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Like most Jewish holidays, the meaning of Sukkot is multi-layered: it commemorates the ancient harvest pilgrimage to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem, but it also represents the temporary dwellings used during the Exodus from Egypt. In modern times we tend to think of it as a chance to reconnect with nature, gives thanks for our blessings, and gather with community.

In terms of kidlit, Sukkot is the winning-est holiday of the season this year, with multiple titles coming out at the same time! We expect lots of books each year for Passover and Hanukkah, but it’s unusual for Sukkot to be so well represented. I couldn’t choose, so I invited three authors into my virtual sukkah for a group discussion.

Love, Heidi

NEWS

On the Jewish Book Garden we’ve released a Fall 2026 Preview of Jewish Kidlit, August through December. READ HERE

Interview with Jewish author Judy Blume on NPR LISTEN HERE

“The Monster in the Closet” by Arnon Z. Schorr is a great article about why Jewish stories are important. READ HERE

CALLS TO ACTION

SCHTICK: Reading and Creating Jewish Graphic Novels is an online course running September through April. They charge tuition but scholarships are available. LEARN MORE HERE

Hanukkah Cards for the Blind: request supplies from JBI Library by October 12 to make tactile cards; return cards for distribution by November 12, 2026. LEARN MORE HERE

SHOW NOTES

• Amy Fellner Dominy’s website, Instagram, Facebook

• Barbara Lerman-Golomb’s website, Instagram, Facebook

• Sidura Ludwig’s website, Instagram, Facebook

• Buy A House with No Door | The Sukkah Hop | Our Spectacular Sukkah | or A Purr-fect Sukkot (another book published this year that I found out about too late)

• Tikkun Olam suggestion: Support the American Library Association

• Lesléa Newman’s Guest Post about The Last Flame Last

• Info about Hanukkah cards for the blind at JBIlibrary.org

• Share Your Shelf bonus segment with Amy, Barbara, and Sidura

FAVORITE ILLUSTRATIONS

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Sidura Ludwig 0:00

[COLD OPEN] Amy, the line about the etrog and it being tart -- the word being tart on your tongue -- that oh, I loved that so much. It’s my favorite line in the book. It just jumped. I said, “Yes, it is absolutely!”

Amy Fellner Dominy 0:11

Thank you. Every once in a while, right? Something works! [LAUGHER] I won’t tell you about all those other versions that you didn’t see.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:22

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. Step into my virtual sukkah and meet my guests: Amy Fellner Dominy, author of A House with No Door; Barbara Lehrman-Golomb, author of The Sukkah Hop; and Sidura Ludwig, author of Our Spectacular Sukka. How exciting to have three excellent new Sukkot stories published in the same year! I couldn’t choose, so I invited them all.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:56

You can find show notes, a transcript, and bonus content at BookofLifePodcast. Substack.com. One bonus this time is a guest post by author Lesléa Newman, who will tell us about her new poetry collection for adults, The Last Flame Last. It’s a suite of 18 poems that explore the events of October 7th and the surge of antisemitism that has followed since then. Be sure to check the show notes for a link to Lesléa’s post. And if you would like to hear the Share Your Shelf segment, where Amy, Barbara, and Sidura all share books from their own personal bookshelves, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription to support the show. Thanks! [MUSIC FADES]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:47

Amy, Barbara, and Sidura, welcome. Since we have so many voices for listeners to keep track of today, I’m going to ask each of you to just briefly introduce yourselves. Who are you? Where are you? And what book are you here to talk about?

Amy Fellner Dominy 2:03

Hi, I’m Amy Fellner Dominy. I am right now in the mountains of Colorado, I spend half the year in Phoenix. And I am the author of Sukkot book, A House with No Door.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 2:17

I am Barbara Lerman-Golomb, and I am in the Hudson Valley, New York, and I am the author of The Sukkah Hop.

Sidura Ludwig 2:25

And I am Sidura Ludwig. I’m in Thornhill, Ontario, just north of Toronto, and I am the author of Our Spectacular Sukkah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:34

For those who are not familiar, can we explain what the Sukkot holiday is about and how it’s celebrated? Go ahead, Sidura.

