Marjorie Ingall
By Marjorie Ingall
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Life Bintel Brief: The Mamele Says ‘Roasting Is Your Friend’
Dear Mamele, I feel completely inadequate when it comes to holiday celebrations. I’m not such a slouch in the kitchen, but hosting a big holiday meal or Seder for family and friends is something that seems downright terrifying. It’s easy to prepare and bring a homemade dish or a cake to someone else’s home, but…
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News The Tooth Fairy
Josie lost her first tooth. How is this possible? Only moments ago she was teething. (Cue the music: “Sunrise, Sunset.”) She already knew about the tooth fairy. We’re not raising her in a Skinner box. She hears things. Every day, as she wiggled her loose tooth, she asked whether the tooth fairy was coming. Would…
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Life Bintel Brief: The Mamele Advises an Alaskan Fisherman Living in Hasidic Borough Park
Dear Mamele, Hi. I’m a goy from Alaska who just moved to Borough Park. Before I moved here, I may have been the only logger/fisherman who read Isaac Singer, Martin Buber, Rabbi Nachman, Potok, Ansky and others. Now, I guess I expected my Hasidic neighbors to be Gimpels, thieves, louts, dipsomaniacs or kabbalistic meshugene. But…
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Life Bintel Brief: The Mamele Helps With the Housework
Dear Mamele, This is a complicated question, so I will ask it at length. What is an equitable division of housework? Does it entail doing exactly one-half of the housework, even if a large part of that housework seems to one to be fetishistic make-work, of no use or interest to anyone but the person…
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News Long Lost Twins, Reunited
Human beings have always been fascinated by twins. Romulus and Remus, Jacob and Esau, Mary-Kate and Ashley. We love ultrasound images of twins hugging (or punching) in utero, stories about shared secret languages, notions of twin-to-twin ESP, movies like “The Parent Trap.” (But c’mon, identical cousins? That’s crazy talk!) As children, many of us fantasized…
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News The Joys of Sukkot
Sukkot gets a raw deal. So many marketing opportunities left on the table! You got your plagues masks for Passover, your chocolate gelt and cloying ceramic ballerina menorahs for Hanukkah, your hamantaschen for Purim. But where are the adorable sukkah dollhouses with Velcro branches and hanging fruit? Where’s the make-your-own-garlands craft kit? Why isn’t every…
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News Good Enough Parent
In our tradition, we often compare God to a parent, and ourselves to clueless, wayward children. Our expectations about God’s parenting can teach us a lot about our own responsibilities as Godlike figures (uh, sometimes) to our own children. As Rosh Hashanah approaches and we begin the introspection and self-inventory that are as much a…
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News The Power of Theater
I watched Josie watch the stage. Lucy was entering Narnia for the first time. The furs in the wardrobe were becoming trees. The mothballs, crunching beneath her feet, were becoming snow. Suddenly she was in a strange new land, and there was a faun. Josie was just as transported. In this children’s theater production of…
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