Resources in Hebrew for kids

I’ve been working for a while to find resources for my kids to be exposed to more Hebrew. I’ve found a number of things that I’m sharing here – hopefully making your life easier and letting you get your kids more Hebrew as well!!

Obviously there is plenty on Youtube
· Parpar Nechmad (they watch at school)
· Rinat and Yoyo – great for Jewish holidays (they watch at school)
· Hop Yaldut Yisraelit – songs
· Specific books – you can find them being read and acted out

But it’s hard to keep track of and much is old, and I wanted to have some only audio options. So here are a few recent finds:

Finally found some podcasts for kids:

https://www.kan.org.il/podcast/

Kan also has TV programming for kids in Hebrew from Israeli public television, so current:
https://www.kan.org.il/page.aspx?landingpageid=1083

Books on tape in Hebrew:
https://books.icast.co.il

Can buy one at a time or subscribe for a month or 3 to all the books. Can also play at .9 or .8 speed which is helpful for non-native speakers

Also, the Minuteman library network has lots of books and DVDs in Hebrew, though I couldn’t find ebooks or audio books in Hebrew:
http://library.minlib.net/search/

So when we do get to that point, I’m hoping to try this Hebrew ebook site:
https://indiebook.co.il/
(though we bring lots of books back on each trip so we have plenty for now)

בהצלחה – Good luck!

Rosh hashana d'var Torah

I gave the d'var torah at Washington Square Minyan this past week. I'm sharing it on Medium since that seems to be the thing to do these days!

Bike to Work Day

I biked to work today and it was amazing. Kudos to Boston & Hubway. #biketowork #Boston @bikeboston @RandCorporation

Today was bike to work day, so that motivated me to check out Hubway, the not-so-new bike sharing program here in Boston. I was worried the bikes would be clunky or the signup complicated, but the interface at the station was a cinch and I was off on a bike in no time. My first bike was a little clanky, and with only 3 low gears, it sometimes felt pointless to pedal downhill, but the seat was adjustable and comfortable and I felt great riding it.

I had to make a stop in the morning for an appointment. There were Hubway stations two blocks from my house, two blocks from my appointment, and one block from my office. All super convenient. I hear that sometimes the stations are full so you can’t return your bike--that would be a bummer if you were in a rush--but all I experienced was ease and convenience.

As for Boston, I enjoyed seeing the number of bike lanes and the number of bikers. Where there weren’t designated lanes, the bike symbol in the lane was more than symbolic: it reassured me as a biker that there was space for me and maybe even made the other drivers more courteous, if you can use that word and Boston drivers in the same sentence. A little planning kept me mostly off main roads, but even when I was on Huntington Ave, it was smooth sailing. And when I made a wrong turn in the South End, I just ended up getting a closer look at some of the great side streets there.

I’m sure it didn’t hurt that it was a gorgeous, sunny, cool spring day, and I wasn’t in a rush. There are plenty of reasons not to ride--if it’s too hot, too wet, or too cold, or I’m carrying too much stuff, or I need to dress a certain way (and not get sweaty!). But now, some of my many reasons are gone--having to make sure my bike’s tires are full, shlepping it out of the basement, worrying about locking it somewhere during the day, and most importantly, having to bike home every time I bike in. It was so freeing to be able to bike to work and enjoy it--and to be able to decide NOT to bike home, since I had to pick up my kids. Now I can take them in in the morning and bike home if my husband is getting them, or vice versa. That is amazing!

I can’t say every day will be bike to work day for me, but I hope a lot more of them will. Thanks, bike to work day!

I Hope My Daughter Questions Everything

Excited to share my first blog post on Kveller.com:

I Hope My Daughter Questions Everything
By Shira Fischer 

My 3-year-old daughter already knows the difference between dairy and meat.She saw our delight the first time she asked us if a meal was chalavi (dairy) or besari (meat) and now she can even choose the right silverware. She doesn’t yet understand all the details–but she knows there’s a difference. Yesterday we even went to the next level and discussed pareve (neither dairy nor meat), too.
Through these recent conversations, I’ve realized how much about our world must seem completely arbitrary to her, with names and categories she has to just accept–and she’s slowly learning to do so. No pajamas during the day–but no dresses at night. Why? 

Read the rest here:
http://www.kveller.com/blog/parenting/i-hope-my-daughter-questions-everything/

My new Inbox

I got my Inbox invite today (Gmail’s new format for email, for those who haven’t been waiting for their chance to check it out).

First of all, no, sorry, I can’t see how to issue an invite. But the good news for those who want in is that I just requested an invite on the site, and it came quickly, so sign up yourself!