Sidura Ludwig 2:44

Sure, I’ll take a crack at it. So the Sukkot holiday is a seven-day holiday that happens in the fall, just after Yom Kippur. It’s a holiday that commemorates the time when the Jews had left Egypt and were wandering in the desert and spent their time in temporary structures, which we call sukkot or a sukkah. And in honor of that, we build a sukkah, which is like a hut in our backyard or you know on our properties, and we dwell in that sukkah for the seven-day period. We eat in it, we entertain in it. Some people sleep in it. It’s an opportunity for us to connect with that part of our heritage.

Amy Fellner Dominy 3:20

And I would just add that it’s also a celebration of the harvest and nature, and it’s a time when being outdoors in that way also allows us, I think, to recognize all the things that we get from this world.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 3:34

We’re able to connect with the huts of ancient times. When our ancestors were out in the fields doing the farming, it was a way for them to be closer to their crops, so they wouldn’t have to travel to their own homes. And so it’s kind of an amazing thing that after all this time, we’re still recreating that concept, getting close to nature.

Heidi Rabinowitz 3:50

That was an amazing team explanation. [LAUGHTER] Good job, everybody! How did you choose Sukkot as your focus, as opposed to the Jewish holidays that get written about the most, Hanukkah and Passover? In other words, I want to ask each of you what inspired your book. Amy, why don’t we start alphabetically again?

Amy Fellner Dominy 4:10

I am a nature girl. I am all about the outdoors, and I think for that reason, Sukkot really stood out to me. It is also my favorite holiday that I never celebrated. We did not have a sukkah when I was growing up. I always wanted us to have one in the backyard, and we never did. I was lucky in that I got to celebrate and help decorate at my synagogue. But I think because it was a holiday I never really got to dive into as a child, that was even more appealing for me to think about writing a story about.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 4:46

This is Barbara, and I will add that I also wear another hat called Barbara Wow, Wonders Of the World. I am also an environmental educator, so it’s always been one of my favorite holidays. I went sukkah hopping with my kids when they were young; A very joyful way, I think, to experience the holiday, and I never really forgot it. The thing about a sukkah is that you can decorate it in a very individual way, but of course, it’s very communal and inclusive. There was a art installation in New York City in 2010, a sukkah city, where they built 12 different sukhas in Union Square in New York City. It was a three-day celebration, and the idea was really you know just to be as creative as possible and to celebrate the concept of fragility, humility, and connection to nature.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 5:29

And I will lastly say that when my great grandmother was part of her synagogue many years ago, she took it upon herself to feed the elders of the synagogue that slept in the sukkah all week, and she would bake them gefilte fish. She would bring that to them every day because they didn’t leave and they needed meals. When she passed away, in her will she put in that my grandmother, my nana, should continue the tradition after she was gone. So I knew that this was a very meaningful holiday to my family. And also I had been interviewed by Lilith a few years back about the question of inviting mystical guests to your sukkah, the idea of ushpizin. So I want to bring in all my matriarchs, my mother, and all those that came before.

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:15

And did your nana keep on bringing gefilte fish?

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 6:18

She did, and I don’t know if you ever make gefilte fish, but it’s not a fun task. And I have to say, she started out grumbling in the beginning because it’s a messy, not pleasant experience. But she did want to honor...it was her mother-in-law too, so even more, yeah, who had been a quite a matriarch of the family, quite a forceful person. And I think that she felt also that responsibility to continue to honor those people that were emulating the tradition of sleeping in the sukkah for the week, yeah. So it continued on many years.

Sidura Ludwig 6:49

This is Sidura. For me, I also did not grow up having a sukkah in my backyard. I grew up in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and back then in October there was often snow on the ground by then, so trust me, even if people were eating, they were not sleeping in the sukkah in Winnipeg! [LAUGHTER] The school had a sukkah, the synagogue had a sukkah, but we didn’t. But it is something that I celebrate with my own family. I don’t know that I went out to write a book about Sukkot, but I was starting to wordplay, and I remember, you know, coming up with this phrase, “our spectacular sukkah” and “a distinctive sukkah.” Just this fun wordplay. When I started writing this draft, and then as the story started to evolve, I realized that this was really a story about community coming together, and that for me is what I love most about Sukkot. The sukkah is without a door because everybody is welcome in. That’s what I realized I really wanted to play with, was this idea of community and how community can come together.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:46

Amy, I love the way you describe a sukkah as a house at one with nature. You say “the outside hangs on the inside, and the inside feels like the outside.” Can you expand on that?

