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How two advice columnists with the same name counseled, comforted and inspired millions of women
Though you probably know about “A Bintel Brief,” the Forward’s advice column that debuted 120 years ago, or the postwar advice columns of Esther and Pauline Friedman, better known as the authors of the advice columns “Ask Ann Landers” and “Dear Abby,” American readers might be less familiar with the work of “Les Deux Marcelles” who launched their careers as advice columnists on the other side of the Atlantic in postwar France.
They were Marcelle Auclair and Marcelle Ségal, two women whose advice columns counseled, encouraged and even emboldened countless women suddenly confronting an old world that was dying and a new world that was being born.
Unlike their American analogues, Auclair and Ségal were not related. The former grew up in Chile, where her father, an architect, assisted in rebuilding Valparaiso and Santiago after a massive 1906 earthquake. Auclair’s father encouraged her literary ambitions as she began publishing poetry and fiction. She returned to France in 1923, married author Jean Prévost and had three children. She continued publishing and moved into journalism. After noticing Auclair’s columns in the woman’s weekly Femme de France, publisher Jean Prouvost offered Marcelle a “woman’s page” in Paris-Soir (Paris Evening) in 1935 where she responded to letters asking for advice. Two years later she persuaded Prouvost to start a weekly woman’s magazine, Marie-Claire.
Like the Friedmans’ parents (and countless thousands of fellow Jews), Ségal’s mother and father fled Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire, at the turn of the 20th century. They ended up in France, settling at first in Paris in a neighborhood near what was then the Place Daumesnil, nicknamed Domenilovka by the neighborhood’s large Russian-Jewish community. Their daughter did not start out as a journalist, but folded to family pressure and married a second cousin, the owner of a textile business with whom Ségal quickly had a daughter. Two terrible blows soon followed: In 1927, Ségal’s child died of meningitis and, shortly thereafter, her husband abandoned her.
Ségal struggled to support herself; she took in lodgers, and sold fashion house dresses to wealthy American tourists by knocking on hotel doors. She enrolled in secretarial training and landed a job at a bank where she earned enough to travel during her vacations. She began writing about her travels and eventually published her travel pieces in The Woman’s Journal, which then hired her as a regular correspondent. In 1939, she landed a job as editor and contributor at Marie-Claire shortly before the start of World War II. As the German army approached Paris in June 1940, Ségal joined the massive civilian exodus from Paris, eventually rejoining the editorial staff of Marie-Claire in Lyon.
After the Armistice of June 22, 1940, the magazine resumed publication from Lyon, and kept Ségal in spite of Vichy’s antisemitic law targeting Jews in the professions. In June 1941 Vichy passed a more severe antisemitic law extending the professional exclusion of Jews in the press beyond leadership roles; five months later, Ségal was fired. She went underground, editing and typing texts for the resistance. “About my resistance work, I prefer not to talk about it,” she wrote in her memoir. “I did too little, way too little, our group having been decimated.”
In the wake of France’s liberation in 1945, Ségal helped launch Elle magazine with two pre-war journalists and friends, Pierre and Hélène Gordon-Lazareff. As Elle sought to build its readership — a daunting challenge when most staples and goods, including paper, were still rationed in France — Hélene Gordon-Lazareff proposed that Elle solicit and respond to readers’ letters about such topics as beauty, fashion, home and love. Reluctantly, Ségal accepted, unhappy that she would be playing the “vulgar role of ridiculous auntie” — namely, an advice columnist. To her great surprise, her column became and remained a fixture in the lives of millions of French women for the next 40 years.
Like Auclair, Ségal served as a bridge to feminism, leading her readers to think for themselves, take control of their lives, and question social expectations damaging to their sense of self-worth. Rather than challenging readers — an approach that the great figure of French feminism, Simone de Beauvoir, sometimes adopts in her canonical work The Second Sex — Ségal was always conversational. She regularly downplayed the importance of physical appearance, questioned beauty standards, and insisted that whatever negative aspect a letter writer expressed about her appearance, the real problem was not how a woman looked but how she felt.
Ségal also warned against the quest for finding a husband. One writer whose boyfriend had recently broken up with her bemoaned, “I’m afraid I’ll never get married. What should I do to get married — quick quick?” “Why quick quick?” Ségal asked. “Take your time.” Similarly, she advised a young woman of 18 to resist her boyfriend’s pressure to drop out of school and marry him. Take time to live, Ségal urged, to experience life, finish her education, and establish her own career. “Take advantage of your youth,” she exhorted, and never “disregard your security and your independence.”
