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 A Mikvah Lady Turned ‘Lice Lady’
As soon as the phone call came from my daughters’ school yesterday, the itching started. My knees, my shoulders, my scalp, it all itched, because the Lice Lady, doing one of the several school-wide checks she is periodically brought in to do, had found the little buggers in my girls’ hair. Turns out, my itching…
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Life Asking Fewer People for Forgiveness
For many years now, since I learned about the practice of mechila, or asking for forgiveness, I’ve taken it seriously, using the weeks leading up to the High Holy Days to reflect on the ways in which I know I’ve fallen short. My personal al chet, or confession, is a long one — as I…
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Life Is It Easier To Be Plus-Sized in Israel or America?
When Tali Giat was picked as the winner of the show “More to Love” by bachelor Luke Conley, she became the first Israeli to win any American reality show, and the first plus-size woman to win any of the bachelor shows. Late last fall, Giat and Conley broke up. Since then she has focused on…
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Life ‘The Velveteen Rabbi’ on Raising Money for Mosque Repair
It’s not every day that New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof cites a rabbinical student, but Rachel Barenblat won that distinction on Sunday, when the writer mentioned her recent success raising money so that a vandalized Queens mosque could replace its damaged prayer rugs. On August 25, a drunk man entered an Astoria, Queens mosque,…
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The Schmooze ‘L’Chaim’: Broadway Composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Wedding Surprise
At the September 5th wedding of Tony Award-winning Broadway composer and lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda and attorney Vanessa Nadal, the groom organized a surprise for his love. It was a wonderful take on the classic song “L’Chaim” from the fantastic 1971 movie “Fiddler on the Roof.” You can see the recent wedding’s version here. It wins…
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Life Shofar as Midwife
There are some Jewish holidays where the feminine aspect is front and center, as on Passover, which counts women are pivotal characters and when we remember coming through “the narrow place” in our exodus and re-birth from Egypt, and Purim, whose heroine, of course, is Esther. I hadn’t thought of Rosh Hashana as one of…
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Life Rabbi Sperber on Why He Supports Orthodox Women’s Ordination
During a recent visit to New York, Rabbi Daniel Sperber — to date the best-known Orthodox religious authority to back the idea of Orthodox women’s ordination — spoke with The Sisterhood about the evolution of Jewish law. Sperber — a Talmud professor at Bar-Ilan University and the author of, most recently, “Women and Men in…
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Life On Co-opting the Word ‘Girl’
“Hey Gurrrlll, how you doin’?” Part Brooklyn homegirl, part Wendy Williams, it’s the way I’ve lately greeted my nearest and dearest girlfriends. I’m going for affectionate and ironic — what with it coming out of the mouth of a white woman edging into middle age, even if as a naturalized citizen of Brooklyn I can…
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