Amy Fellner Dominy 7:58

Well, I wrote a completely different story, and I shared it with my critique group, and they said, “Yeah, in all of these pages, the only line that really stands out to us is, ‘Everyone is welcome in a house with no door.’” And I started to really think about what that meant, not just literally, but also figuratively. What are the rules to building a sukkah? I didn’t know, we never built one! A certain number of walls, a roof that you can see the stars, all the decorations, the colors of nature, and the gourds and the paper chains, and and carrying what’s outside inside, and, and then also in the sukkah you feel like you’re outside. Walls dance. You can see through the roof. The ground is the earth. Those are all just beautiful ways to stay in touch with nature.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:50

Sidura, one emphasis of your story, as you mentioned, is on community supportiveness. When the wind tears apart the family sukkah in your story, the neighbors come to the rescue. Can you talk about why you chose that angle for your story?

Sidura Ludwig 9:05

If I can just call attention to Sophia Vincent Guy, the illustrator, and what she did with this book: Sophia was the illustrator for my first book, Rising, and we’ve become good friends. And I actually visited her in Israel, and she was just starting the sketches on this book. And she said to me, “Is there anything that you want to tell me?” And you know, I’m very respectful of the author-illustrator collaboration that happens on the page, and I love what she brings to something and how that brings a story alive. So I certainly didn’t want to prescribe very much, but I did say to her, “It has to take place in a neighborhood like mine, where the backyards are divided by fences, so everybody’s in their own little enclave, and they don’t really see what’s happening.” Because what happens in Thornhill every year it seems, you know it’s really windy or there’s a storm, and then the next day everybody’s talking about, oh what happened with your sukkah? now mine blew over here! and this decoration ended up there! and so I just had this idea that at the beginning the family is building the sukkah in their own little area, the the narrator is very excited about the sukkah that they are building for themselves. And it’s only when the pieces end up flying and she can’t see because of the fences where these pieces have gone, but the neighbors gather them up and bring them back, and so then it becomes a sukkah that we can all share. I was thinking about the young reader and thinking about the ideas of what is mine, and then how do we share, and how do we take possession of something, but how do we also, you know, open it up for other people? That was the roundabout way in which the the community story came in.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:31

Barbara, was it difficult to distill the idea of the holiday down to make it simple enough for very young readers? Talk about how you did that.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 10:40

Absolutely! [LAUGHTER] And in verse, which I love to do. I started out with different concepts that I knew I wanted to have in there, like environmental creativity that people can bring to their sukkah. I wanted energy, the excitement, the joy of moving from place to place, and so I thought about the kind of words I could use to create that kind of energy and movement,

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:02

Amy, your language is so lyrical. You use the sounds of the words “etrog” and “lulav” to evoke like a sensory reaction. I wanted to ask, if you have the book handy, could you read us that passage and tell us more about how you came up with that?

Amy Fellner Dominy 11:20

Thank you. Yeah, I wanted to make this an interactive story for young readers, so I was trying to bring in all the senses.

Amy Fellner Dominy 11:31

“And on this table, a fruit that looks like a lemon, that is not a lemon but an etrog. The word is as tart as the fruit and tingles on my tongue. Can you taste it? Etrog, etrog, etrog. There is a branch that is not a single branch, but three branches woven together. It’s a lulav. The branches rustle as it’s shaken east, south, west, north, above, and below. Can you hear its music? The word sounds like a lullaby. Lulav, lulav, lulav.”

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:10

I love that.

