Media Roundup: ‘Taliban Mom,’ Shabbat in Prison, Egg Trafficking
• Bad-mommy news out of Israel is in abundance this week, between Jerusalem’s “starving mom,” whose arrest sparked street riots, and the child abuse conviction of “Taliban mom” of Beit Shemesh. Sure puts these “bad mommies” in perspective.
• In the wake of the ordination of Alyssa Stanton, the first black female rabbi, Moment magazine looks at the phenomenon of “post-racial” rabbis.
• A Romanian fertility clinic was raided, and nearly two-dozen Bucharest-based Israeli doctors were detained — and later charged — in connection to a suspected human egg trafficking ring.
• Women make up 70% of the student body of Ma’aleh, the Orthodox television and film school in Jerusalem. The school’s alumnae are well represented at this week’s San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Tablet magazine reports.
• Nancy Goldberg, a California Jewish lay leader, writes about spending Shabbat with 30 incarcerated Jewish women; some of the women have been convicted of white-collar crimes, others drug offenses, still others murder.
• Israeli lawmakers met to address the gender gap in the Jewish state’s business, military and government sectors. Likud MK Miri Regev has proposed a bill to mandate that at least one army general position is filled by a woman.
• The National Council of Jewish Women officially threw its support behind the confirmation of Supreme Court nominee Sonya Sotomayer. An email from the organization’s Action Center chastised the Senate Judiciary Committee — and its ranking member, Senator Jeff Sessions — for attempting to “obstruct a vote.”
• An Orthodox female rabbi will be known in Israel as a rabba, according to Kolech Religious Women’s Forum. Now all the group has to do is convince Israel’s rigid Orthodox religious establishment to train female clergy and recognize their rabbinic ordination.
• Jewcy has a post on a new Web portal for Jewish brides-to-be.
• Jill Zarin, the nasally gala-hopping star of the “The Real Housewives of New York,” is writing a book called “Secrets of a Jewish Mother.”
• Likud’s coalition director Aliza Barashi calls fashion model turned Yisrael Beiteinu MK Orly Levy-Abekasis a “bimbo” — and, in short order, apologizes.
• Britney Spears is reportedly converting to Judaism. Andy Borowitz’s imagines her “conversion diary” — and the result is side-splitting.
• What happened this week in Jewish women’s history? The Jewish Women’s Archive breaks it down.
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