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 Empowering Children To Confront Disney and Despair
I’m feeling protective of my children. Perhaps it’s the fact that my baby, Rockerchik, turned 10 last week, that Girlchik is 11 going on 15, and that my eldest will be 17 this week. Now that his college applications are all in, I’m acutely aware that he will soon be leaving home. And I am…
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Life On Tweenage Girls Joining Facebook, Wearing Makeup
When I saw this blog post, about attempts by some ultra-Orthodox authorities in Israel to ban Facebook from Haredi homes because the ubiquitous social media site “greatly damages families,” I thought it just another example of the community’s ongoing effort to build the shtetl walls high enough to control people’s behavior. Then I read this…
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News The Jewish ‘Library of Congress’ Bounces Back From Debt, Then Advances Campaign
Facing a looming deadline to pay off $30 million in tax-exempt bonds, the Center for Jewish History has raised every dollar needed to settle its outstanding debt, the organization’s leadership announced on January 24. It is no small accomplishment for any not-for-profit in the current economic climate, particularly for one that, in recent years, has…
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Life Gabrielle Giffords’s Husband Faces a Choice That a Woman Would Not
Representative Gabrielle Giffords’ husband, astronaut Mark Kelly, is facing a big decision: As Giffords begins a long rehabilitation after being shot in the head earlier this month, should he take the helm of the space shuttle Endeavor when it takes off in April on a two-week mission to the International Space Station, or not? According…
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Life ‘Black Bus’ Looks at Women Who Left Hasidic Life
In the movie “The Black Bus,” — a selection at the New York Jewish Film Festival — filmmaker Anat Zuria uses the Haredi-run “mehadrin buses” as a metaphor for the lives of two young women who have broken away from their Hasidic communities in Israel. The movie introduces us to a young woman, photographer-law student Shulamit…
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Life Hadassah’s Leadership on Madoff, Fundraising and Growth
Hadassah: The Women’s Zionist Organization of America, has just voted in a new national president, so we thought it would be a good time to check in with the venerable but embattled organization. Hadassah recently agreed to pay $45 million to settle with the court-appointed trustee in the Bernard Madoff bankruptcy. The settlement was first…
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Culture Judith Plaskow is Still Standing, Twenty Years On
It has been 20 years since Judith Plaskow published the first-ever book of Jewish-feminist theology, “Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism From a Feminist Perspective.” Much about Jewish life and practice has changed since then. But, Plaskow says, not enough. In “Standing,” she looked back at a watershed moment in her life as a Jew and…
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News A Modern-Day Miriam, Friedman?s Legacy Is Her Music and Her Message
As Shira Ruskay was dying of cancer in 1997, Debbie Friedman, whose concert schedule was crowded with gigs around the country, kept another, more intimate commitment in Manhattan, with unfailing regularity. ?Once a month we gathered with Debbie, and she uniquely wove together prayer and Torah,? recalled Ruskay?s husband, John Ruskay, executive vice president of…
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