Dorothy Lipovenko
By Dorothy Lipovenko
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Food Who Still Makes Gefilte Fish?
Whitefish finally in hand, it’s time to make the gefilte fish. Thinkstock Like the fixings needed to make gefilte fish from scratch, I’m feeling like a fish out of water. Question to my fellow balabustas busting a gut to gut our homes of chametz: Does anyone still make their own gefilte fish? Are those of…
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Life Happy Mother’s Day To the Mother-in-Law I Never Knew
Mela Mietkiewicz, the mother-in-law of the author // Courtesy of Dorothy Lipovenko At the top of a staircase, a pious Jewish family in pre-war Europe gazes out from a series of framed photos. A boy of bar-mitzvah age stands with two older sisters, faces too young to be so serious. Seated between their parents is…
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Life Charities, You’re Leaving Money on the Table
Pickings in a mid-winter mailbox are slim: The holidays are over; it’s too early for spring catalogs, and a property tax bill that will raid my bank account hasn’t yet arrived. No better time for an envelope to get noticed. So why did a Jewish non-profit that does good work come away empty-handed after grabbing…
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Life Losing My Appetite for Orthodoxy
Two warring factions, my head and heart, have tussled for decades over the inequality and hurt on the women’s side of the mechitzah. Always, if sometimes reluctantly, my heart wins, and I cling to the curtain folds of observant Judaism. But events in Israel these last few months — segregated buses, ultra-Orthodox extremists jeering at…
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Food Baking With the Bubbes
Call them the baker’s dozen bakers. Well, almost. They’re 10 or so women living at a Jewish nursing home in Montreal, neighbors on the sixth floor, who bake together most Tuesday afternoons, coaxing big, sweet aromas from a small convection oven. “Visitors tell me they can smell [the baking] when they step off the elevator,”…
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Life Don’t Judge Women Sitting at Back of Buses
To walk a mile in another woman’s shoes, Nancy Kaufman of New York recently boarded a gender-segregated public bus in Jerusalem. The CEO of the National Council of Jewish Women took a “freedom ride” with a group of colleagues while recently visiting Israel to experience what it’s like to be a woman and assume that…
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Life American Soap Operas Taught Me Yiddish
The language of soap operas is universal: vexing vixens, meddling matriachs and busy men with even busier zippers. When All My Children joined numerous cancelled soaps with its final episode on September 23, it prompted me to reflect on how the voices gone silent did more than entertain; they helped teach me Yiddish. Like monarchies…
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Life Jewish Women’s Groups for a New Age: A Proposal
Time was, a Jewish woman’s legacy could be counted on to include, outside of family, two things: her recipe for sponge cake and membership in a synagogue sisterhood, or one of numerous women’s organizations dedicated to raising money and hope for Jewish children, the State of Israel, indigent elderly or anyone else life had been…
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