I had an illegal abortion in 1964, and I have hardly mentioned it in the last 52 years. I might have mentioned it to my former husband. I know for sure my four adult children didn’t know because I told them one by one on the day I decided to write this piece, and asked…
Last week, our own Larry Cohler-Esses shared his story of helping a close friend obtain an abortion in 1969, when it was still illegal and dangerous to do so. When Larry interviewed his friend decades later, she told him that “the experience for me was just an experience…I don’t believe it was life altering. I…
When memory bursts, it’s like a dam opening, flooding the present. Still, I did not expect it to happen in a late-night taxi as I headed home from work, reading a New York Times story on my smartphone. On its face, the story before me had nothing to do with my own history: It was…
When I got a call from the Rev. Laura J. Young, head of the Ohio Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, asking me if I could testify before an Ohio state Senate committee about Jewish views on abortion, I did what rabbis have done for hundreds of years: I crowdsourced. With only a short time to…
Donald Trump’s candidacy has revealed many things, but I don’t think anyone expected it to cast a harsh light on the misogyny of the pro-life movement. Interestingly, the pro-lifers’ conundrum has a Jewish precedent. The latest controversy (of how many? I’ve lost count) started at the March 30 Republican Town Hall, in which Trump, clearly…
“Fatma”, a mother of twins with a demanding workload, was distraught to discover she was pregnant again. Her doctor agreed to perform an abortion, she says, only after she promised to pretend the procedure had been a medical emergency. “He felt sorry for me and told me, ‘If someone asks you how you ended up…
I want Jews to pray for reproductive justice, and I want rabbis to lead them. On March 2, the eight-person Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Whole Woman’s Health v. Cole, the most significant abortion case in a decade. At issue in the case is whether Texas’s absurd and completely medically unjustified restrictions on…
If it’s not American Jewish liberals who have betrayed Israel, but our organizations that have betrayed us — — then that leaves us with a question: What would a genuine Jewish public agenda look like? Here’s a quick recap of how we got to where we are: When the main American Jewish advocacy organizations arose…
די העלדן אין דער זאַמלונג זענען אוקראַיִנער ייִדן וואָס לײַדן פֿון אַ שווער לעבן אָבער בלײַבן פֿאָרט לײַטיש.
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