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 Why Do Teens Today Love Prom?
Remember the good old days, when everyone hated prom? Okay, maybe everyone didn’t hate it, but for a long time there was a deep and widespread cynicism of this (forced) rite of passage— and those who took it too seriously were considered out-of-touch or uptight. (See basically every high school movie from the last 25…
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Life Attitude Adjustment for Working Moms
We know there are many forces working against women in the workplace, things like poor maternity leave and child care policies as well as some good old-fashioned institutionalized sexism, and that as individuals we have very little power to change them. But there is one thing we can change, and that is our fixation on…
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Life Mommy’s Paycheck vs. Daddy’s
Last week on the New York Times’ parenting blog Motherlode, Jessica Grose wrote about why it is important for mothers to not, consciously or semi-consciously, earmark the money they earn for childcare expenses. She talks about how she started seeing her freelance writing assignments in terms of how many diapers or onesies they could cover,…
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Life Go Diaperless? Are You Crazy?!
According to the New York Times, the latest parenting trend among those who seem to shun every innovation ever made to ease childbirth and child care is raising babies without diapers. Yes, “elimination communication,” as it is called, is trending in Brooklyn. Doulas now see it as a job qualification to be able to train…
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Life How Should a Jewish Mother Worry?
Like many of you readers, I come from a long line of worrying women. Jewish mothers worry. It’s a total cliche, and it’s also totally true. My mother worries, her sister worries, their mother worried, her sisters worried, my Jewish friends’ mothers worried, their sisters and mothers worried, and so on and so forth. My…
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Life A Better Kind of Parenting — Israeli-Style
When MSNBC host Melissa Harris-Perry recently called for a more communal attitude towards raising children in a TV commercial, it provoked a rather bizarre outrage among conservatives. (Mary Elizabeth Williams sums it all up perfectly in her piece, “Melissa Harris-Perry Doesn’t Want to Steal Your Children.”) While the backlash from the right was without a…
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Life How to Fix American Day Care
After finishing Jonathan Cohn’s new story, “The Hell of American Day Care” about the potential tragic consequences of the abysmal day care policies in the United States, it took everything I had to not get up from my desk and wrest my baby boy away from his caretaker’s arms. The fact that they were only…
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Life It’s Paternity Leave, Stupid
Those of us who have made it our business to achieve gender equality by way of parenting, have long pushed for better paternity leave policies. Quite simply, it is the right thing to do. But it looks like it’s also the economically prudent thing to do, too. The New York Times magazine had a story…
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