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 Jami Attenberg on Jewish Identity and the Heartland
Jami Attenberg’s new novel “The Melting Season” (Riverhead, 2010) is about a young Nebraska woman who leaves her husband and small town for Las Vegas with a suitcase filled with cash. On the road she meets a very un-small town Nebraska cast of characters — including a cross-dressing Prince impersonator and a cancer-surviving flamboyant woman…
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Life The End of the Juicy American Princess?
There are big changes at America’s most overtly Jewish fashion line. Gela Nash-Taylor and Pamela Skaist-Levy, founders of Juicy Couture, are stepping down as creative directors — leaving the company in the hands of its parent company, Liz Claiborne, which bought Juicy three years ago. The buzz is that Nash-Taylor and Skaist-Levy, both Jewish, aren’t…
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Life What ‘Big Love’ Can Teach Us About Marriage
“Big Love” is a crappy show about love. But it is a great show about marriage. In the way that “The Simpsons,” unexpectedly taught us a thing or two about family values, the Henricksons have shed some insight on being wed. The polygamous premise aside, the show has some of the most honest portrayals of…
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Life The Jewish Matriarchs of Striptease
According to the recent obituaries of Alice Schiller, co-owner of Los Angeles’ legendary burlesque nightclub the Pink Pussycat, was a prudish Midwestern gal who cried when her husband told her he was turning his Hollywood club into a strip club. The Orthodox Jewish-reared Schiller, the daughter of a deli manager, eventually came to terms with…
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Life Embracing the ‘Coastie’ Label
Coastie, a new term for out-of-state students that is floating around the University of Wisconsin, Madison, definitely seems like a euphemism for Jewish American Princess. And I am just not sure it is such a bad thing. The term, which, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has been used at the school for around a…
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Life The Jewish-American Lexicon
American Jews speak their own language. This is the thesis that Professor Sarah Bunin Benor is working under as she gathers up phrases and words for her project “Jewish English: Distinctive Lexicon.” I spoke with Benor recently and she explained that while it is not like Yiddish or Ladino, American Jews have a specific vocabulary…
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Life Jews and the ‘Bo-tax’
The Slate folks recently had an online spat about Congress’s idea to help cover the cost of health care with a 5% tax on elective cosmetic surgery. On the main site Christopher Beam argued against the tax, using studies to show that, despite assumptions that this would only affect the rich, one-third of the people…
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Life On Jewish Mothers Who Teach Their Daughters To Diet
Talk about the new Jewish mother has bubbled up in recent years. Goodbye to the neurotic, ever-doting figure of the past. Hello the “I need some freedom, and you kids should have some too” variety. Of course, stereotypes are never as potent as we remember them, which was something I thought about upon reading this…
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