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 Single Orthodox Women Could Be Happy — If Only We’d Let Them
Ever since reviewing Ruth Whippman’s book, America the Anxious, I’m attuned to the concept of happiness, and to its centrality in American life. I thought of it most recently when reading Heather Havrilesky’s recent Ask Polly column, “Ask Polly: I’m Pretending I’m Happy Single, But I’m Not!” The letter-writer may look like a proud, independent…
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Life Tiffany Charm Bracelet Evokes Memories of Bat Mitzvahs Past
What does “Tiffany” mean to you? Is it a place to breakfast with Audrey Hepburn? Or does it evoke the plight of the younger Trump daughter? There’s yet another meaning to the brand, which Joanna Rothkopf lays out at Jezebel: upscale bat mitzvah gift bracelets. First, Chavie Lieber had tweeted the following: OK, I’M SORRY…
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Life Anti-Oppression ‘Cleanse’ Takes Activism in the Wrong Direction
Drawing a connection to the Safety Pin Box (patronized by at least one woman rabbi, and discussed here earlier; see also Jesse Singal’s critique for New York magazine), Slate’s Christina Cauterucci highlights another new project along the same lines: The Complicity Cleanse: “Billed as an ‘anti-oppression diet,’ the cleanse runs from Jan. 1 to Jan…
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Life Links for Later: New Years 2017 Edition
So 2016 ended, after all that. 2017 thus far? A mixed bag: -Lindy West has had it with Twitter trolls and, more to the point, with Twitter’s failure to crack down on trollishness as the phenomenon moved from the platform to, uh, the presidency. –Exercise is exclusionary. Especially the kind that involves putting on high-end…
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Life Vice Video Uses Woman Rabbi as Exhibit A of White Liberal Guilt
Via journalist Jesse Singal’s Twitter, I found one heck of a recent Vice story and video about something called the Safety Pin Box, a subscription service for white people who want to learn how to be better allies to people of color. “This is literally everything I have been whining about about corporate woke liberalism…
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Life Bernard-Henri Lévy’s Lady-Lacking Reading List
As I was perusing the New York Times book reviews this weekend (yes, the section whose cover features a review by Woody Allen), I happened upon an interview with French-Jewish writer and public intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. As someone with an above-average interest in French and Jewish (I’ve got a doctorate in just that topic, and…
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Life Steve Martin’s Carrie Fisher Tweet and the (Imagined) War on Male Heterosexuality
Carrie Fisher died on December 27th. Steve Martin’s controversial (since-deleted) tweet praising Fisher’s looks and Claire Landsbaum’s perhaps still more controversial New York magazine critical response to that tweet were both written on December 27th. Even without knowing precisely how long either Martin or Landsbaum sat pondering their words, we’re talking same-day. The timing matters….
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Life Fighting To Be Optimistic About 2017
I wanted the Sisterhood look at the year ahead to be a positive take on what’s in store for Jewish girls, Jewish women, and Jewish gender-non-conforming individuals. And it might have been just that, had I, a Jewish woman, not spent much of the past 24 hours blocking and reporting Nazi sympathizers for social-media harassment….
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