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 [email protected].
Debra Nussbaum Cohen
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen
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Life Parents Gone Wild: Babies in Bars
Here’s what I want to know: when did parenting become entitlement to impose young children on people around you in places which were, not long ago, understood to be adult spaces? A mom recently posted on a local listserv, called Park Slope Parents, that she’s offended by a neighborhood pub with a sign on its…
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News Evangelist for Silence Promotes a Quiet Gift
At the border of Crown Heights and Brownsville, in an impoverished corner of Brooklyn, stands the hulking, tan brick building that houses P.S. 191, the Paul Robeson School. The school serves a student population that is remarkable in its disadvantage: 99% of its roughly 300 students in prekindergarten through fifth grade qualify for free or…
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Life Jewish Women Watching Points Finger at ‘Jewish Racist Voices’
Nearly 2,000 people in New York State recently received an unusual bookmark in the mail, from a mysterious group that calls itself Jewish Women Watching. The bookmark, which can be seen here, calls attention to what it calls “Jewish racist voices” by pointing to the difference in response by Jews to the creation of two…
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Life Fractional Parenting: What Makes a Jewish Mother?
The New York Times recently ran a fascinating editorial essay by Adam Cohen on scientific research that soon may make it possible for a baby to have three biological parents. Cohen writes: Scientists have created baby monkeys with a father and two mothers. Their goal was to eliminate birth defects, but increasing the number of…
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Life Going Mormon for Modesty
I’m going Mormon. After all, I do love watching “Big Love,” and I can’t deny the appeal of having a “sister-wife” who wouldn’t mind doing the laundry for everyone in the family. But mainstream Mormons no longer practice polygamy — it’s been against official church policy for more than a century — so the “sister-wife” situation…
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Life The Choices and Ambivalence Are Real, Not Artificial
Dear Elana: I usually love your point of view, and always enjoy your writing. But, wow, do I disagree with your most recent Sisterhood post, “What Makes us Bad Feminists? Kvetching About Artificial Choices.” My friend, I was surprised to see you use such derisive language when you decried the “pseudo-crises” of “Should I work?”…
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Life Something No Woman Would Say
Last week I heard something out of the mouth of a father that I cannot imagine hearing from a mother. Permit me to explain. My 15-year-old, Boychik, is in a fabulous Jewish youth choir that just had a regional retreat in N.J. I had volunteered to be the Manhattan chapter’s parent coordinator, which meant I…
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News Leaders Mull Options To Protest Restrictions at Kotel
Acts of civil disobedience are among the strategies that the Reform movement is weighing as it mulls how best to advocate for religious pluralism in Israel, particularly at Jerusalem’s Western Wall — the site of recent confrontations between women worshipping as a prayer group, the Orthodox rabbis who control access to the wall and the…
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