At Reform Temple Beth Shalom in Needham, Mass., high school students can go on weekend wilderness adventure trips in lieu of attending Hebrew school. At North Shore Congregation Israel, a Reform synagogue in the Chicago area, they can join a musical group where they jam together — and prepare to lead an alternative High Holy…
Ellie Goldenberg and Emily Blum are getting ready to immerse for the first time in the mikveh, or Jewish ritual bath. One might assume that Ellie and Emily are soon-to-be brides; in traditional communities, women immerse in the mikveh for the first time before they are wed. But they’re not — Ellie is an 11-year-old…
A few weeks ago, one of my engaged friends was asking me for marriage advice and I told her that she should allow her husband to have his own opinions and respect him for them. Also, she should be able to give in every now and then. This advice isn’t something I came up with…
Teen Vogue magazine began mysteriously arriving in our mail a couple of months ago (probably because I subscribe to Vogue proper and the algorithms know how old my children are), and I am doing my best to keep it away from my 13-year-old daughter. I take a quick look through it and then tuck it…
New numbers show that the teen birthrate is way down. In 2010 it was the lowest since the U.S. government began tracking it in 1946, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The teen birthrate dropped by 9 percent from a year earlier to about 34 births per thousand girls ages 15 through…
“His main premise is that young people will tune out educators if their real concerns are left in the shadows.” In the end, that perhaps was the most important line of all in the recent New York Times Magazine article, “Teaching Good Sex,” by Laurie Abraham. The article described a course given by a beloved…
While reading Elana Sztokman’s recent Sisterhood post about her friend who had decided to have an abortion, I found myself responding very strongly. While I’ll admit that I am stubbornly pro-choice, it is not the actual decision to have the abortion that filled me with admiration for Elana’s friend — it was her decision to…
Caitlin Flanagan’s use of Rachel, the brassy Jewish character from the Fox television show “Glee”, as an anecdote for her Atlantic essay “Love, Actually” about the renewed interested in the “boyfriend story,” or old-fashioned romance, is a bit flawed. Yes, Rachel wants love, but she is hardly an innocent romantic. Early in the series she…
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