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 Rabbi Eliyahu on a Woman’s Place
There seems no end to the stream of astounding stories out of Israel relating to the official rabbinate there. This one, for instance, which says the rabbinate revoked an Ethiopian immigrant’s conversion to Judaism in retaliation for the legal action against a prominent rabbi. The immigrant was injured when he tried to leave the parking…
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Life In Defense of Ruth Madoff
Ruth Madoff’s recent turn of fortunes fascinates me; it also makes me wonder if she deserves to lose nearly everything she has. With her husband Bernie, she enjoyed a privileged life, with estates in Montauk, Palm Beach, Fla., and a reportedly “modest” 3 bedroom place on the French Riviera, in addition to their penthouse on…
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Life A Gender-Bending Parenting Experiment Gone Wrong
Even at a moment when I’m still transfixed by all those photo montages of Michael Jackson’s transformation from black boy to pale-skinned, snip-nosed mutant, this story from an English-language newspaper in Sweden called The Local, caught my eye. It’s about a young Swedish couple keeping the gender of their two-year-old child a secret. They don’t…
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Life A Woman With the Title ‘Reb’
This week I had the privilege of studying with a remarkable teacher, Reb Mimi Feigelson, who taught a three-day seminar on “soulful prayer” at the Drisha Institute for Jewish Education. Reb Mimi is a teacher in the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies at Los Angeles’ American Jewish University, where she teaches rabbinics and is the…
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Life Do Teenage Boys Need a Room of Their Own?
It’s been clear for a while now that post-bar mitzvah age boys drop out of organized Jewish life, at least in the non-Orthodox world, far more than girls the same age do. In this article in The New York Times a few years back, I wrote about how the Reform movement had begun to address…
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Life But My Husband Is My ‘Partner’
As a straight, married woman, I often refer to my husband as my partner. Sari, in your recent post on The Sisterhood, you wrote that you’re discomfited by heterosexuals’ use of the term “partner” to refer to their significant other. I’ve used the term consciously not because I wanted to steal anything semantic from gay…
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Life Oldest First-Time Jewish Mother
According to a story on the religious website Vos Iz Neias (What’s News?), a 60-year-old woman in Kfar Chabad, Israel, gave birth to her first child earlier this month. Oy. Now, this couple had been trying to conceive, and undergoing fertility treatments, for 40 years. That’s a long time to put your body and soul…
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Life Messinger Fasting for Darfur
Most of us are accustomed to fasting only on Yom Kippur. But Ruth Messinger president of the American Jewish World Service, is taking on a two-day fast on June 15th and 16th, in order to bring more attention to the plight of the millions of victims of the deadly violence in Darfur. She is joining…
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