Monica Osborne
By Monica Osborne
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Opinion The bias of anti-bias training
Recently I attended an anti-bias session hosted by my child’s elementary school in Los Angeles, a diverse private school with a long history of churning out kids who are kind, compassionate, and tolerant. The woman who led the session describes herself as an “anti-bias anti-racist educator and consultant,” but the session was less an instruction…
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Life ‘Frumpification’ of Orthodox Fashion
Everything comes easier for me when I have a bit of intellectual stimulation, and exercise is no exception. Recently, as I pushed through another grueling post-baby workout, my trainer, sensing that I was in desperate need of distraction, told me something interesting. An Orthodox Jewish woman had recently complained to her that some of the…
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Life The Pregnancy Fear Factor
Anyone who’s been pregnant, or knows someone who’s been pregnant, has probably been exposed to the terrifying list of dos and don’ts that accompanies bringing a child into the world. It’s bad enough to be deprived of wine, imported cheeses, wine, smoked salmon, coffee, and did I mention wine? But the most frustrating thing is…
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Life Make Your Own Haggadah
On Monday night, the first night of Pesach, many of us will sit around a table telling stories. The primary narrative of the evening — the exodus of the Jews from Egypt — is pretty much the same at every gathering, as is the basic framework of the haggadah from which we’ll tell the story….
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Life Let’s Blog About Sex
It has never been the Jewish way to avoid talking about sexuality. Even the Torah abounds with narratives of sex and desire. Sometimes the eroticism is subtle, as with Jael beckoning Sisera into her tent and covering him with a blanket before driving a stake into his head. Other times it is so blatant that…
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Life Being Pregnant Doesn’t Mean Baring All
These days, news of a woman’s pregnancy elicits all sorts of shameless demands from people with voyeuristic drives to see her naked stomach. I should know; I’m pregnant. This is the first time that people I hardly know have asked me to reveal my bare mid-section on social networking sites for all of my so-called…
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Life Stop Apologizing. Seriously!
This is the sixth in a Sisterhood series on women, apologizing and Yom Kippur. As a professor of Jewish Studies, I find that moments of inspiration present themselves to me readily, like gifts I don’t quite deserve. I read furiously, I attend lectures and intellectual events like clockwork, and I spend time listening to my…
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Life What’s Up With All the Rape Jokes?
Everybody’s talking about rape. From Daniel Tosh to Todd Akin, it’s all the rhetorical rage. While rape jokes may be more pervasive than ever these days, I think it’s fair to say that we’ve grown weary of arguments about rape humor — especially since the current political rhetoric regarding women’s bodies gives us something deeper…
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