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 The Male Rosa Parks?
When thinking about gender segregation, most of us think of discrimination against women, as when women are forced to go to the back of busses or denied seats if there is no room left in their section. Recently, however, Israeli man Assaf Musman found himself tossed out of a shared van shuttle taxi, called a…
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Life New Approach in Israeli Agunah Cases
There’s a new tool in the kit available to women whose husbands refuse to grant them a Jewish divorce which, according to an Orthodox reading of Jewish law, only a man can give. In Israel, women have begun to file damages claims against their estranged husbands in civil court, and it appears that the threat…
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Life Delivering a Baby in Silence
Can you imagine giving birth in silence? Me neither. But at least one woman so driven by piety (and perhaps mental illness) did so, staying silent through the rest of the day, apparently because she made a vow of silence, or taanis dibur. While her husband was at synagogue, one recent Shabbat morning, this woman…
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Culture The Liberation of Helène Aylon
Whatever Is Contained Must Be Released: My Jewish Orthodox Girlhood, My Life as a Feminist Artist By Helène Aylon The Feminist Press, 350 pages, $29.95 Walking through the “Too Jewish?” exhibit at Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum back in 1997, surveying the artistic commentaries on popular tropes of American Jewish culture — big noses, Barbra Streisand,…
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Life The Ambivalent Joy of Camp Season
Several years ago I talked through this dilemma with my therapist: I couldn’t seamlessly switch back and forth between mommying and working. When I was on deadline and working from home, as I mostly do, and in the flow of writing a sentence or article, it would be terribly aggravating to have to stop to…
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Life Male Reform Rabbis Earn More than Women
A recent article by Anne-Marie Slaughter in the Atlantic provides a thoughtful look at the struggles of women committed to both their careers and their families. These same struggles have come up in the Jewish professional world over the last couple of decades, particularly in regard to women in the rabbinate who have yet to…
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Life Dressing Frum in the Summer
For many years we spent our summer vacation in a Sullivan County, N.Y. bungalow colony, close to several bungalow colonies catering to Haredi communities. The sight of men and women trudging along Route 17B on hot August Saturdays, dressed in long sleeves and many layers of clothing, wigs on the women and long satin coats…
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News Nod to Change as Jacobs Takes URJ Reins
Rabbi Rick Jacobs designed the ceremony that installed him as president of the Union for Reform Judaism to broadcast his vision of what the Reform movement — the largest denomination in American Jewish life — should be. Rabbis and cantors led songs by Orthodox Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and by Reform folksinger Debbie Friedman at the…
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