Rileys Furniture

Harriet Newman Cohen weathered many storms in her five-decade-long journey to become one of the nation’s most celebrated divorce attorneys. Voted one of the top 100 attorneys in New York for many years, Cohen served as president of the New York Women’s Bar Association and has been a champion of divorce reform. She and her co-author, journalist David Feinberg, will give a book talk about her memoir, “Passion and Power: A Life in Three Worlds,” at the Norfolk Library on Sunday, March 22 at 2 p.m.

What began as a personal record of her life, intended for her family, grew into a memoir that journalist Carl Bernstein describes in his endorsement as “wise and riveting.” Born in 1932 in Providence, Rhode Island, to parents who immigrated in 1920 from Ukraine and Poland, Cohen traces the arc of her life and the challenges she faced entering a legal profession that was overwhelmingly male at the time, leading to her success as a maverick divorce attorney fighting for women’s rights and equity in the law. She received her Juris Doctor, cum laude, from Brooklyn Law School in 1974, one year after Roe v. Wade was decided. She is a founding partner of Cohen Stine Kapoor LLP in New York City, a family and matrimonial law firm she formed in 2021, at age 88, with her daughter Martha Cohen Stine and Ankit Kapoor.