There is a new audio podcast on Nextbook of an interview with political activist and writer Alix Kates Shulman -- featured in JWA's online exhibit Jewish Women and the Feminist Revolution -- about her first novel Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen. Click here to download or listen to the Nextbook podcast.

Last week, after Jewish writer Tillie Olsen died at the age of 94, I picked up a copy of Tell Me A Riddle, her first collection of short stories published in 1961. Last night I re-read “I Stand Here Ironing,” a story that recounts a poor working woman’s ambivalence about her parenting skills and about her eldest daughter’s future during the Great Depression.

Cartoonist Miriam Engelberg, whose best-known work found humor in her fight against breast cancer, died last Tuesday in her San Francisco home at the age of 48.

Engelberg’s book, Cancer Made Me a Shallower Person, was published earlier this year. The book details the painful experience of going through cancer treatment but in the end, Engelberg has her readers laughing.

If you’ve noticed that we seem to be awash in a sea of pink ribbons and ads for pink products these days, you probably realize that it’s National Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Not surprisingly, given our prominence as feminist leaders (and the higher incidence of breast cancer among women of Ashkenazi descent), Jewish women have played leading roles in breast cancer activism. The public attention to breast cancer today is largely due to the pioneering activism of journalist Rose Kushner (1929-1990).

Nora Ephron’s new book I Feel Bad about My Neck is causing quite the stir. Here we are at a time when Oprah is claiming that 50 is the new 40, women’s magazines are focusing on the beauty of self-confidence over taut skin, and women past menopause are openly discussing their sexuality. Then, wham!, Ephron comes and claims this is bull****.

As I’m sure you all know, today is the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. It’s hard to believe it’s already been a year.

I’ve never been to Israel. There, I said it. When I was a bratty teen who turned my back on all things religious, it was a point of pride. A badge that said I was too cool for exploring my encumbering heritage. Now it’s a source of embarrassment.

How could I have worked in the Jewish community for three years and not have set foot in the Holy Land? How could I be a 37-year-old woman proud of my Jewish identity and not have experienced the place Jews call home?

It’s the story of an immigrant struggling to survive economically in the big city, a woman running for president, a crusade against pornography and birth control, a decades-long debate on how to achieve political equality for women.

I’ve fallen behind on blogging this week because I’ve been immersed in planning for JWA’s first National Summer Institute for Jewish educators, which begins on Sunday.

Lately I’ve been re-reading the stories of Grace Paley, and no matter how many times I’ve read them, they’re hard to put down. She’s one of my favorite writers, a woman who weaves stories from what she views around her and captures how the most mundane, brief moments (a walk with a friend, moms watching kids in the park) contain everything we need to know about people and the world.

I picked up the book Joy Comes in the Morning , written by Jonathan Rosen, for a couple reasons. One, I knew the book had won the 2005 Reform Judaism Prize for Jewish Fiction award. Two, I am always intrigued by the notion of a man writing from the perspective of a female (Wally Lamb’s She Comes Undone is still the best I’ve seen). In this case, Rosen writes from the perspective of Rabbi Deborah Green, an attractive, smoking, complicated Reform rabbi.

When a reporter of the Jewish Journal of Greater L.A. asked Amy Sherman-Palladino, creator and executive producer of WB’s acclaimed series Gilmore Girls, whether she’d be introducing more Jewish characters into her TV show, Amy replied: “By year seven, everyone on the show will be Jewish,” she says. “Believe me, it’s going to be the Chabad telethon.”

I guess the line is funnier if you know Gilmore Girls—a show about a single mom raising her teen daughter—is set in a fictional WASPy Connecticut town.