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 Searching for Modesty, and Finding Obscenity at Wal-Mart
While in Target this morning, to grab one of their super-duper-on-sale-cheap netbook computers for my teenage son’s Chanukah gift (I got one of the handful they had delivered overnight, whoo hoo!), I cruised through the girl’s department as I do each time I’m in the store, in search of an appropriately modest skirt or dress…
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Life Woman of the Wall Arrest: A First-Hand Account
As they do at the start of every month, Israel’s Women of the Wall went to the Kotel on Wednesday to celebrate Rosh Chodesh. But this time, instead of services concluding with the Musaf prayer, the experience ended with a 25 year old participant, a medical student who was wearing a tallit and carrying the…
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Life Conservative Women Rabbis Celebrate Changes, Still Face Struggles
Much has changed for female rabbis in the 25 years since the first woman was ordained in the Conservative movement — including acceptance by peers and congregants — but some things, including more difficulty getting good jobs and resentment from other women, remain challenging. These issues were explored at a conference at the Jewish Theological…
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News By the Numbers
As anyone who follows the news can tell you, America?s economy is on a roller coaster ride of purported recovery from the past year, which saw the deepest recession in decades. And as the economy goes, so goes American ? and American Jewish ?philanthropy. Giving to not-for-profit organizations has suffered, and is being made worse…
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Culture Giving While Sick
This past January, Rochelle Shoretz had just celebrated her son’s bar mitzvah in Israel and returned home, when she had a routine MRI, necessary after she’d been successfully treated for Stage 2 breast cancer seven years earlier. She wasn’t particularly concerned about the scan, having already made it past the critical five-year mark with no…
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Life Orthodox Sage to Women in Tallitot at Kotel: You Are Deviant and Stupid
A former Chief Sephardic Rabbi and current spiritual leader of Israel’s Shas religious political party, Rav Ovadia Yosef, in his weekly sermon last Saturday night called women who wear prayer shawls to daven at the Western Wall “stupid” and “deviants.” He was speaking of Women of the Wall, a group of devoted and, dare I…
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Life Growing Strictures on Religious Women’s Comportment – and Their Silent Complicity
I love a good frum wedding. No one knows how to party, in the best possible way, like religious Jews at a wedding. Last Sunday, we went to the wedding of the daughter of a couple to whom we’re related by marriage and with whom we’ve become friends. It was a beautiful affair that took…
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Life Playing with Playmobil: Fun With Pharaoh
I love the shopping circulars that come with the Sunday Times (which really arrives on Saturday). I’m a big browser – and not the Internet Explorer kind. Well, I browse online too. But back to one of the few remaining circulars that arrive in the print newspaper. In this weekend’s paper arrived the Toys R…
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