Marjorie Ingall
By Marjorie Ingall
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News The Eye of the Beholder
Parenting is one long Jacob-and-the-angel-esque wrestling match with ethical dilemmas. Here’s this week’s bout: Maxine, age 4, was walking home from school with our wonderful babysitter Rita, and they passed a neighbor who often sits on her stoop. Maxine observed, loudly, “That lady is very fat!” Rita desperately hushed her: “Don’t say that!” When Rita…
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News When to Let Kids Quit?
Josie wails, “I hate flute! I won’t play Takahashi Twinkle!” She hurls herself onto the couch, swanning and weeping like Sarah Bernhardt. What do you do when you want your kid to do a given afterschool activity — whether it’s chess club, music, sports or religious school — and she doesn’t want to do it?…
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News Musical Motherhood
If you live in or near New York, get over to the DR2 Theater to see “Dear Edwina” before it closes on April 19. “Dear Edwina” is a musical for kids about manners, but it’s also charming, tuneful entertainment that will not make adults want to drive spikes into their own ears. It is so…
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News Domestic Workers’ Rights: A Matter of Ethics
CORRECTION APPENDED My childhood Sedarim involved a slight disconnect. Perhaps yours did, too. Here we were, a big tableful of upper middle class white folks, reclining on pillows around a beautifully set dining room table, discussing our history as slaves… while Mrs. Dyer, our cleaning lady, bustled about in the kitchen, ladling out the matzoh…
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News Playing Dress-Up: A Purim Guide
When I was 11, we were in Israel for Purim. I was shocked at the number of non-Esther, non-Mordechai costumes. There was a Karate Kid, a Darth Vader, various zombies and ninjas, a spandex-clad, gum-chomping Sandy from Grease. But most of my friends who do Purim in the States tend to stick to the Megillah…
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News Facing The Flood
I’ve been thinking a lot about resilience lately. When faced with adversity and horror, why do some people crumple like used tin foil while others manage to cope? The story of Noah and the Ark is an interesting window into the notion of resilience. Maxine, age 4, is obsessed with a book by Lucy Cousins,…
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News Digging Deep on Tu B’Shevat
Tu B’Shevat, also known as “the New Year for the trees,” starts at sundown on February 9. (So soon? Why, it seems like it was just the 10th of Tevet!) Like a Rorschach inkblot, this holiday can reveal a lot about who’s celebrating it. Originally it was merely the agrarian equivalent of April 15 for…
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News Bam! Pow! Whack!
Maxine, at just-turned-4, is in a superhero phase. This despite the fact that the only superhero she’s actually seen is WordGirl (the vocabulary-building crime-fighter from the planet Lexicon) on PBS. Both Max and her big sister, Josie, love the show; for Halloween, they dressed as WordGirl and her chimp sidekick, Captain Huggyface. (Guess who had…
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