Friday Love: Avital Chizhik

Last week we highlighted Avital Chizhik’s wonderful NYT post “The God of Marriage“, which details striking similarities between Orthodox Jewish and Muslim courtship and marriage rituals here in the US.

Ms. Chizhik wrote us a lovely email soon thereafter, saying, in part:

I spent a good hour reading through other posts on your site, and wanted to tell you that I love your work. It’s wonderfully empowering, refreshing too, to see women finding spaces to discuss love, relationships, sexuality vis-a-vis religion and the traditions they seek to uphold. I ended up reading aloud quite a few excerpts from your site to my roommates. We girls sat here laughing and gasping over the similarities: the struggles are one, and so are the voices.

We wanted to send big Friday love to Ms. Chizhik and the many, many others of all faiths and backgrounds around the world who are helping people see themselves reflected in the lives of others, and who remind us all that there is far more that binds us together as humans than separates us as nations.