“Being fat is a key part of my identity,” says Deb Malkin, the owner of Re/Dress NYC, a vintage and resale boutique in Brooklyn for women size 12 and up. “It’s taken me years to be comfortable with my body and live fearlessly in it.” As the catwalks in Bryant Park and around the city ...

Last week, Maxie, my 5-year-old daughter, came home from school talking about the Haitian earthquake. “The houses fell on the people and they got squashed and now the children have no mommies,” she told me.
The previous week, I’d explained to Maxie and Josie, her 8-year-old sister, that there was an earthquake far away and ...

In the spirit of Choose Your Own Adventure, the classic (and newly reissued) series from our childhood in which a single misstep could mean death by yeti, ghost, or Royal Bengal tiger, join us on this expedition of horror. At the bottom of each page, you’ll find several choices. Click on the one that appeals ...

Because I like to torture myself and revisit decisions long made, I often wonder whether we should have sent the girls to Jewish day school. I fell madly in love with a school called Hannah Senesh, in Brooklyn, a school I felt wasn’t hyper-competitive, grimly obsessed with “excellence,” insular, self-satisfied, or attractive to the kind ...

Do you remember the Jewish books of your childhood? Many seemed to provide as much terror as pleasure. I was an easily traumatized child, so everything scared me. When Henny borrowed Ella’s fancy dress in All-of-a-Kind Family and got a stain on it, I felt sick with fear. (Sure, Henny dyed it with tea and ...

“Mom! Max is trying to put a booger on me!”
“Mom! Josie won’t let me play fairies with her!”
And so it goes. I’d like to tell you that time off from school means time spent baking gluten-free organic muffins and jamming joyfully with our family bluegrass band. But not so much. Intensive togetherness in our house ...

The Annotated Child: Coping with the December dilemma

Last week, we looked at the best Jewish picture books of 2009. Now let us applaud the year’s best chapter books.

Tropical Secrets: Holocaust Refugees in Cuba by Margarita Engle (Macmillan). It’s 1939. Daniel, age 13, is a German-Jewish refugee. His grandfather was killed on Kristallnacht; his parents, poor musicians, wiped out their savings to shove ...

Here are my favorite picture books of the year. Next week we’ll look at chapter books. Sorry, no board books—this year either I didn’t love them or I didn’t deem them sufficiently Jewy. (But if you wanna pick up Happy Hanukkah, Corduroy, knock yourself out.)

New Year at the Pier: A Rosh Hashanah Story by April ...

It can be so hard to find the perfect Hanukkah gift. Here are some non-starters to non-inspire you. Peruse them all, then buy your child a book.