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 JTS Ordains Its First Openly Gay Rabbi
Rachel Isaacs has known, for as long as she can remember, that she wanted to be a rabbi. But Isaacs, who on May 19 became the first openly gay rabbi of either sex to be ordained by the Conservative movement’s Jewish Theological Seminary, knew by the time she was in college that she wouldn’t be…
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Life Babes in Boyland: The Sisterhood Goes to Hollywood
Jewess with much attitude (and talent) Roseanne Barr wrote in this recent New York magazine article about the rampant sexism that exists in Hollywood even two decades after she tried to take down those barriers with her television show “Roseanne.” Barr rightly takes credit for developing and starring in “television’s first feminist and working-class-family sitcom…
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Life The Semiotics of Skirts and Swimsuits
In Tablet magazine, Dvora Meyers recently wrote a brief meditation on her conflicted history with skirts and some of their Jewish cultural connotations. I enjoy reading the semiotics of skirts, a fun game to play where I live, which is close to Crown Heights and equidistant from Williamsburg and Borough Park. Young women from Crown…
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Life On Schwarzenegger’s Infidelity — and the Lies We Tell Ourselves
About three weeks ago, my dad died. We soon learned that there were things about his life that were the opposite of the way he had presented them. Nothing enormous, but it is still shocking and saddening. I recently visited with a friend who told me that when her father died, decades ago, his will…
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Life My Daughter’s Favorite (Fictional) Orthodox Heroine
It’s not every day that a comic book heroine is an 11-year-old Orthodox Jewish girl. So when Rockerchick received the book “Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword” (2010, Amulet Books) as a birthday present, I took a look and was quickly entranced by the story of Mirka, a girl with a rebellious streak who lives…
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Life ‘Jewish Hair’ Meets ‘The Amazing Race’
When people talk about “Jewish hair,” they’re usually referring to the curly, thick, frizz-prone locks that are the lot of many Jewish women. Having “Jewish hair” doesn’t usually refer to guys, but in the case of Justin Kanew and Zev Glassenberg, best pals and teammates on of “The Amazing Race: Unfinished Business,” having “Jewish hair”…
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Life Should Young, Unmarried and Sexually Active Women Frequent the Mikveh?
This Forward article about Yeshivat Hadar and its attempt to lead students toward a sexual ethic based on classical Jewish texts omits one central question: What about mikveh? Hadar Dean Rabbi Ethan Tucker says, in the piece, that he and his colleagues are trying to create a community “that discusses current sexual norms while taking…
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Life Newsweek List Takes a Page From ‘The Sisterhood 50’
Newsweek magazine, this year in conjunction with its sister publication The Daily Beast, has just published its annual list of America’s 50 “most influential” rabbis. It’s Newsweek’s fifth such list but the first time that a woman — writer Abigail Pogrebin — has been directly involved in the selection, which no doubt explains why the…
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