Media

Apropos of Ellen's comment about "what makes Thanksgiving so meaningful for some American Jews" in her prior post, I thought I'd share an excerpt from an article published in The American Jewess in November 1896.

Did anyone else catch the mention of Emma Goldman in last week's SNL Thursday Weekend Update? If you missed it, you can see it here (around 15:30-16:03). I love that Emma made it to prime time!

Pretty much since moving to Boston last summer, my friends have been making weekly pleas that we watch Mad Men on AMC. It took until last week, because in spite of critical acclaim and the insistence of friends whose opinions I trust, who wants to watch a television show about an advertising agency? (Of course, by that logic, who wants to watch a show about a paper sales office, NBC corporate headquarters, or a misanthropic doctor?). But I was wrong, wrong, wrong to delay! Why? Because aside from a smart script, good acting, etc.

Summer? Summer is the time that you eat sticky popsicles, ride your bike to the beach, and watch fireworks, right? Oh wait, I think summer is the time that you have to plan six months in advance to find a single weekend that you can go away with your friends because everyone is off traveling. Yes, even this year, with gas prices sky-high. And we are not without good company. Jewish women have made it their business to see the world for hundreds of years.

As a new crop of college graduates ponder their uncertain futures and decide whether to go directly to work (if they can find work in this uncertain economy) or bum around for a while in search of inspiration, I thought it would be fun to find out what passed for "backpacking through Europe" in the turn-of-the-20th-century world of The American Jewess.

It's June. Wedding season is officially upon us, and with it, a return to our feature on The American Jewess after a brief hiatus.

By Rebecca Honig Friedman, cross-posted on Jewess. This would have been an appropriate post for last week when we celebrated Yom Ha'azmaut and commemorated Yom Hazikaron but ...

A regular column in The American Jewess, "The Woman Who Talks" (a more politically correct way to say The Yenta?) was a place "for the ventilation of all subjects pertaining to woman: social, domestic, religious, literary, political, philanthropic, and so on-ad infinituz," according to its first installment.

Some of the articles we're finding in our look at The American Jewess archives seem surprisingly contemporary (19th century language aside), yet a closer look reveals the more subtle points of contrast between how we approach particular issues now vs. then.

Besides this piece being interesting as a documentary description of late 19th century life in London, it's fascinating for the writer's clear invocation of class issues, though that seems more a natural by-product of her own upper-class biases than a deliberate attempt to raise an explicit discussion about socioeconomic divisions between Jews.

Cross-posted on Jewess. The beginning seems like a good place to begin our exploration of The American Jewess archives. The first issue of TAJ, from April 1895, proves to be varied in its area of coverage, likely reflecting the varied interests and education of its intended readers. And that 19th century language sure is something!

Today marks the 113th anniversary -- centennial + bat mitzvah! -- of the launch issue of The American Jewess, the first English-language publication directed to American Jewish women.

Rather than stay fixated on last year’s “war against Christmas,” dust-up, the New York Times this holiday season has been running a veritable flood of articles suggesting that, when it comes to Christmas: if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em. No less than seven articles have put forward the argument that even those who might have good reason to distance themselves from Christmas tend to be happier (and less curmudgeonly) when they simply embrace the holiday that everyone loves.

Today’s Forward reports on auditions for a new reality tv show called “Hottest mom in America” – ostensibly newsworthy because a special audition was held in Miami for Jewish mothers and was scheduled to avoid conflicting with Rosh Hashanah. Jeff Greenfield, the marketing exec in charge of the auditions, asserts that it’s possible a Jewish woman could win this contest.

This week, the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences honored the first Iranian Jew with an Emmy. She also happens to a woman—Lila Yomtoob. The Forward profiles Lila today, noting that her award is for working as a sound editor on the HBO documentary "Baghdad ER." The film follows the daily lives of doctors, nurses, soldiers, medics, and chaplains working in the U.S. Army's Baghdad medical facility in Iraq's Green Zone.

That’s what writer David Marchese is looking for, according to the article he wrote last week for Salon.com. He laments the fact that long gone are the hip male Jews of the 60s and 70s like Dustin Hoffman, Bob Dylan, Gene Simmons, Starsky and James Caan (to name just a few). These were Jewish men who came across as tough and multi-layered and complicated in a way that made us love them.

Newsweek just retracted its 1986 cover article “The Marriage Crunch,” which claimed that a 40-year-old, single, white, college-educated woman was “more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to marry.” Retraction? Are you kidding?!

Everywhere I turn there seem to be “shocking” or “eye-opening” reports on “The Mommy Wars,” including those on ABC news, the Washington Post, CNN, and Good Morning America. Although I’ve been hearing the term bandied about all year, it was just this week that I decided to find out what the heck they were. After all, as the mother of a toddler, I should probably know why I’m at war with other women—and whether I need to draw my weapons.

When a reporter of the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. asked Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator and executive producer of WB’s acclaimed series Gilmore Girls, whether she’d be introducing more Jewish characters into her TV show, Amy replied: “By year seven, everyone on the show will be Jewish,” she says. “Believe me, it’s going to be the Chabad telethon.”

I guess the line is funnier if you know Gilmore Girls—a show about a single mom raising her teen daughter—is set in a fictional WASPy Connecticut town.