Debra Nussbaum Cohen is an award-winning journalist and the author of Celebrating Your New Jewish Daughter: Creating Jewish Ways to Welcome Baby Girls into the Covenant. Follow her on Instagram @debranc or email her at dncnews@icloud.com.
Debra Nussbaum Cohen
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
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Life Chayie Sieger’s Pioneering Life, Riker’s Island Death
When Helen Sieger died on the day before Passover this year, at just 57 years old, in a hospital used for inmates of Riker’s Island, it was a sad end to a life with many sad chapters. Helen — or Chayie — Sieger’s story was well-known in Haredi circles in Brooklyn. But when her saga…
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Life Esther Broner’s Legacy
I met Esther Broner close to 20 years ago, when I was a newbie religion writer, and was awed by the power of the Jewish feminist rituals like the feminist Seder, which was then starting to become mainstream (though is most popular now in its neutered form as “women’s seders,” lest anyone be offended by…
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Life Keeping (Saudi and Skverer) Women Out of the Driver’s Seat
Today is the day that women in Saudi Arabia are taking to the streets — behind the wheel of their husbands’ cars, that is. June 17 is the day selected by women’s rights activist Manal Al-Sharif for women to get out there and protest the kingdom’s ban on women driving. Last month, after Al-Sharif posted…
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News Major Effort To Promote Day Schools Shows Mixed Results
When the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education was founded in 1997, it had commitments of $18 million from a dozen leading Jewish philanthropists, and it had lofty goals: to create 25 new Jewish day schools and to double the percentage of non-Orthodox students who attend all Jewish day schools. Fourteen years later, PEJE’S founding…
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Life In Williamsburg, Wearing Tank Tops or Nothing at All
The Satmar community’s Central Rabbinical Congress last week banned tank tops, among other women’s popular warm-weather wear. Of course, the hipsters and the Latinos who live in the neighborhood, alongside the Satmars, probably can’t read the Yiddish posters that Hasidim hung on light posts throughout the area to promulgate the ban. We’re not sure if…
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Life Weiner’s Jewish Problem
Rep. Anthony Weiner reportedly used a sexual stereotype about Jewish women in Facebook sexting with a young Jewish woman, according to this account on Radar Online. This pathetic story just keeps getting more appalling. Weiner, a 46-year-old Jewish congressman who represents parts of Brooklyn and Queens and was considered the leading candidate in New York’s…
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Life Meeting Our Grown Children Where They Are
There is a beautiful piece in yesterday’s New York Times travel section, an essay by House & Garden editor Dominique Browning on her attempt to forge a new relationship with her two young adult sons as they travel together by train across the country. It is an apt piece for this time of year, the…
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Life Calling on Men To Boycott Homogenous Panel Discussions
It’s time for male leaders in the Jewish community to step up and boycott invitations to participate in conferences and panel discussions when women are not part of the main lineup. Nathan Guttman’s recent Sisterhood post details the absence of women from the main stage at AIPAC’s recent annual policy conference, and even suggests which…
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