Janice Erlbaum mentioned to an elderly neighbor that she’d been teaching a writing workshop for girls who are trying to get out of the sex trade, the neighbor surprised her with a reference to “Di Grine Kusine,” a Yiddish song from the 1920s. Erlbaum shares this story.

“You may be smart and pretty, but with two little kids? You’re a hard sell,” my mother told me a few months ago when we were discussing my dating again after my divorce. It was one of her more tactful moments. But it turns out, as a single mother with two kids, she’s wrong. I’m ...

As summer gets underway, the beach beckons, clothes come off, and we think about our bodies. This trailer (by the folks behind Tablet’s God & Co. series) for Melvin Konner’s The Jewish Body shows what happens when that body is clad not in a bikini but in clay.

Rachel Kauder Nalebuff, who graduated from high school last year and will be a freshman at Yale next fall, is the editor of My Little Red Book, a new collection of women’s writings about getting their period. Every woman, she writes in the introduction, remembers her first period—where and when it happened, ...

Melvin Konner
Circumcision, laws governing intercourse, eugenics, big noses, fleshy lips—all of these figure somewhere into notions of Jews and their physical selves. In the new book The Jewish Body, out now from Schocken and Nextbook’s Jewish Encounters Series, anthropologist and physician Melvin Konner explores some of these ideas.
He spoke with Nextbook about physical stereotypes of ...

Joy Ladin is a poet and a professor of English at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. For most of her life, though, she was known as Jay and her biological sex was the source of deepest unhappiness. A few years ago, Jay decided to start the process of becoming a woman, a move that ...

“The line” is a fairly simple concept. Here’s how it works: the person who is first in line (he is known as “First”) goes first. The next person in line (he is known as “Second”) has to WAIT BEHIND the person who is First, until the first person is done. Then, and only then, does ...

How’s your weight? Is today a thin day or a fat one? Oh my God, I ate so much last night, I’m such a cow! Moo!
I exchange these comments with a select group of friends: Jewish ones. Weight—and food—is just not something my non-Jewish friends and I get into. Not that ...

Atonement is best practiced in canvas, or so says Jewish tradition. In the interest of abandoning personal comfort in favor of reflection, common Yom Kippur observance bans leather shoes, and early historical records suggest the custom was once to abandon footwear altogether. The lore surrounding the practice varies: Some rabbis explain it by applying Kabbalistic ...

As a Hebrew writer living outside Israel, novelist Maya Arad is able to maintain a critical perspective on both her native culture and on the United States, where she has lived since 2002. Another Place, a Foreign City, her debut work and the first Hebrew novel written in verse, charts a love affair between a ...