To millions of people all over the world, V-Day means much more than roses and a romantic dinner.

I guess it’s inevitable, when you’re at a book talk by a 1970s radical political activist who was wanted by the FBI, went underground, got arrested, and spent 16 and a half years behind bars, that someone will ask  “How do you understand what you did and why?” Susan Rosenberg made an honest attempt to answer a complex question, ending with a shrug and the explanation, “That's a different book.”

This month, the folks at the Jewish Women's Archive and its blog Jewesses with Attitude are honored to host the November Jewish Book Carnival.

Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World, (Eds Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz, Indiana University Press, 2011) is at once intellectual and imaginative.

Due to the proliferation of food blogs and cooking websites with thousands of recipes at our fingertips, some folks question the need for cookbooks at all. I am not one of them.

Wonder Woman, created in the 1940s, showed the world that women could kick butt.

I want to give a shout out to Lesléa Newman, an iconic yet under-recognized gay Jewish writer whose work continues to inform the changing landscape of GLBT rights in the U.S.

As part of Yeshiva University Museum’s “Graphic Details – Confessional Comics by Jewish Women” event, I attended the October 24th “Close and Personal: Jewish Women Artists and Their Graphic Diaries” panel at the Center for Jewish History, which featured authors from the exhibition in dialogue about the confessional nature of comic book art. The panelists come from distinct backgrounds: Lauren Weinstein is the lead singer of a metaphysical rock band; Miss Lasko-Gross is creating an iPhone app about religious fundamentalism; Ariel Schrag is a lesbian screenwriter for HBO and Showtime series; and Miriam Katin is a holocaust survivor. Yet these women share a commonality: they are comic book creators with semi-autobiographical stories about coming of age as a Jewish woman.

Anyone who knows me would have been surprised to see me walking down Mass Ave in Cambridge the other night and into a hip club on the edge of the M.I.T.campus. What was I doing there?

The idea for this post came as I was reading Jane Ziegelman’s fascinating book 97 Orchard: An Edible History of Five Immigrant Families in One New York Tenement.

Estie would rather be a dog or a turtle or a monkey than a person.

I miss Wendy Wasserstein. How much so? Well, when Hillary Clinton announced she was running for president, my second thought—right after “All right!”—was: “What would Wendy say?”.

Last weekend the eighth and final Harry Potter movie hit theaters. In the Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling created a magical alternate universe.