Irene Katz Connelly is a staff writer at the Forward. You can contact her at connelly@forward.com. Follow her on Twitter at @katz_conn.
Irene Katz Connelly
By Irene Katz Connelly
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News Ice cream wars: Ben & Jerry’s is hardly the first to make frozen desserts political
Israeli president Isaac Herzog referred to the departure of Cherry Garcia from settlements (Ben & Jerry’s will continue to operate inside Israel’s borders) as “a new kind of terrorism.” Oklahoma Sen. James Lankford called for a ban on the sale of Ben & Jerry’s products. (Even under the state’s current anti-BDS law, which prohibits the…
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Culture With #MyOrthodoxLife, religious women say Netflix doesn’t speak for them
It looked like a pretty ordinary Instagram post: a smiling woman in a trendy periwinkle dress, posed against a background of roses. But Alex Fleksher, the woman in the picture, was on a mission. She wanted people to know that plenty of women “are leading happy, healthy, and fulfilled Orthodox lives,” she wrote. “I’m a…
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The Schmooze Five questions for ‘Call My Agent’ star Liliane Rovère
Liliane Rovère prefers to stay home. The French actress, 88, racked up dozens of credits before finding international fame with “Call My Agent,” in which she plays the fast-talking, reefer-smoking talent agent Arlette. In a world where older women rarely get any screentime, much less the chance to take center stage, the actress has become…
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Culture Meet the husband and wife behind Williamsburg’s first Hasidic art gallery
Just off Flushing Avenue, a bustling thoroughfare in Hasidic Williamsburg, there’s a basement full of art. Chiaroscuro portraits of eminent rabbis. Scenes of Jerusalem’s Western Wall. Modernist sculptures of men kissing their tefillin, tender floral still lifes, a collection of old violins splatter-painted in exuberant colors. Housed in a lower-level ballroom in the Condor Hotel,…
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The Schmooze Netflix wants you to believe ‘My Unorthodox Life’ is a feminist fairytale — is it?
As a teenager, I spent a lot of time arguing with my mother about what clothes qualified as “feminist.” To her, feminism was a knee-length dress and a blazer. To me, it was a miniskirt. She wanted to defy the sexist conventions that equate style with exposed limbs. I wanted to protest a high school…
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Culture ACT UP changed AIDS activism. Sarah Schulman wants us to learn its lessons
Sarah Schulman had already been covering AIDS as a journalist for five years when she attended a 1987 demonstration organized by the newly-formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP. ACT UP members picketed outside New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 72 hours in protest of the sluggish pace…
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Culture Can Shabbat be #self-care? For me, the answer was yes — maybe
Sometimes, when I quit Slack and stow away my laptop on a Friday afternoon, I go on Instagram and scroll through pictures of challah. Plain challah, rainbow challah, challah embellished with candied flowers. Hefty, round challah and etiolated mini challahs scattered artfully across a pristine baking sheet. Challah posed next to minimalist Shabbat candlesticks or…
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Culture A very normal, totally logical, sort-of-Jewish Father’s Day gift guide
Gift guides for men are perplexing documents. In their haste to assure our dads and ourselves that men don’t like clothes, cosmetics, or anything that can’t be classified as a “gadget,” publications have urged the purchase of some truly deranged items. Doorbells that connect to his iPad. Camping knives with functions that almost no dad…
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