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Homeshuling

One of the few consistent parts of our family’s observance of shabbat is to have at least one delicious challah on our dinner table. Before I went back to working full time, it was relatively easy to whip up freshly baked challah every week. Now that I’m on teacher-mom-writer schedule, it’s not. Usually, I make…

Another glimpse from my kindergarten class at a Jewish day school: This week, the Gan has been learning about the lives of Martin Luther King and several other key figures in the civil rights movement. We began the week by reading several biographies of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. We also read both a biography and…

Believe it or not, I like bad reviews. The good ones, anyway. I appreciate criticism of my writing that helps me become better at what I do. The review of Mezuzah on the Door that I quote most often is that the dialogue is, at times, “stiffly didactic.” It’s true, and one of the things…

We definitely aren’t the first family to celebrate the eighth night of Hanukkah by making, lighting and then eating our menorah. Google “cupcake menorah” if you don’t believe me. But, that doesn’t mean I’m not going to blog about it. Who ever accused me of being original? I used Martha Stewart’s yellow cupcake and frosting recipe,…

Last night, I had to exaplain to Zoe that our plans to make jelly dougnuts were put on hold because her sister was running a 101 fever. She was none too thrilled by this information.  “We don’t really do anything Jewish for Hanukkah,” she cried. “All we do is light some stupid candles.” Mind you,…

Now that I teach full time, a lot of my best “parenting'” work happens with other people’s children. I’m not sure what that might mean for the future of homeshuling (school-shuling just doesn’t have the same ring to it) but I thought I’d share a blog post from my Gan blog. I think this activity…

So, I’ve been working on a post of recommended books to buy for Hanukkah gifts. Procrastination rarely pays off, but in this case Marjorie Ingall posted the same column on Tablet. She recommended many of the same books I was planning to suggest – a few that I already wrote about earlier this year, including…

There are a lot of Hanukkah picture books (and no, not all of them were written by Eric Kimmel.) But there actually aren’t a lot of books for young children that tell the story of Hanukkah – the narrative of the Maccabees’ defeat of Antiochus. Granted, it’s a fairly grizzly story, with its fair share…

It’s not too often that I find myself in agreement with the Christian right when it comes to politics. But this week, when RIchard Land, Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, called on Newt Gingrich to address and apologize for his history of marital infidelity, we were strange and fleeting bedfellows. Not literally, mind you.…

It’s November. Christmas is almost a month away. But even before the Halloween clearance candy was actually cleared, tinsel and plastic Santas were popping up at the ends of the supermarket aisles. “Why are they playing Jingle Bells already?” asked Zoe, in a not so patient voice, as we gathered bags of cranberries for our…
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