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 Not Sure What to Give This Hanukkah? Have You Considered a Rock?
It’s an annual holiday tradition to circulate and mock outrageously expensive gift guides. (Goop’s being the prime example.) But there’s a new contender: the rock-in-a-pouch. Why was Nordstrom selling a rock in a leather pouch for $85 and more to the point, why is it sold out? (Limited supply, possibly. A good rock is hard…
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Life Shocking but Unsurprising: White Supremacists Use Photos of Fashion Models as Twitter Avatars
If you ever find yourself trying to explain or just understand the connection between white supremacy, the abstract phenomenon anti-racists sometimes use to describe societal unfairness, and white supremacy, the thing where neo-Nazis (rebranded or otherwise) get together to heil Hitler or Trump or whomever, look no further than the bizarre story of fashion models…
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Life Is Alexander Portnoy White?
It’s struck me lately that the American writer perhaps most deeply associated with White Male Writer-ness is one who made his name writing fiction about identity. Google “Philip Roth” and “white male” and you find an endless stream of essays that offer up Roth as a prime example of the white male literary novelist. As…
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Life Stop Scapegoating Feminism for Clinton’s Loss
As the election recedes in the collective memory, and as Hillary Clinton gets remembered (called it!) as a you-go-girl abandoner of makeup, what’s left in the rubble is this trickle of feminism-caused-Trump takes. Or maybe not caused, exactly — what’s posited is more that Clinton’s loss invites A Reckoning, and thus an overhaul of feminism…
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Life The Major Jewish Holiday No One Discusses: Non-Celebration of Christmas
On “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend”, an adolescent Rebecca Bunch refers to herself as “half-Christmas.” In a show full of spot-on moments, this rang especially true to me, for reasons that shall, I hope, become clear. Secular Jewishness, at least in the United States, is grounded in one annual non-act: the non-celebration of Christmas. Yes, some Jews celebrate…
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Life ‘Jackie’: Feminist Warning Tale or Tragically Beautiful Diversion?
I saw Jackie yesterday, and have to say the movie succeeds at what would almost have to be its purpose: Making audiences experience a political disaster as the personal family tragedy it also, of course, was. With the right music, the right anguished expression on the right brilliant actress (Natalie Portman), you care. The next…
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Life ‘Rabbi Jacqueline’ Film to Put a Female Spin on a French Classic
The Mad Adventures of ‘Rabbi’ Jacob is a 1973 French comedy starring Louis de Funès. It involves — among so much else, and I don’t want to spoil it! — a racist French man and an Arab revolutionary dressing up as orthodox Jews, which, as I type this, sounds terribly problematic, but has an anti-racist…
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Life How Should We Feel About Natalie Portman Getting a Christmas Tree?
A commenter to my earlier post about Natalie Portman getting her first Christmas tree writes: “This is what the Forward loves, Jews that celebrate Christmas. Shame on her, a Solomon Schechter graduate who celebrates that holiday and desires a tree. The Forward hates Ivanka because she conve[r]ted to Modern Orthodoxy Judaism and [is] raising her…
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