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 New Yorker, Harper’s, NYRB and TNR Editors on the Dearth of Female Bylines
After my post last month about the gender disparity in magazine publishing, which was followed by VIDA’s much more thorough and ultimately conclusive study, I, perhaps naively, expected to see a comment or two from the publications about the roots of this imbalance. Then weeks passed, and, well, basically nothing. For a while I thought…
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Life Our Rack: The History of Childbirth, and the Rise of the Girlie-Girl
NON FICTION In “Ugly Beauty: Helena Rubinstein, L’Oréal, and the Blemished History of Looking Good,” Ruth Brandon tells the story of Rubinstein, a self-made cosmetics tycoon who came from a poor Polish-Jewish background, and her battle with L’Oreal founder and Nazi collaborator Eugène Schueller, who acquired her company. The book delves into their lives, and…
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Life Prime Ribs: ‘Bra-gate’; Ultra-Orthodox Women in the Army; Circumcision and Cervical Cancer
The Israeli army approves enlistment of 10 ultra-Orthodox women. Teenagers are turning toward plastic surgery to avoid bullying. The most liberal Orthodox Jewish rabbinic organization in the United States rejected a proposal to admit women. Israel’s press office apologizes for “Bra-gate,” in which they denied entry to a reporter who refused to remove her bra…
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Life What ‘Funny Girl’ Could Teach ‘Black Swan’ and ‘Country Strong’
The fact that “Black Swan” and “Country Strong” are both movies about women who are ravaged by fame is hardly a spoiler. Anyone who has seen the films’ trailers — Natalie Portman’s bloody back and Gwyneth Paltrow’s teary battles with the bottle — gets a sense of how these characters’ quests for beauty and success…
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Life The Life of Hannah Senesh — on View
“Blessed is the match consumed in kindling flame/Blessed is the flame that burns in the secret fastness of the heart/Blessed is the heart with strength to stop its beating for honor’s sake/Blessed is the match consumed in kindling fame.” These words were written by Hannah Senesh, just before she entered Hungary on a ultimately fatal…
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Life In Magazine Journalism, It’s Nowhere Near ‘The End of Men’
Whenever I see “best of” lists, award finalists and even table of contents, I can’t help but immediately scan them to see how women fared. Because of this little tic, I find myself regularly complaining to my husband about the lopsided male-to-female ratio in the bylines of the highbrow magazines we receive, which include The…
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Life The Women of the New York Jewish Film Festival
Eccentric and sure-footed Jewesses populate some of the non-fiction films at this year’s New York Jewish Film Festival, which runs through January 27 in New York City. This group includes two pretty young women who choose to leave behind the ultra-Orthodox communities of their youth, a documentarian who chronicles her dating life, a grieving mother…
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Life On Broadsheet’s Demise
Last week Salon announced that Broadsheet, a trailblazer for feminist blogs like this one, and breeding ground for great feminist writers like Rebecca Traister, and Tracy Clark-Flory, was being shut down. Salon’s executive editor Kerry Lauerman explained: No feature in Salon’s history kicked up the amount of righteous dust and ad hominem rage as Broadsheet,…
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