Sex & Body

Sex & Body

Breeding Ground

In a graphic memoir and an online video, two women channel anguish over infertility into art
By Holly Lebowitz Rossi

More in Sex & Body

Sex & Body

Death Toll

Back when the Yiddish press relished covering suicides
By Eddy Portnoy | 7:00 AM Jun 17, 2010

Cartoon from Yiddish satire magazine Der blofer (April 1, 1927):
Q: What’s the big rush? Who are the chasing? What happened?
A: They say there’s a man over there who hasn’t tried suicide yet.
CREDIT: Courtesy Eddy Portnoy

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and ...

Slideshow 

Sex & Body

Nosing Around

A look at a pseudoscience that hinged on the shnozz
By Eddy Portnoy | 7:00 AM May 21, 2010

Among the pseudo-sciences that emerged over the centuries, phrenology was one of the most successful, with supporters including Charlotte and Anne Brontë, Walt Whitman, and Edgar Allen Poe. Developed in 1796 by a German physician named Franz Joseph Gall, phrenology maintained that there are 27 sections of the cranium whose shapes align with different personality ...

Sex & Body

Sisters in Arms

Playing the defiant Vashti in a day school Purim play awakened my inner feminist
By Elisa Albert | 7:00 AM Feb 26, 2010

A couple of thousand years after Haman was sent to his death for trying to persuade King Ahasuerus to execute all the Jews in his kingdom, a motley group of fifth- and sixth-graders at Temple Emanuel Community Day School of Beverly Hills (motto: “Living Judaism!”) pulled out all the stops on a Purim musical revue ...

Sex & Body

On Not Learning to Flirt

On Valentine’s Day, reflecting on the limits and boundlessness of a father’s love
By Daphne Merkin | 7:00 AM Feb 12, 2010

It begins with your father, the First Man in your life, this primal love affair—not sexual in nature, but with the faintest erotic undertone—that will lead on to other, more fleshed-out romances. At some moment in time you start to take in the Otherness of him, the ways in which he is different from you, ...

Sex & Body

Fat and Fabulous

Plus-size retail queen Deb Malkin insists that fashion isn’t only for the skinny
By Marjorie Ingall | 7:00 AM Feb 8, 2010

“Being fat is a key part of my identity,” says Deb Malkin, the owner of Re/Dress NYC, a vintage and resale boutique in Brooklyn for women size 12 and up. “It’s taken me years to be comfortable with my body and live fearlessly in it.” As the catwalks in Bryant Park and around the city ...

Sex & Body

Is Yoga Kosher?

How a Modern Orthodox Jew struggled to reconcile her yogic practice with her Judaism
By Taffy Brodesser-Akner | 7:00 AM Jan 5, 2010

A few years ago, freshly moved to Los Angeles, I started practicing yoga. I was feeling anxious and worried, and if I were still a New Yorker, I’d have gone on anti-depressants. But I’m a big believer in doing what the Romans do, and, as it turned out, yoga helped a lot. Now, in class, ...

Sex & Body

Manhood, Interrupted

The grisly aftermath of a broken engagement
By Eddy Portnoy | 7:00 AM Nov 19, 2009

One of the convenient aspects of studying Jewish history is its 3,000-year-old paper trail—the texts and records of the rabbinical and intellectual elite allow us to examine contours of Jewish law and history. But we tend to know less about the lives of average Jews, who didn’t receive much attention in the writings of the ...