Judge Kimba Wood Shows Her Cultural Sensitivity — and Feminism
By Debra Nussbaum Cohen November 22, 2010
You’ve got to love a lawyer who writes a note — laden in Yiddish and as footnoted as any legal brief — to the judge presiding over his client’s case, touting the forthcoming birth of the lawyer’s grandchild and asking for a recess from the trial so that he can be at the bris if said grandchild is a boy.
And you’ve got to love a judge —in this case federal Judge Kimba Wood of the Southern District Court of New York, who appears not to be Jewish — who responds not only with permission, but also with a desire to “balance the scales” and decides that “if a daughter is born, there will be a public celebration in Court, with readings from poetry celebrating girls and women.”
It turns out that not only is the lawyer, Bennett Epstein, about to become a zeyde. According to this blog post on the website Israel Insider, he’s also devoted to the Jewish state.
(tichel tip: Jeffrey Goldberg.)
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