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 How Loehmann’s Transformed Shopping Forever — and Gave Me a Million Memories
So long, Loehmann’s. After a series of store closings and bankruptcies over the past 15 years, the retailer has decided to call it quits, citing a sluggish economy and a failure to implement an effective e-commerce strategy as the causes of its demise. This marks the end of not just deep discounts on designer clothes,…
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Life Why I Like Likeable Women
I like people I find likeable. This goes for men and women, as well as the fictional and the living. I also like being likeable. This all sounds pretty obvious, I know. And yet holding such an opinion these days makes one a bit of a philistine and, worse, a heretic in certain feminist circles….
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Life Could Eve Have Been Happy About the Expulsion?
For so long, I took their word for it. Eve — the world’s first woman according to the creation myth of Abrahamic religions — messed up. Her punishment, two-fold. One, she was kicked out of Eden, sweet Eden, where she spent her days sauntering around naked, no shame in her step. There she led a…
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Life ‘Tiger Mom’ Amy Chua Roars Again
“Tiger Mom” Amy Chua has a new book out with her Jewish husband Jed Rubenfeld and in it she looks at the parenting practices of six cultural groups who, she claims, create more successful people. These include Indians, Chinese, Iranians, Lebanese-Americans, Nigerians, Cuban Exiles, Mormons and, you got it, Jews. Her thesis in “The Triple…
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Life Call Your Mother
Novelist and culture writer (and my friend) Teddy Wayne has a story in the New York Times style section about how nobody talks on the phone anymore. Citing such disparate sources as Taylor Kitsch, a.k.a. “Tim Riggins”, memoirist Domenica Ruta and himself, Wayne looks at our rising preference for sending texts over making calls. This…
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Life Men Need To Lean Out
Only 9% of employed mothers ages 25-44 spend more than 50 hours working. For college-educated women this number rises slightly, to 13.9%. Compare this to fathers who live with their kids and work outside the home, of whom 29% report spending more than 50 hours a week at work. Also interesting this gap exists for…
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Life Israeli Government To Subsidize Abortion but Not Birth Control
As conservative politicians continue to chip away abortion access around the United States, the Israeli government has decided to foot the bill. According to Haaretz, in 2014 Israel will begin to pay for abortions for women between the ages of 20 and 33 under any circumstance and they hope to pay for all abortions in…
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Life Having Some Instead of Having It All
Editor’s note: This post is the second in a three part series answering the question, “How should Jewish feminism change in 2014 to be more effective?” Read part one here. There are two somewhat opposing currents in the women’s movement these days. One is our long-running struggle to be equal to men. The other is…
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