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 Motherhood, ‘Otherhood’ Inspired Adrienne Rich
Adrienne Rich has died, and a voice who provided invaluable insight to the discourse on motherhood, on feminism, on Jewish identity and on sexual politics, has been stilled. Rich, who was 82, died Tuesday at her home in California. Described in her New York Times obituary, as “a poet of towering reputation and towering rage,”…
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Life At Brooklyn Girls School, Facebook Is Off Limits
One Hasidic girls school is demanding its students remove their Facebook pages. Noncompliance means expulsion. Beth Rivkah High School, in the heavily Lubavitch Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, is requiring 11th grade girls with Facebook pages to cancel their accounts and pay a $100 fine. That’s quite a U-Turn from the school’s position in 2010,…
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News Two Babies Sickened by Circumcision Rite
Two Jewish infants in New Jersey were recently infected with — but survived — a herpes virus attributed to their ritual circumcisers’ use of an oral suctioning technique that is said to have caused the death of an infant in New York in September. Dr. Margaret Fisher, chair of pediatrics at Monmouth Medical Center, told…
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Life The Limits of Childhood
When is a kid not a kid? Perhaps when he’s old enough to carefully set up his computer camera to spy on his roommate in the supposed privacy of their college dorm room, and use texts and Tweets inviting friends to watch a live feed of the roommate’s gay sexual encounter. The roommate, Tyler Clementi,…
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Life Why Is Clothing the Focus at JTS?
Coming this Sunday, to the intellectual and spiritual fountainhead of the Conservative movement, the best and brightest women (and men) in the movement will be talking about….clothing. As Renee mentioned in this post, JTS will be hosting “What to Wear?” on March 11. It is an event billed as “An All-Day, Multifaceted Exploration of Women’s…
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Life ‘What Jewish Feminism Means to Me’
What does it mean to be a Jewish feminist today? That is the key question that we will explore in a new Sisterhood series, in which women and men, from across denominational, political and generational spectra, will write about the convergence, and in some cases the separation, of their Jewish and feminist identities. The series,…
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Life Congressman Pressed on Agunah Issue
Never before has so much public pressure been brought to bear on an American man for refusing to grant his wife a Jewish divorce, or get. There have been public demonstrations against Aharon Friedman, and articles in prominent publications, public calls by one of the nation’s leading Orthodox rabbis, and lots of back-channel efforts as…
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Culture Serenading the Bobov Bride
Photos and video from the wedding of Avraham Yehoshua Heschel Halberstam, a son of the rebbe of the Bobov Hasidic dynasty, to Chana Sara Baila Friedman posted on this Chabad website, offer a fascinating peek into a world that is all but invisible to those who are not part of it. Still, even the most…
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