Elissa Strauss has written for the Forward over a number of years. She is a regular contributor to CNN, whose work has been published in a number of publications including The New York Times, Glamour, ELLE, and Longreads.
Elissa Strauss
By Elissa Strauss
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Opinion ‘Princeton Mom’ Susan Patton Is Back — and She’s Not All Wrong
Princeton Mom Susan Patton is back. The Jewish mother of two boys, Princetonians natch, just came out with a book called “Marry Smart” in which she expands her letter that launched a thousand blog posts about why young women should find husbands in college into a 200-page treatise. In the book, she reups her original…
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Life No Saintly Mother
Thinkstock Becoming a mother didn’t make me nicer. More compassionate? Yes. More sensitive? Sure. But nicer. No. During the few months in which I was “trying”, I started involuntarily responding to pregnant women with a snarl. Then there was the period of time following my son’s birth when my concern for other people, places and…
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Life Ban Bossy? But It’s a Jewish Birthright
Sheryl Sandberg is trying to ban the word “bossy” by telling everyone what to do. It’s kinda funny. The ban on bossy is the center of the leaning-in Facebook COO’s most recent crusade to try to encourage us not to discourage leadership in girls. As the campaign’s website explains: “When a little boy asserts himself,…
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Life Bye, Bye Barbie?
Getty Images When Ruth Handler created Barbie in the mid ‘50s, she tapped into a fantasy of feminine perfection very particular to the mid 20th century. Those shiny blond locks, the wasp-waist, long legs and perky breasts proved irresistible to girls from all backgrounds, including Jewish ones like Barbara Handler, Ruth’s daughter and the doll’s…
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Life 50 Is Not the New 40
Photo credit Jeannie Cole There was a brief moment there, must of been my early 20s, when I thought that women of a certain age were not subject to the same contradictory demands and humiliations as younger women. I believed that we all would eventually reach a point when projecting the right image on the…
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Life Treating Babies Like Adults
Thinkstock A few years ago at a holiday party at my brother’s house one toddler began hitting another toddler. After a few minutes the parents of the boy being hit asked the parents of the hitter if they wouldn’t mind telling their kid to stop. “No. We can’t. We don’t believe in telling our son…
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Opinion The Jewish Case Against Unplugging
Jews can be pretty proprietary about guilt. We’re almost proud of it. If an outsider, after binge-reading Philip Roth, came to the conclusion that guilt is what fuels our emotional engines, we would experience that particular delight of feeling completely understood. And yet, when it comes to guilt, the thing we might feel most guilty…
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Life Reclining and Leaning In Aren’t Only Options
Getty Images Foreign Policy columnist Rosa Brooks wrote a call to arms last week inciting women of the world to recline. In the piece, Brooks explains that she tried to lean in, a la Sheryl Sandberg, stepping up at work, volunteering more at school, pushing, pushing, pushing as hard as she could until, finally, she…
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