Sarah Seltzer
By Sarah Seltzer
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Life Tolerating Abuse at Horace Mann
Like many graduates of the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, I’ve spent the week in consternation over the New York Times Magazine story exposing a tragic history of sexual abuse at my alma mater (also the alma mater of the story’s writer and editor). Most of the abuse, but not necessarily all, took place…
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Life Morning After Pill: Birth Control, Not Abortion
“Morning After Pill Works As Birth Control, Not Abortion.” That most likely should have been the headline for an important New York Times piece discussing the paper’s own thorough review of the existing science on emergency contraception. Instead, the Times went with a mix of less straightforward headlines, one of which was the awfully fuzzy…
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Culture Copywriters at the Gates
At the onset of the fifth season of the critically beloved AMC ad agency drama “Mad Men,” a new Jewish copywriter, Michael Ginsberg, becomes the bright creative light of the office, while Abe Drexler, a secondary character dating another copywriter, is outed as a member of the tribe by using the word “bracha.” Then the…
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Life Mommy Wars: A Province of the Privileged
When I saw last week’s much-discussed Time magazine cover with its provocative mom-breastfeeds-toddler photo I groaned, worried that the debate over attachment parenting and breastfeeding would bring with it another chapter in the “mommy wars.” When it comes to parental choices, such as staying at home vs. going back to work, breastfeeding vs. bottle-feeding, it…
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Life Marriage, Evolved
The public acceptance of gay marriage by the President of the United States — a position that most Jews support — is hardly the end of the struggle for full equality for LGBTQ citizens, who continue to lack many of the same enshrined rights and protections as other minority groups. Similarly, Barack Obama’s historic announcement of…
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Life Adam Yauch, Feminist Ally
The world of music lost a treasured star today, when Adam Yauch, a.k.a. MCA, of the Brooklyn-born hip-hop group the Beastie Boys, died of cancer at the far-too-young age of 47. Hundreds of thousands of fans who grew up with the Beasties are mourning Yauch’s musical contribution: the memorable rhymes and beats that provided a…
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Life Who’s Afraid of Nuns?
The Vatican crackdown on nuns in America has provided a fascinating window on gender, religion, and power — specifically, on how groups of women become scapegoat for religious conflicts. Reuters reported: A prominent U.S. Catholic nuns group said Thursday that it was “stunned” that the Vatican reprimanded it for spending too much time on poverty…
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Life Where ‘Girls’ Fails
A few weeks ago, when I wrote about the hype surrounding Lena Dunham’s new HBO show, “Girls,” I noted that there might be a forthcoming critique of the show’s “overwhelming whiteness.” Now that the premiere has aired, the looming quibble has blown up to a full-blown controversy — and understandably so. One of the show’s writers,…
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