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 Why Do Hasidim Live Like Saudi Women?
It looked, this week, like there might be progress for women in Saudi Arabia. King Abdullah granted women the right to vote, and to run for election to municipal councils and be appointed full voting members of the Majlis Al-Shura, a government advisory group. According to a New York Times editorial this week, however, women…
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Life ‘Millionaire Matchmaker’ Should Take Own Advice
Patti Stanger should take her own advice. The “Millionaire Matchmaker” was on Bravo TV’s “Watch What Happens Live” Sunday night (unfortunately I can’t find a video version to share with you), talking with host Andy Cohen, who seemed by turns disgusted and perplexed by what Stanger had to say. Now, unlike Ilana Angel from the…
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Life Leah Shakdiel: Still Making Waves for Women & Peace
Leah Shakdiel is a modern Orthodox Jew, feminist and peace activist who first became widely known in 1988, when she won an Israel Supreme Court case that allowed her to become the first woman to be allowed to sit on a local religious council. Those councils supervise and dole out funding to local synagogues, cemeteries,…
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Life The New York Times and Gendered Editing
I used to roll my eyes when my mother would point to someone on television and say, “He’s Jewish!” or, “She’s Jewish!” Now I’m that person, thrilling to the news of a Jewish woman’s rise to a position of prominence and influence, like when Elena Kagan was appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court, or when…
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Life 9/11: A Mother’s Memories
I didn’t lose anyone I personally knew in the terrorist attack on New York City on September 11th, 2001. But it changed my family nonetheless. My oldest child, now a college freshman, was a new 3rd grader in a Jewish day school in downtown Brooklyn just around the corner from Atlantic Avenue, which was then…
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Life Men Protest Panels Excluding Women
It’s nice to see influential men increasingly protest the absence of women presenting at major Jewish events. In the publication eJewishPhilanthropy.com, Shaul Kelner writes a powerful essay about his pledge to refrain from participating in any all-male panel discussions, and to make his involvement conditional on the inclusion of women. Kelner, an assistant professor of…
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Life Jewish Women Organize Conference on Anita Hill
Who remembers where they were during Anita Hill’s testimony in Senate confirmation hearings for her former boss, Justice Clarence Thomas? I recall being riveted by her 1991 testimony and thinking that surely it would jettison Thomas’ nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court. Hill testified that when Thomas was her boss at the U.S. Equal Employment…
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Life Blessing a Child Leaving for College
Friday we bring Boychik to college for the first time. My friends have taken to asking me how I’m doing in a way usually reserved for inquiring about a serious medical condition. I say that we are happy and excited. Boychik is going to an amazing school that will undoubtedly help him grow intellectually, emotionally…
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