Plenty of awkwardness to go around this week

Feud flashback, marriage therapy, and a foursome

Does wokeness explain nothing or everything? The answer requires cringing at what online discourse used to be

The successfully performative cultural commentator Emily Gould recently announced that she has decided to stop being mad at Lena Dunham.

If you would assume that she was mad for the same reasons everyone else had been (more on those momentarily), you’d be wrong. Gould had been jealous of Dunham’s relative success in a similar field, if not necessarily the same profession. Gould admitted as much to a reporter, word got back to Dunham, and awkwardness between two Jewish women ensued.

Writer-envy, a story as old as time…

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Anger, anxiety and over-intellectualization: We talk about Jewish perspectives on masculinity and marriage

Valentine’s Day, for most people, is a day to celebrate love. For the more neurotic among us, we might be inclined to spend the day analytically dissecting our romantic lives and partnerships. There are conflicting truths about modern relationships: we have to accept that our partners are special, sacred and worth fighting for; and, at the same time, that modern marriage was never meant to be like this. Throughout history, our co-parents, best friends, cooks, nannies and confidants were different people; today, we expect everything from our partner.

It’s no surprise that couples therapy has risen dramatically, and that the shifting role of men in society—more depressed, anxious and lonely—has played a role in this.

Daniel Oppenheimer knows this well. The writer and podcaster recently published a lengthy personal feature in the New York Times Magazine, “How I Learned That the Problem in My Marriage Was Me“, in which he details undergoing couples therapy quasi-publicly with the acclaimed therapist Terry Real. He joins Bonjour Chai, our weekly current affairs show, to discuss the importance of taking responsibility for one’s actions and the complexities of modern masculinity—especially through the lens of Jewish identity.

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Phoebe Maltz Bovy and Kat Rosenfield talk kosher Super Bowl halftime shows, beauty and aging, The Golden Girls, and more on the podcast Ask a Jew. And if you want to get a little more meta, dig into Phoebe talking to Daniel Oppenheimer on his Eminent Americans podcast last March about subjects that included Emily Gould.