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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News Name Game: How Traditional Is The Conservative Movement?
What’s in a name? Lately, that age-old question has become a burning issue for leaders of Conservative Judaism. Once the largest of American Judaism’s denominational streams, the movement today, though still significant, faces declining membership, financial difficulties and confusion about what it stands for. The confusion is in part a result of lost distinctions as…
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Life Code Pink: Slinging Mud and Hate at Ahava
I sent Boychik off to his summer program in Israel with an extra $100 in his pocket and instructions to bring me back as much Ahava hand cream as that will buy. Ahava is my favorite — smells nice, absorbs quickly and does what it’s supposed to — but it’s too pricey here in the…
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Life Taking On The Difficult Obligation of Brit Milah
Mention circumcision in a crowd — even a virtual crowd — of liberal Jews (or liberal anything, I guess) and it never fails to spark rhetorical fire. And so, when I saw a recent post on the Park Slope Parents listserv from a woman whose daughter is pregnant and not sure about having a son…
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Life The Conversion Bill, the Kotel, and Women as Coalmine Canaries
Forward alumna and current Tablet editor in chief Alana Newhouse has an incisive op-ed in today’s New York Times today, warning that Israel’s Rotem Bill, which would enshrine official approval of conversion to Judaism in the hands of ultra-Orthodox rabbis, will lead to a split between Israel and the Diaspora. She’s right, of course, though…
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Life New York Mag On Rabbi Avi Weiss’ Rabba-Rousing
Abigail Pogrebin’s story, “The Rabbi and the Rabba,” in this week’s New York magazine, takes an insightful look at the man behind the making of the first woman in America to be ordained as Orthodox clergy, Rabbi Avi Weiss. Pogrebin does a good job of capturing many aspects of Weiss’ complicated personality; his ardent political…
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Life Parenting’s Displeasures and Rewards
When I saw the cover line — “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting” — on this week’s New York magazine, I thought “Yes! That sums it up exactly.” The story, a well-crafted synthesis by Jennifer Senior of research old and new, merged with a personal take on the experience of mothering a…
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Life Brooklyn Hasidim Protest Bus Ads. Bikini Models Protest Back.
Bikini clad models were trotted out at New York City’s transportation headquarters this week to protest the Brooklyn Hasidic communities’ protest of their presence in advertisements for Georgi vodka on the sides of buses that pass through neighborhoods heavily populated by the ultra-Orthodox community. More can be read in this report on the Fox News…
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Life Which Women Should Have Made Newsweek’s Most Influential Rabbis List?
Newsweek is just out with its 4th annual list of what it deems to be “the 50 most influential rabbis in America.” This year, as last, few women have made the cut and all but one are in the bottom half of the list. The first woman to appear — Rabbi Ellen Weinberg Dreyfus, the…
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