Join us for a funny-serious look at a familiar stereotype. We all know the Jewish Mother of cliche: She’s hectoring, guilt-inducing, clingy as a limpet. In this program, Mamaleh Knows Best writer Marjorie Ingall smashes this tired trope, showing that the stereotype is a cultural construct created by male writers and comedians … and Jewish mothers are, in fact, awesome. But where did this stereotype come from? What does it say about contemporary Jewish life, acculturation, and shifting perspectives on gender and class? And what happens when Jewish women are the ones telling the jokes?

Marjorie Ingall is the author of Mamaleh Knows Best: What Jewish Mothers Do to Raise Successful, Creative, Empathetic, Independent Children and the co-creator of the web site SorryWatch, which analyzes apologies in the news, in history, and in the arts. Her book Make It Right: The Case for Good Apologies, cowritten with Susan McCarthy, is forthcoming from Gallery Books/S&S in 2022. She often writes about children’s books for the New York Times Book Review, and has written for many other publications, including Tablet and The Forward (she was a columnist for both), New York magazine, Self, Town & Country, Ms., Wired, Harper's Bazaar, Real Simple, and the late, lamented Sassy (where she was the senior writer and books editor). She is also a ghostwriter. She was on the startup team at the Oxygen TV network, where she learned that her perkiness levels were not up to a job in daytime talk television.