Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt was the Life/Features editor at the Forward. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, Salon, and Tablet, among others.
Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt
By Avital Chizhik-Goldschmidt
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Life Meet the Orthodox Entrepreneur Bringing Luxe Fashion to the Masses
Yoni Chesner was no fashion expert growing up. He was a yeshiva student; his first job was making $6 an hour in a bagel shop in his hometown of Baltimore. “I went to the clearance section at Ross,” he says now, chuckling. But one visit to the Saks Fifth Avenue Company store in Aberdeen, Maryland,…
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Life WATCH: Orthodox Girl Studies For Her Bat Mitzvah — And Breaks Powerlifting Records
Naomi Kutin, a Modern Orthodox Jewish girl from Fairlawn, New Jersey, has been breaking powerlifting world records since 2012. And now the movie telling her story is going to be released online on September 28. Inspired by Naomi Zeveloff’s 2012 profile of Kutin in the Forward, filmmaker Jessie Auritt turned her lens on this extraordinary…
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Life This Hasidic Picture Book Teaches Children About Sexual Abuse
If you walk into Monsey’s Evergreen kosher supermarket, somewhere among the extensive schnitzel varieties and Shabbos candy treats, you’ll see a single children’s book for sale. Zai Gezunt! is the Yiddish translation of Artscroll’s Let’s Stay Safe, written by Bracha Goetz and illustrated by Tova Leff, a picture book that talks about children’s safety of…
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Culture Why These 5 Statues Of Rabid Anti-Semites Are Still Standing
As the national debate roils over monuments of those who oppressed groups — this past week, regarding Robert E. Lee, Confederate army general and slaveholder — it makes me think about the significance of a memorial, altogether. After all, monuments are more than just portrayals in stone or bronze. They are daily reminders of a…
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Life Checking Your Phone At Night Kills Your Sleep – And Might Affect Your Day, Too
It’s tempting to check what the 45th President of the United States may or may not have tweeted at 3:00 am, when you wake up in a sudden sweat remembering the state of the country. But that reflexive move to pick up your phone in the middle of the night may be killing your sleep,…
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Opinion Why Won’t Orthodox Condemn Trump’s Ties to White Supremacists After Charlottesville?
Over the past two days, we have been flooded with horrifying images of the largest white supremacist demonstration in decades. We’ve also been met with President Trump’s shameless failure to condemn the white supremacists. A president who has no qualms condemning journalists for doing their jobs, or retailers for not carrying his daughter’s handbags, could…
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Life This Amazing Project Invites The Public To Help Unlock Medieval Jewish Documents
One group of Judaica scholars is taking crowdsourcing to a new level. In a new initiative to unlock the thousands of parchment fragments from the Cairo Geniza, scholars are inviting the public to help scholars sort document fragments — all online, as part of a project by the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, the Princeton Geniza…
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News Meet The Russian Jewish Journalists Challenging Putin Today
Ever since the days of Isaac Babel, Vasily Grossman and Ilya Ehrenburg, Russia’s Jewish journalists and commentators have been at the forefront of those fearlessly speaking truth to power. Today’s Russian media is swarming with misinformation, or “fake news” in American terms — ‘news’ stories that are farmed and placed by government propagandists across languages….
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