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 Alfred Gottschalk, a German Refugee Who Became a Reform Movement Leader
Each year, the day before he was to ordain them as rabbis, Rabbi Alfred Gottschalk told students at the Reform movement’s Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion about an experience he had as a young boy in Oberwesel, Germany. The day after Kristallnacht, the November night in 1938 when the Nazis rampaged through synagogues and…
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Life Rest in Peace, Patrick Swayze — and the Noses of Jewish Actresses
Rest in peace, Patrick Swayze. It’s a measure of the speed of our information age that when I Googled him, 20 minutes after he died of pancreatic cancer on September 14th, his Wikipedia page had already been updated. Swayze was not Jewish, but his co-star in the movie that made him famous, Jennifer Grey in…
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Life Women: Sit at Home or Risk Being Spat Upon
Years back, when the Lubavitcher rebbe was alive and I was covering various events connected with that movement, I was always pleasantly surprised when my job seemed to cancel out my gender. For instance, at a gathering of thousands of Chabad emissaries, then held at a hall on Eastern Parkway across from the movement’s headquarters,…
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News Cross-Denominational Grant to Help Train Jewish Educators at 3 Schools
A San Francisco foundation with a focus on funding Jewish education is giving nearly $11.5 million to Yeshiva University, the Jewish Theological Seminary and Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion for individual and cooperative projects. The grant will require these central institutions for training Orthodox, Conservative and Reform rabbis and educators to work together for…
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Life The Price of Wearing Pants
In July Lubna Hussein was arrested, along with a dozen other women and girls, in a Khartoum café — for wearing pants. Though at first she faced being fined plus being flogged 40 times with a whip, on Monday, according to this story a Sudanese court found her guilty of violating the country’s indecency laws…
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Life Beyond ‘Superstition’: The Wisdom of Waiting for the Baby Shower
B’sha’ah tova, Rebecca — congratulations on the upcoming birth of your baby. I hope that all goes well for you and the baby. You write that the pregnancy is leading your husband to connect with his Jewish roots in new ways. Becoming a parent can do that to you. If you want to read more…
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Life Hearing the Voices of Jewish Women Who Survived Hurricane Katrina
It has been four years since Hurricane Katrina hit with devastating and deadly force, killing at least 1,836 people, destroying tens of thousands of homes, and sending 1 million people away from New Orleans, Baton Rouge and the Gulf Coast into other parts of the country. Four years later, while some areas have returned to…
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Life Making My Daughters Wait — and Wait — To Get Their Ears Pierced
I read Elana Sztokman’s post about her daughter’s nose piercing with great interest, as for years now I’ve been fending off my daughters’ pleading requests to get their ears pierced. Now, I know that ear piercing is no big deal in our culture – my own ears are pierced, with three holes in my right…
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