In her 1971 memoir, Moi aussi, j’étais seule (I Was Alone, Too). Segal, who never remarried, reassured her readers that her personal story was not one of failure, loneliness and pain. She decided to write about her single life, she explained, for all unmarried women. “Let’s go single women!” she wrote. “Get out of the house! Go for it! Don’t be afraid! Adventure Awaits!”
Such advice as “Living only for a man represents the number one cause of women’s pain,” seems positively quaint today. And yet, the reason it does so is partly due to Ségal’s trailblazing work. While she never rejected general assumptions about gender, marriage and family life, for 40 years Ségal encouraged women not to feel bound by traditional expectations. She responded to the women who wrote her with messages warning them against blindly following convention or fitting themselves into a standard mold. Ségal’s exhortation “Don’t be afraid!” is no less relevant today than it was during her own life.
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The Nakba exhibit and the importance of historical context
By NOAH STRAUSS When I went to the Nakba Exhibit, I was shocked, not by the contents of the exhibit but by its size. The exhibit was tiny in my eyes, and I thought the amount of outcry was excessive for an exhibit that is less than 500 words. It felt like every other day the National Post had an article about the exhibit, criticizing different aspects of it. But then I had a realization: the exhibit was never criticized because it was “too” big, but because of the contents of it. When I was toured by the curator, I actually asked her, “Where is the rest of it?” I was confused because I had been misled by the media to believe the size of the exhibit was massive.
I believe that every human being should be able to live a free life. No human should be bullied for who they are. That is not okay, and to some credit, the Nakba exhibit does cover this. But where my problem now comes into play is the fact that the museum fails to portray the full history surrounding the Nakba.
The museum is publicly funded; our taxpayers’ dollars go there. It is supposed to represent our nation and our beliefs, not take a side on history. The Museum did exactly that. It took a side, and guess what? It caused chaos.
Whenever asked why it does not show the other side of history, the museum would always say something along the lines of: our space is limited, the focus of the exhibit is solely the Nakba, etc. But to me, these are excuses, and I will call that out.
For context, the Nakba was an event that occurred around 1948 after the 1947 UN Partition Plan. The Nakba continued until about 1949. During this time, approximately 750,000 Palestinians were either forced out or left what is now Israel.
The Museum is contributing to concerns surrounding the rise of antisemitism. The Museum has failed to mention that during the same era as the Nakba, hundreds of thousands of Jewish people were displaced from Middle Eastern and North African countries, with many forced to leave because of their religion.
Context matters. Yes, 750,000 Palestinians were displaced, but what happened during the same era also left hundreds of thousands of Jewish people without homes. When a visitor with no historical context walks in to see what the “Jewish” people did to the Palestinians, of course they’re going to blame the Jews. Because it makes me, a Jewish person, look terrible.
In my view, the exhibit contributes to concerns about growing antisemitism by presenting an incomplete historical narrative.
But then, as Jewish people, we need to know when it’s time to move forward. We need to focus on how we can positively portray the Jewish community and show the world who we are, rather than allowing others to define us through a one-sided historical narrative.
Noah Strauss is a 15-year-old Gray Academy student
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Trump is still going after Palestinians in the U.S. Jews must keep protesting those antidemocratic efforts
Mohsen Mahdawi, a 35-year-old Palestinian, has been a permanent resident of the United States for the past 14 years. And as the U.S. government presses ahead with efforts to deport him over his pro-Palestinian advocacy at Columbia University, more than 1,000 Jews have come forward to defend him by signing an open letter I authored.
Why? At a time of particularly fractious division in the Jewish community over issues related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, how is it possible that so many Jews have come together in support of a Palestinian activist?
One key reason is that the government is seeking to infringe upon the rights of someone who neither engaged in acts of violence nor supported them. In July, the Second Circuit Court overruled a prior district court judge’s dismissal of the deportation case against Mahdawi, giving new energy to the government’s efforts.
Mahdawi has committed no crime; the government has not even bothered to accuse him of doing so. Instead, he simply gave voice to his belief in the necessity of freedom for his people.
Jews of all ideological stripes can and should agree that it is wrong to penalize someone for the expression of their political views. They don’t need to go far back in time to recall that such tactics have often been used against Jews themselves — in the Soviet Union to suppress refuseniks who sought to manifest their identity as Jews; in the U.S. during the McCarthy era; and, most ominously, during the dark age of Nazi totalitarianism.
