The new Pixar film “Inside Out,” centers around an eleven-year-old girl named Riley going through a tumultuous time in her life- a big move, a new school, and tension with her parents. As viewers, we get a glimpse into her head, and learn of five key emotions represented by different animated characters— Joy, Sadness, Anger,…
My story about the crushing pressures ultra-Orthodox women face to raise large families touched a raw nerve. The story went live on the Forward’s web site on Monday, March 11. By that night, I was sorting through an avalanche of emails from people within and out of the community, from those who sympathized, and those…
Guilty on all 59 counts: guilty, guilty, guilty. On Monday, December 10, a jury of 12 found Nechemya Weberman enormously guilty. The jurors convicted him of sexually abusing an underage girl entrusted to his care. They declared the respected member of the ultra-Orthodox community to be a criminal and a fraud, and thousands of survivors,…
Eilenberg trimmed his beard on Tuesday and did not leave home until Friday. It was his wife, my good friend Gitty, who put an end to it — she who could not understand him. “You wanted to trim your beard for over a year,” she screamed, exasperated. “Why are you crying now like you lost…
Once, life in Brooklyn’s Boro Park was simple. There was the inside and the outside and an impenetrable wall in between. Then came the Internet, and everything changed. In the beginning, we did not fully understand. The computer seemed to be a rather innocuous box: glass screen; dark plastic, flat keyboard, and a cursor that…
Elmo’s radio broke. He shook his furry head and banged on his toy. Elmo wanted to listen to music. He wanted to sing the ABCs, or a song about shapes and circles or fish in the sea. I was 25 years old when I first watched “Sesame Street.” Oh, I knew Bert and Ernie from…
This week, the Forward will publish the first in a series of essays by Judy Brown, a 32-year-old author and journalist from the Hasidic neighborhood of Boro Park, in Brooklyn. Brown is in the process of leaving her community, and her series, “Inside Out,” is the narrative of her Hasidic life and her departure from…
The email had arrived that morning from Rivky, a woman who was like a sister to me. In the past few months, though, there had been silence between us. When I first saw Rivky’s name in my inbox, I felt dread. I knew why she had written and what she wanted to say to me….
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