Amy Fellner Dominy 12:11

I mean, etrog. It is just a tart sound, and it’s a bumpy fruit. It just kind of fit, and it evoked that sort of feeling in me, and then lulav, which is a gentle word, almost like the sound of the branches. So I, I felt like I was trying to watch the sukkah coming to life, not just through my eyes, but also through all my senses. There’s also a passage where the walls sort of whisper with the wind as they dance and move, and I think I was trying to feel the house in all the ways, and also the sukkah tradition. So I’m so glad if that came across.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:50

Sidura, you have a comment?

Sidura Ludwig 12:51

I wanted to say, Amy, that the line about the etrog and it being tart, that the word being tart on your tongue -- oh, I loved that so much! It’s my favorite line in the book. It just jumped. I said, “Yes, it IS, absolutely!” [LAUGHTER]

Amy Fellner Dominy 13:04

Thank you! Every once in a while, right? Something works! [LAUGHTER]

Sidura Ludwig 13:09

Exactly! [LAUGHTER]

Amy Fellner Dominy 13:09

I won’t tell you about all those other versions that you didn’t see!

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:14

Sidura, you include a sukkah craft at the end of your book. Have you yourself ever created a cardboard box sukkah? Tell us about the craft.

Sidura Ludwig 13:24

I have created a lot of cardboard box structures. When I was a kid, actually, there was this book that I took out from the library again and again, called The Boxed In Dollhouse. You know, how you could use a cardboard box to make a dollhouse. In my last book, Rising, I included my challah recipe, and I love the idea of having some kind of activity that a child can do. It evoked for me the idea of The Boxed In Dollhouse to create the sukkah, and also because not everybody can create a life-size sukkah, you know, depending on where they are. But this was a way to be able to experience that on the child level and decorate it how you like and bring some of the outside in, like Amy says, because you know you can gather the nature to use for your s’chach on the roof. I love creating things out of boxes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:08

It’s funny that you had a book about how to make a dollhouse out of boxes, because without ever reading a book about that, that’s what I did in my childhood. I had a very expansive, constantly growing dollhouse made out of cartons. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:25

Barbara, in your story, folks are going on a sukkah hop from one sukkah to another. Can you tell us about your own experiences sukkah hopping?

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 14:34

Yes, it was an activity that I did with my children when they were young. We went to about three different ones, and in each one, you could do a different activity. That was part of the inspiration. I guess it always stuck with me that I did this with the kids. We would do arts and crafts, and some of them, some of them, we were singing with guitars, and the cantor came in, and the rabbi, you know, and the families that were hosting, and of course, the food. To have some of those harvest foods was really wonderful.

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:59

Let’s talk a little bit about the ushpizin. Your books don’t really cover that aspect. Maybe it’s an idea to save for a future book, but let’s first define what that means.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 15:13

What I know is that the tradition of inviting mystical guests into your sukkah -- it could be anyone who’s brought inspiration to your life, anyone you would like to spend more time with, living or not, kind of an exciting challenge, I think, for people.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:25

It’s like a fantasy dinner party.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 15:27

Exactly! Yeah. When I was in the article for Lilith, I invited in my mother and Rachel Carson. So. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:34

Oh, I like that.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 15:35

Yeah. Rabbi Nachman of Breslov was another one I thought of, sort of the eco rabbi.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:39

Good idea. Anybody else? Who who else would you invite?

Amy Fellner Dominy 15:42

What a great question! I had thought of it more in terms of opening our doors to the people in our community that we don’t always, but I hadn’t thought about the mystical.

Sidura Ludwig 15:55

I think I would invite Miriam, you know, Moshe’s sister, an original sukkah dweller. [LAUGHTER] I would love the opportunity to ask her a few questions and shake some tambourines with her!

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 16:05

Yes, wouldn’t that be something? And I love the idea of going back in time. That would be a lovely idea for a story, to go back in time to see what it was like. How fun it would be if I could be with my great grandmother, who I didn’t know, to be there delivering the gefilte fish with her to those elders of the synagogue.

