Family

Dr. Jayne Guberman felt two things when her adopted daughter announced at a pre-Bat Mitzvah family education program eight years ago, “I don’t know how I feel about being Jewish.” Guberman felt it was incredibly courageous of her daughter to share this in public. She also felt very alone as an adoptive parent in the Jewish community.

I just came across a Craigslist posting via Twitter (oy, my life!) looking for a Jewish woman to donate her eggs to a Jewish couple looking to conceive. This couple, through an agency called A Jewish Blessing, is offering $8,000 for an egg from a Jewish donor. A Jewish Blessing was founded by Judy Weiss, RNC in 2005 in response to the growing number of requests from Jewish families for her help in finding qualified and extraordinary young Jewish donors and surrogates.

Scratching, clawing, digging. Those words don't sound very friendly, do they? When it comes to getting beyond the surface of stereotypes, they're even worse than that. They're painful.

HBI eZine editor Michelle Cove’s latest book, Seeking Happily Ever After, was profiled at Feministing. I’ve seen news about the book in a couple of places, and there is a documentary film (here’s the trailer of the same name that Cove co-made).

I returned home from my cousin’s wedding Sunday night, happy and exhausted with barely enough energy to flop onto the couch and turn on the TV. That is how I found myself watching the two new episodes of TLC’s Sister Wives, a reality TV show about a modern polygamous family.

I recently read a piece called "New Study Finds That It’s Not a Lack of Welcome That’s Keeping the Intermarrieds Away" in the eJewish Philanthropy daily e-letter. It explained how a study done by Steven M. Cohen, a sociologist who studies American Jews, determined that it was a lack of "competency" rather than welcome that was keeping intermarried families and their children from engaging with the Jewish community.

The Washington Post Outlook section featured an interesting article this weekend on a surprising topic---whether or not marrying someone of the same religion is likely to make your marriage more successful. This is particularly relevant to Jews, who now find themselves with an intermarriage rate of almost 50%.

Kayli had her first soccer game this week. Right before the big game she jumped into her purple outfit, had her hair french braided by our fabulous babysitter and finished off the look with a dollop of lip gloss. She nodded in the mirror and smiled. Totally and completely satisfied with her “soccer look.” You might be asking yourself what any of this actually has to do with soccer right about now.

The Jewish Women’s Archive was the community partner for the Boston New Center for Arts and Culture’s last program of the season on May 6, “Listen to Your Mother,” featuring StoryCorps founder David Isay. He played a number of clips from StoryCorps interviews and closed the evening with a “sneak preview” of StoryCorps’ newest venture which will be broadcast on PBS this summer -- an extremely effective animated version of a conversation between a mother and her young son.

Knowing Navah Paskowitz-Walther today as a San Fernando Valley stay-at-home mom who is active in her synagogue and children’s Jewish day school, it is hard to believe that, as a child, she lived a peripatetic existence in a 24-foot camper.

I am an actress, currently rehearsing a one-woman show at the Nora Theatre in Cambridge, MA.  I play Ann Landers, a.k.a. Eppie Lederer. The title of the show is The Lady With All the Answers.

New Yorkers know better than to bother an actor, celebrity or otherwise famous person when they see one on the street (or in a restaurant, store, or park – not to mention stepping out of a taxi).  As a New Yorker for fifteen years, I upheld this unwritten rule – even when it came to a famous neighbor.

Is 73 too old to become a first-time mother? Not for the trailblazing Marylin Berger, who is now raising an 8 year old boy from Ethiopa.

Why have an American actor and Israeli model become hot topics for the Jewish press? Lehava, a Jewish organization created to prevent assimilation, recently sent a letter to Bar Refaeli, a prominent Israeli supermodel, not to marry DiCaprio because it would be bad for Judaism. Some excerpts from the letter:

This past weekend was Purim, and amidst the celebrating and partying one thing stood out in my mind that most people tend to ignore: the fact that the feminine hero of the story, Esther, is interma

You can learn an incredible amount about different people from language.

“She was trying as hard as she could not to be beautiful. But she had a brightness on her, made stronger by the fact that she wanted to hide it; thinking if it was seen, somehow, it would make him choose her, and of course it did.” 

It's not always easy to raise children Jewish in America. Our holidays are no match for the big C, bacon is America's favorite food, and to top it off, your ex might baptize your children when you're not looking. That's what happened to Rebecca Reyes, a Jewish woman going through a divorce.

Last week in The Sisterhood, Elana Sztokman weighed in on the struggle to balance work and motherhood. Her piece was written partly in response to an earlier Sisterhood post by Deborah Kolben, who wondered if choosing to stay home with her new baby made her a "bad feminist."  Below is an excerpt from Elana Szotkman's piece.

I recently received a press release announcing the launch of JSitter.com, a site that purports to connect families with "reliable" Jewish babysitters, pet sitters, and house sitters. My initial reaction to this was disgust. This morning while I was catching up on my reading, I saw a post on TC Jewfolk that caught my attention.  In their advice column, "Ask Shuli," a reader asked: "I’m wondering where to find a Jewish babysitter.

Oh to be a working mother in Israel, where women who give birth will soon get 14 weeks of paid maternity leave. Fourteen weeks? I’d have been happy to get 14 days of paid leave in this country.