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 Sleep-Away Camp: My Daughter, My Self
Last week, we put our 10-year-old daughter, our middle child, on the bus for her first overnight camp experience. Though she didn’t know any other girls at camp, as she boarded the bus she gave me a smile electric with excitement. She is doubtlessly doing fine. I, however, am having some separation anxiety. I recall…
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Life Mikveh-Going Singles
I enjoyed taking Forward Web Editor Gabrielle Birkner — a friend as well as a colleague — to the mikveh just before her recent wedding, an experience she describes in her recent Sisterhood post. I’ve taken a number of friends over the years, happy to introduce my sisters in liberal Judaism to this central ritual…
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Life Too Fat for Surgeon General — Or for a Shidduch
Last week, President Obama nominated widely respected Dr. Regina Benjamin, to be the country’s next Surgeon General. It took no time at all for the question to be asked whether the winner of the coveted MacArthur “genius” award is too fat to hold the post because she appears to be overweight. Even at a time…
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Life New ‘Hecksher’ for Ordination of Orthodox Women Rabbis
When Rabbi Avi Weiss announced in May that he is opening a center for the training of female Orthodox clergy, it was heralded by many as a watershed moment. At the Kolech conference in Jerusalem earlier this month, women’s ordination was much-discussed, the idea endorsed by Rabbi Yoel Bin Nun, and participants decided that female…
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News The Jewish Mother, Revisited
Four years ago, author Ayelet Waldman wrote in a New York Times essay, “I love my husband more than my children.” And she was pilloried. In May, she came out with “Bad Mother: A Chronicle of Maternal Crimes, Minor Calamities, and Occasional Moments of Grace,” a new bestselling book from Doubleday that extolls the virtues…
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Life Should Ivanka Want a Sheitel…
Welcome to the tribe, Ms. Trump. No sooner had the mikveh water dried from her conversion to Judaism this week than Ivanka Trump became affianced to Jared Kushner. The future Mrs. Trump-Kushner announced their engagement by sending off this Tweet. She completed her conversion this week under the tutelage of Rabbi Haskel Lookstein, who is…
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Life The Only Thing Offensive About ‘Brüno’
I saw the new Sacha Baron Cohen movie “Brüno,” and unlike some others who’ve seen it, I thought it was hilarious with a capital “h.” On Tuesday’s episode of The View, Barbara Walters expressed her distaste for the way Baron Cohen, as Austrian gay fashonista Brüno, makes fun of unsuspecting people by asking them outrageous…
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Life Men’s Torah Commentary ‘Steals the Spotlight’
It hasn’t been long — just the last dozen years in human time, but a blink of an eye in the long arc of Torah interpretation — that women have published scholarly commentaries on the Jewish Bible. Now there’s a new book in response, “The Modern Men’s Torah Commentary”, edited by Rabbi Jeffrey Salkin and…
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