A Little Girl’s First Haircut

by Alanna E. Cooper

The author recasts upsherin, the traditional boy’s coming-of-toddlerhood ceremony, for her three girls.

• Haircutting Ritual for Your Daughter by Alanna E. Cooper

The Refusal of Time: Visiting the Old Old

A social worker on her unlikely half-day friendship with a demented charge; a Florida yakker on her ball-busting butcher-mom in the Old Country; fail-safe & haimish prompts for your next hajj to the nursing-home, and what Grandma did with those Nazi bedsheets.

• Wordless Tea by Liat Katz
• “Go check on Gramma,” my father said. by Gayle Ann Weinstein
• The Gingham Dresses by Alisha Kaplan
• Reading “Dear Abby” in Massachusetts by Jayne Lampert
• Capturing the Elderly Visiting Each Other

Disability Oppression

by Susan Nussbaum

Author Susan Nussbaum, paraplegic and a fierce activist for girls in chairs, tells Susan Weidman Schneider why “access” is just another term for disability oppression.

Same Page, Seven Years Later

by Ilana Kurshan

Juggling three children under age three and her publishing job, she breaks her arm. Kurshan reflects: “In order to heal, bones have to set, and so I find myself wondering what has set in my life in the time between my two encounters with the Talmud tractate Yoma.”

The Young Suffragist’s Diagnosis

fiction by Ayelet Waldman

Plus, Waldman talks about the drama folded into her new novel: corset-shedding early European feminists, tender Freud-era psychoanalysis, looted art, the complex schemes of post-Holocaust Zionism, and the family life of Syrian Jews.

• Ayelet Waldman on chance, and obsession by Ayelet Waldman

Jewish Filmmaking—Curse or Calling?

by Amy Stone

Hungarian filmmaker Diana Groó sees herself as part of a “traumatized third generation” of Jews who refused to speak about their past. She’s breaking that mold with her bold new films.

Born Out of Wedlock

art by Liana Finck

At the turn of the [last] century, Jewish immigrants wrote for advice to the Yiddish Forward. In A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York, Finck graphically envisions the mini-dramas these letters limn.

In the Desert

a short story by Sarah Seltzer