got older did I realize that those Indian heroines I idolized were, and still are, stuck in a post-colonial culture that venerates Western ideals of beauty, markets harmful skin-lightening creams and even imports British actresses and Brazilian models to play the part of Indians. They can’t speak the language? It’s nothing a voiceover can’t fix.

In what is dubbed India’s “Snow White Syndrome,” whitening creams far outsell Coca–Cola, and sales are growing at a rate of 18% a year. Recently, the already fair-skinned reigning queen of Bollywood, Aishwarya Rai, was furious over an overly airbrushed Elle cover in which her skin was lightened several shades.

Women are not the only ones who face pressure. When my favorite Bollywood actor, Shahrukh Khan, began serving as a spokesperson for Fair and Handsome, a skin lightening cream for men, I was disgusted. The commercials for the cream always show a darker-skinned man who is mocked or unable to attract female attention until he lightens his skin.

Now, an Indian company has introduced an intimate wash meant to brighten a woman’s skin. The commercial for the wash alludes to a light-skinned couple’s marital woes — woes that apparently vanish when the private-parts wash comes into the picture.

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Q&A: Tara Sophia Mohr on 'Playing Big' at Work

Wed, 02 May 2012 15:15:00 GMT-5

Three years ago, Tara Sophia Mohr, who earned an MBA at Stanford, was working as a senior planner at the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco and working toward her life-coaching certification on the side. Three years later, her blog and Huffington Post column are followed widely, and hundreds of women have enrolled in her 6-month online course on leadership and professional development, “Playing Big.”

Mohr, 33, is also the co-creator of “The Women’s Seder Sourcebook” and “The Women’s Passover Companion,” and is the chair of the Jewish incubator program UpStart Bay Area.

She spoke recently with The Sisterhood’s Renee Ghert-Zand about how women can shut off their inner critic, build professional relationships and get the career that they’ve always wanted.

Renee Ghert-Zand: What made you decide to dedicate your career to women’s leadership?

Tara Sophia Mohr: I loved working in the Jewish community, and when I really reflected, I felt clear that that kind of work was not what I most wanted to do and felt called to do personally. I wanted to do something more creative and more entrepreneurial and more connected to being in the media. I love groups and speaking and performance. And there was my lifelong interest in women’s voices and personal growth and spirituality.

So what does ‘Playing Big’ mean?

My work has evolved to help women play bigger, which means to share their voice more fully, to tap into what they feel called to do in their work, and to not be run by their inner critic, not to be run by fear anymore.

During my first couple of years of coaching, I felt like I was working with all of these brilliant women. I don’t mean the old school definition of IQ, but rather that all of them had incredible talent in one area or another. They had a gift to share and important ideas and perspectives that would shape their industries and their fields if they could bring forth those ideas. Those women could not see or believe in their own brilliance, or of being worthy of being at the big table.

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In Tel Aviv Case, Why Did We Assume Rape?

Wed, 02 May 2012 14:54:00 GMT-5

When the woman at the center of a very public and highly publicized Tel Aviv orgy, which The Sisterhood’s Allison Kaplan Sommer wrote about here, confirmed to police that she had not been coerced or raped, I was relieved. Why had we assumed she was a victim in the first place?

According to reports, the incident involved a group of young men, most of them teenagers, and a woman who was decades older. The woman was laughing as she led the men into the water, and rejected the efforts of a stranger who tried to come to her aid.

Then why, if nothing about her demeanor screamed “victim,” did so many people read this as a gang rape? It occurred to me that society has adopted a victim mentality when it comes to women in unorthodox situations.

Years back, during law school, I interned for an organization that represents children in abuse and custody proceedings. Throughout the internship, and for months after, I was suspect of every seedy-looking man holding a child’s hand. If a little girl on the subway platform so much as sniffled, I was immediately sizing up her guardian and trying to determine what horrible things he might be capable of. I couldn’t help but read into every situation.

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