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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Life Should Feminists Go on Diets?
In the past 20-some years, women have “taken back” many things from the patriarchy. These include lipstick, the words “lady” and “slut,” and knitting. But there is one last thing feminists have yet to re-appropriate, and that, according to a new essay in Elle magazine, is dieting. In this month’s magazine Marisa Meltzer writes about…
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Opinion 2013 Was the Year of Twerking
Miley Cyrus isn’t Jewish. Baruch Hashem. She isn’t ours to worry about — to define, to defend, to forgive or condemn. We can’t get off that easy, however. We may have had nothing to do with the creation of Cyrus but all of us had our part in setting the stage, physical and otherwise, upon…
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Life A Family Leave Policy That Works
Good news for families everywhere, no matter how much the moms and dads are leaning in. Senators Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY) and Representative Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) just introduced a Senate bill that would create a national paid family leave policy. The legislation, called the Family and Medical Insurance Leave Act, or FAMILY Act, would provide up…
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Opinion Why Christmas Is America’s Storybook Holiday for All
Growing up, my family’s Jewish identity was rooted more in what we didn’t do rather than what we did. Keep kosher. Not so much. Observe the Sabbath? Nominally. Regularly attend synagogue? Once a month at best. But boy were we proud, even eager, to abstain from anything and everything that we considered goyish. These included,…
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Life Women Are Women’s Harshest Judges
The New York Times recently ran a story about an experiment testing the competitiveness of the human female. For it, researchers had a woman, who “embodied qualities considered attractive from an evolutionary perspective,” interrupt a lecture about female friendships. Sometimes she was dressed casual, in a T-shirt and jeans, and other times she wore a…
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Life Q&A: "The New Soft War on Women" Authors
In their latest book, “The New Soft War on Women”, academics Caryl Rivers and Rosalind C. Barnett take on the notion that the end of men is imminent — as posited in Hannah Rosin’s book. They argue that while women have made some gains, particularly early on their careers, we are still a long, long…
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Life Enough With the Stay-at-Home Dads
Can we please stop pretending that stay-at-home-dads are a viable, large-scale solution for gender equality? Fifty years after Betty Friedan encouraged women to get out of the house, men have not, in any statistically significant way, come to take their place. And yet, the stay-at-home dad continues to live on in our cultural imagination as…
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Opinion Searching for Religious Ritual in a $10 Bottle of Juice
The East Village of New York City has long been a site of cultural defiance. It was home to massive communist rallies in the late 19th century, Boris Thomashefsky’s Yiddishe “Hamlet” in the early 20th century and then, eventually, the Beats and the punks. Walk around the neighborhood today and you will encounter, more than…
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