In the meantime, my brief review: I was excited to try it, and the interface is pretty, but feature-wise, I’m underwhelmed. It basically pre-labels your email into its own categories (Promos, Forums, Updates, Social, Finance), which are not necessarily the categories I’d use (what’s Forums? And why are AMA and JAMA in updates, but Dana-Farber and AMIA in Forums?), so that’s just filters. It then groups them together so that you can view similar messages and handle them together. That is nice and probably more efficient (even more efficient would be to just check email less often each day), but it’s not revolutionary.

A message can be pinned, meaning it will stay in the inbox and not be archived when you sweep everything away. Thus the mindset is to help you clear out your inbox each day, just saving pinned things, rather than most people’s default of just leaving everything in the inbox. Still, it’s a cosmetic difference: some people use read/unread for this, or starred/unstarred. Of course, changing the default is likely to make more people archive the messages they don’t need, but I’m quite good about archiving messages I’m done with, so everything in my Gmail inbox is new or a to-do (“pinned,” in the new lingo), so this doesn’t add much for me.

There’s also the option to add to-do items to the inbox. This makes sense as many people use their email as a todo list. Still, without the fancy features of a real todo program, most people will still need something else for lists that need priorities and tags and other kinds of organization.

Lastly, there is the new option to swipe a message to have it return later to your inbox. This is the greatest and only really new feature. For those who haven’t used it before, the idea is that it keeps you from rereading and reconsidering messages you can’t manage yet, while ensuring they don’t get lost before you need them. But many have used such a feature before: Boomerang does this nicely, though it doesn’t work well on the mobile format, and they limit you to a certain number of deferred messages unless you subscribe. Mailbox does this exceptionally well on mobile, and I’ve been using it as my main iPhone mail program for a while. They recently came out with a desktop version which I haven’t fully adoption since it doesn’t quite integrate with Gmail enough. But now Gmail seems to be stealing their main feature, and I feel guilty whenever the big guy takes the creative idea from the smaller one. I guess Mailbox isn’t suffering—Dropbox bought them, so they’re okay—but there’s a pride in not being purely inside a single provider camp, a la Farhad Manjoo’s advice to “Buy Apple’s hardware, use Google’s services, and buy Amazon’s media,” which is what I already do. I’m not ready to give up Mailbox yet (I’m still nervous about managing my mail in Inbox, since an X in Inbox just closes the message, while on Mailbox the X deletes it), but Inbox might manage to convince those people who use their inbox as a todo list and who have a lot of mail from going elsewhere to manage it; it might keep them in a pure Google world.

Away from home

When you’re away for two and a half months from home, you learn a lot of things about yourself and your family. Some are quite meaningful and/or disturbing: how much time do you actually want to spend with your toddler every day, or the best time of day to have a real conversation with your spouse. Others may seem mundane but are also revelatory: how much laundry detergent do you use in two and half months? How much shampoo? (Answers: a lot more than I thought, and less than I expected). I know which parts of the kitchen I never touched and which clothes I never wore.

Memory is also relative to place and context. My knowledge of this operation is of course better than the last two Gaza ones because I was here, but I may also remember other things better because I’m not at home. For example, I’ll probably remember the date of the Malaysian airplane crash or remember Robin Williams’ death better than some other celebrity because it happened this summer. I’ll remember that the time D first wore nail polish or H first went swimming were summer 2014. Going away divides life up into units that don’t exist at home, for good or bad. This has been studied, of course, to maximize test preparation, with some studies recommending taking practice exams in the room where the real test will be held. But I think it’s an argument for variation in life: change your location and change not just your luck but what you remember, which is really how you perceive the world.

Another ceasefire ending

It’s our second to last week in Israel and we’re at the end of another ceasefire. This one was five days, long enough that I stopped checking Israeli news obsessively and occasionally looked at other sections of the New York Times. But now as midnight approaches, I’m checking Ynet again and that feeling of tension is welling up inside me. They say there might be a deal that was just signed, but there’s no reason to trust Hamas, and I’m bracing myself for more rockets. In the end, either way, most of our summer here will have been during a war. Of course it changed things, though we never considered leaving. In fact, while one friend from Boston emailed me to see whether the I thought she should bring her small children to Israel for their scheduled vacation, heard much more of the opposite: both Americans and Israelis who are glad to be in Israel during the conflict. Israelis felt like if they left, they’d be betraying those who were risking their lives to defend them and their fellow citizens, and Americans like me who felt that there is little we could do from abroad, while by just being here, we might be able to offer support to Israelis and raise awareness back home. In any case, we are still here, but I wish it could have been different.