Holly Lebowitz Rossi
By Holly Lebowitz Rossi
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News The BRCA Gene: A Positive Test, A Personal Choice
If a blood test revealed that you were likely to contract the same cancer that painfully and violently killed your mother, what would you do? Have radical surgery to prevent it? Undergo frequent screenings and aggressively treat cancer at its earliest signs? Or would you not take the test at all? Jessica Queller shares her…
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News Up From the Ashes: A Family Story Unearthed
I never had the religious identity crisis that strikes so many Jewish adolescents and young adults. Never, that is, until last year, when my great-grandparents were disinterred from their graves and summarily dismissed from a Jewish cemetery. The saga started when my great-uncle Bobby died in March, just before his 88th birthday. His will stated…
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Culture Rivalry In the Time Of Cholera
An Imperfect Lens By Anne Roiphe Shaye Areheart Books, 304 pages, $25. * * *| Disease, horrifying as it can be in real life, usually makes for a good read — gripping, intense, fearful and always entertaining. Veteran novelist Anne Roiphe’s latest book, “An Imperfect Lens,” is a riveting work of historical fiction, taking the…
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Culture When The Streets Were Paved With Tragedy
Bodies and Souls: The Tragic Plight of Three Jewish Women Forced Into Prostitution in the Americas By Isabel Vincent William Morrow, 288 pages, $25.95. * * *| Memory is a central concept in Judaism. When someone dies, we say that he or she lives on in how he or she is remembered by others. Countless…
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Culture An Enchanting Lesson
It was a disconcerting thought, a wake-up call that interrupted my reverie as I thought fondly back on four years of teaching second-grade Hebrew school. I realized with a start that the students I’d taught my first year were becoming bar and bat mitzvah this year. They had learned the trope, the system of diacritical…
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Culture Following Another Through Grief
At several points in the novel “A Song I Knew by Heart,” author Bret Lott refers to a character straining under the sheer effort of putting a feeling into a few words — “the work of it,” he writes. The story, which is a modern retelling of the biblical Ruth and Naomi narrative, might as…
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Culture Modern-day Ruths
It is not an easy road — the road from Moab to Bethlehem, from the non-Jewish world into the Jewish. For all the excitement and joy of starting a new life in the Jewish community, there is also, by definition, much new material to be learned and always something to be left behind. Ruth, whose…
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News Finding ‘Something for Everyone’ in the Mikvah
Water is a ubiquitous and potent symbol. It can mean life, from irrigation to amniotic fluid; it can mean physical healing or inner cleansing, as in the literal or symbolical cleaning of a wound; it can mean movement, as in the currents of a river or the tides of the ocean. It makes sense, then,…
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Fast Forward Why neo-Nazis marched in Ohio this weekend, and almost every weekend in the US
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Opinion The group behind Project 2025 has a plan to protect Jews. It will do the opposite.
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Opinion Just about every interpretation of Trump’s narrow election victory is wrong
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News Your complete guide to Trump’s Jewish advisers and pro-Israel cabinet
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Fast Forward Trump attorney general pick Pam Bondi: 5 things Jews should know
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Opinion After all that controversy, here’s why Ta-Nehisi Coates (probably) didn’t change any minds on Israel-Palestine
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Looking Forward How a Jewish student at Columbia became an icon of a movement
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Culture At 95, Shaindel Schreiber is still dispensing babka and advice on the Lower East Side
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