Phoebe Maltz Bovy is a former editor of the Sisterhood blog at the Forward. Her writing has appeared in several publications, including The New Republic and The Atlantic. Her book, “The Perils of ‘Privilege,’” was published by St. Martin’s Press in March 2017. She has a PhD in French and French Studies from New York University, and has read a lot of 19th century French Jewish newspapers for a 21st century American.
Phoebe Maltz Bovy
By Phoebe Maltz Bovy
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Life Links for Later: Lepenisation Edition
-What’s French far-right politician Marine Le Pen doing at Trump Tower? Drinking a warm beverage out of a paper cup like some kind of American? I believe this isn’t my first time introducing Sisterhood readers to a certain French word: lepénisation, a (real) word used to describe the influence of the far-right Le Pen family…
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Life Jewish Women Well Placed to Help Sort Out Conflicts Over Women’s March on Washington
Women. Remember women? We were #trending for a while there. But then Hillary Clinton, woman, lost the presidential election, and all that women stuff got returned to the niche concerns folder. That was on the main stage. On the ragged square-inch platform where women concerned with women-specific issues talk amongst ourselves, the conversation continued and…
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Life President Obama’s Farewell Speech Made the Best of Strange Circumstances
It began, as evenings usually do, with a downpour (sorry) of pee jokes on Twitter. By the time I’d just about sorted out the background (a dubious source; Russia; the president-elect mixing hatred of his predecessor and a predilection), President Obama was about to give his farewell speech. And so my Twitter feed went from…
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Life In Defense of Expressing (Career) Jealousy
In a Buzzfeed excerpt of the new anthology Scratch, about the financial side of writing, Emily Gould describes the pressure on women writers (in the NYC publishing world) to be likable. As someone on the periphery of the world Gould describes, I found the essay both fascinating and a bit terrifying. It had never occurred…
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Life In Essay, Novelist Lucinda Rosenfeld Reconsiders Her Class Origins
I’ve been thinking a lot about a recent New York Times essay by Lucinda Rosenfeld. In “Notes on the Upper Muddle,” Rosenfeld describes imagining she “hailed from the lower end of the middle class,” only to realize later in life that she had grown up “a bona fide member of the bourgeoisie.” She’d failed to…
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Life Meryl Streep’s Golden Globes Speech May Not Change Minds But Isn’t Fueling Trumpism
OK, so I did not watch the Golden Globes, but I did find my way to Meryl Streep’s political, discussion-provoking, and controversial speech: Meryl Streep’s anti-Trump speech at The Golden Globes touches on protecting journalists RT @goldenglobes: pic.twitter.com/FTubRjDN5T — Dan Rather (@DanRather) January 9, 2017 As one would imagine, the president-elect came through on Twitter…
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Life The Self-Deprecation Paradox
The most popular story on the New Yorker’s website at the time of my writing is a Daily Shouts piece by (Jewish!) humor writer Bess Kalb: “A Selection of the 30 Most Disappointing Under 30. It’s good. The piece ends on a self-deprecatory note, adding her own name and age (“Bess Kalb, twenty-nine”) to the…
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Life The Third Neapolitan Novel Ended How?! A (Spoiler-Filled) Reaction to Ferrante
The first and second Neapolitan novels inspired me to write fiction of my own. The third had the opposite effect: If Elena Ferrante can write that well, why bother? It’s hard for me to say whether Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay is better than the previous two installments, or whether the issue was…
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