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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News Like Daughter, Like Dad
Aviva Kremer knew when she was just 8 years old that she wanted to be a rabbi. Now she is 27 and in her third year of rabbinical school at the Jewish Theological Seminary. It took Jonathan Kremer a bit longer to be sure that he wanted to become a rabbi. Today the 55-year-old former…
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Life Ivanka and Jared’s Wedding Registry: What Would Register as Real Class
Is it just me, or are wedding registries tacky? I find it strange to be telling people what you want for gifts – especially when both the blushing bride and handsome groom are scions of two of America’s highest-profile, wealthy real estate families. A story in today’s New York Times, here, details what Ivanka Trump…
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Life Judy Blume: ‘I Was Margaret’ and Other Tidbits From Blogland
Over at Tablet, food writer Mimi Sheraton offers a meditation on the exalted, lemony etrog. On the same Web site, Manhattan writer C.A. Blomquist writes of beginning to study to convert to Judaism at age 52, and has an attendant podcast about taking the final plunge. In this Jewcy post about turning 30 on Yom…
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News PETA’s Kaparot Protest: ‘Gelt, Not Guilt’
When he was alive, the Lubavitcher rebbe distributed dollar bills to encourage people to give tzedekah. Dollar bills were also distributed on the first day of the annual kaparot event in Brooklyn’s Crown Heights this year but not by the Lubavitchers. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals this year stepped up activism against the…
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Life ‘Mad Men’ and Our Mad Cool Sukkah
“Mad Men” is my favorite television show. I know, I’ve got lots of company. But the plaudits are well deserved for a show that relieves us of overstatement and laugh tracks. Best about the incisively-written show is the recondite emotional life of its women. Sure, Don Draper (played by Jon Hamm) tries his hunky best…
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Life Brit Milah — A Modern Jewish Mother’s First Submission to Tradition
I love Rebecca’s new post about the commitment it takes for a Jewish woman to give birth to a boy and, usually on his eighth day of life, turn him over to the (hopefully skilled) hands of a mohel. It brought back that moment when, 15 years ago, I stood in our shul, weak winter…
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Life American Women — Less Happy or Just More Stressed Because of Good Choices?
Maureen Dowd’s recent New York Times op-ed, “Blue is the New Black,” is interesting, but presents some things as facts which seem inaccurate to me, perhaps by dint of their being over-simplified. Dowd writes of recent studies that indicate that women are growing increasingly unhappy despite the fact that there are more choices and opportunities…
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Life Why I Envy Supersized Jewish Families
I read this week on Failed Messiah, a blog by Shmarya Rosenberg, about Mrs. Rachel Krishevsky, a haredi woman in Jerusalem who passed away a week before Rosh Hashana at age 99, and left at least 1,400 descendants. This blessed woman passed away at home surrounded by some of the many children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren and…
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FIRST PERSON As a rabbi, he helped others mourn. So why wouldn’t his daughter say kaddish for him?
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