In drafting an open letter defending Mahdawi, focused on the attack on his political rights, I hoped that a diverse range of Jews would be willing to acknowledge that whether they agree or disagree with Mahdawi, the government’s targeting of him represents a threat to all of us.
I know Mahdawi personally. We met at a peace-building retreat in the summer of 2024. He was an enormously compelling presence who drew people together through his preternatural calmness and clarity of purpose.
Since then, I have come to see him as a unifier, not a divider. He’s an advocate of peace, not war. And he has the potential to become a leader of enormous charisma and potential.
So why has the Trump administration devoted so much attention to persecuting a Palestinian student who has repeatedly called out antisemitism, including at a Palestinian solidarity rally at Columbia?
The sad reality is that Mahdawi, like his fellow Columbia student Mahmoud Khalil, is being persecuted for the crime of being Palestinian.
The U.S. State Department came up with the logic-defying claim, in March 2025, that Mahdawi’s activities at Columbia “would have a potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences and would compromise a compelling U.S. foreign policy interest.” If this administration truly wishes to advance its foreign policy interests, then it should focus on reconstructing Gaza and building a framework for peace between Israelis and Palestinians, not targeting a devoted adept of non-violence like Mahdawi.
Many who signed the letter in support of Mahdawi joined in for the simple reason that they believe it is un-American to discriminate against people on the basis of their political views. Some who added their names felt, as I did , that there was another compelling reason to sign on: that Mahdawi’s activism gives the lie to the prevalent myth that to be pro-Palestine is to be antisemitic. This proposition gets buried in the raging discourse around antisemitism and Israel today.
It is essential to recognize that support for the cause of Palestinian freedom and self-determination is not the political or moral equivalent of antisemitism. It is a precondition to a world in which Israeli Jews and Palestinians live peaceably together. And it is a cause that Jews, by virtue of their own historical experience of exile, should be eminently capable of both understanding and supporting.
Mohsen Mahdawi perfectly exemplifies the position. He is fierce in his advocacy for Palestinian rights. And he is fierce in his opposition to all forms of identity-based discrimination, including and especially, antisemitism. He deserves better from the U.S., and we Jews must vigorously oppose the profound miscarriage of justice being directed against him.
David N. Myers teaches Jewish history at UCLA.
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Lawmakers seek 100-foot buffer zone around houses of worship to protect prayer goers from protests
(JTA) — A bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced a federal legislation Thursday in the House and Senate aimed at protecting houses of worship from disruptive demonstrations, following a series of protests outside of synagogues this year.
The Right to Worship Act was introduced by Sens. Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, and Elissa Slotkin, a Michigan Democrat, alongside Reps. Brad Knott, a North Carolina Republican, and Tom Suozzi, a New York Democrat. It would establish a 100-foot “buffer zone” around houses of worship during religious services — mirroring similar legislation recently enacted in New York.
“The First Amendment guarantees every American the right to freely exercise their faith, and Congress has a duty to ensure that guarantee is met,” Cruz said in a statement Thursday.
The legislation would also establish civil penalties for offenders and provide pathways for individuals, including state attorneys, to seek court orders and damages in federal court. While the legislation would target protesters who knowingly disrupt scheduled religious services, houses of worship would not be required to make their schedules public.
The bill’s sponsors say the measure is aimed at conduct rather than the content of protesters’ speech.
“No one should have to push through a hostile crowd or shout over a bullhorn in an attempt to pray,” said Jonathan Greenblatt, the CEO and national director of the Anti-Defamation League, which helped lawmakers draft the legislation.
It’s the latest attempt at passing federal legislation aimed at insulating houses of worship from protest, following Suozzi’s “SACRED Act” legislation, a similar bill he introduced in April but which has not progressed in the House.
Those efforts have now been joined by Slotkin, who is Jewish, and Cruz, who has often taken aim at antisemitism within the Republican coalition over the past year.
“Exercising your right to worship should not require you to exhibit particular courage as you enter your synagogue, church, mosque, temple, mandir, or gurdwara,” Suozzi said in a statement.
The New York City Council passed a local buffer zone bill in March following a series of pro-Palestinian protests outside of synagogues that hosted Israeli real estate expos. While Jewish groups and leaders heavily advocated for the measure, it also faced opposition from civil rights leaders who said it would have a chilling effect on First Amendment protections.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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