Sidura Ludwig 16:22

I would also love to have my grandparents... if it’s a warm night, because it’s not always a warm night in Toronto, they would be complaining! [LAUGHTER] But they’ve all passed, and I’d love to be able to share this with them.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:31

So all three of these books are gorgeously illustrated. We’re going to give credit to the illustrators now, even though they’re not here with us today. And I want to ask each of you to talk about your favorite illustration in your own book. So, in A House with No Door, the illustrator is Rotem Teplow. Amy, what was your favorite illustration?

Amy Fellner Dominy 16:51

Wow, can I say all of them? No, that’s probably not fair, is it? There’s one I especially love where it’s the house that reminds us that the whole world is also a home, mine and yours and theirs. We see everybody gathered in the sukkah, the animals, those underground, and it brings everything all together. And it’s just beautiful. I mean, the colors are amazing, and I can’t even draw a stick figure, so I’m always just like, wow!

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:22

Right! And I’m going to say about your book, I really love the camera angles, when they’re looking up at the ceiling and down at the table. It’s very creative.

Amy Fellner Dominy 17:31

Yeah, we really talked about that. The idea of would you be able to tell the perspective of looking up? So I’m glad to hear that worked.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:40

So in Our Spectacular Sukkah, the illustrator is Sophia Vincent Guy. Siduraa, what was your favorite illustration?

Sidura Ludwig 17:48

There’s a wordless spread just past the middle of the book where the little brother is the leader, in leading all of these neighbors with the pieces of the sukkah back to the house, and you see them marching through the neighborhood. Barbara, it was you who talked about wanting energy in the book. There’s a lot of excitement and energy, and comes at a point where the main character is devastated. But you can see, with them marching together, that there’s going to be a resolution.

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:13

Thank you, and I’m going to say about these illustrations, I really liked the blended family. There’s a child that sort of matches each parent, so it looks like it could be a sort of a Brady Bunch situation. Perhaps these children are step siblings. That’s my interpretation, I don’t know, but that’s how they look to me, and I think that that’s very interesting. I also have noticed both in this book and in the earlier collaboration you did with her with Rising, that you could read at least one child in each book as ungendered, or or you can decide the gender. You mentioned the little brother, but that little brother is not necessarily a brother. And the child in Rising, I felt the same way. So I I think that that’s kind of nice that it’s open to interpretation.

Sidura Ludwig 19:00

I agree. And when I’ve presented Rising, I’ve loved hearing different people’s interpretation.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:06

And for The Sukkah Hop, the illustrator was Talia Drigues. So, Barbara, what was your favorite illustration?

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 19:12

So people are gathering, and you can see more and more people as they go from sukkah to sukkah. I just feel like it shows so much excitement and activity, the inclusivity, and I love when the stars are shining through, you have the s’chach to be able to see the stars at night, and I just thought that was very beautiful.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:29

Yeah, it’s a wonderful crowd scene at the end. Something that I really got a kick out of in this book were the mildly fantasy sort of elements. It’s basically a realistic book, but there are some birds who are sitting on the roof, like, playing the maracas at some point, playing a guitar. [LAUGHTER] That was very entertaining and did not take away from the realism. It’s just like a little touch of whimsy there.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 19:54

She definitely has a sense of humor.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:56

So now I want to invite all of you to tell about a favorite passage or illustration in each other’s books.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 20:03

With Amy, I love, “in this house we’re surrounded by the colors of earth and growing things. We are growing things.” I love the double meaning of people growing, plants growing, the environmental message. I thought that was really wonderful. I also love “I’m so glad you’re here.” That was such a great kind of thing to break down the fourth wall, inviting the child in. That just felt really lovely.

Sidura Ludwig 20:26

Amy, for yours, it was the language that I was just so taken with. Did you ever read when you were younger or to your kids, A House Is a House for Me? All these different kinds of homes. I was really reminded of that.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 20:41

Sidura, I love this idea of coming together after a disaster, and this idea that it’s big enough for everyone to share, but also that idea that the neighbors, who maybe it’s not their holiday, are coming to rebuild, and that was really a key idea.

Amy Fellner Dominy 20:55

Sidura, I loved how in the text, the “just for us” and “our sukkah” -- it starts with those words, and then by the time you get to the end, it’s big enough for everyone to share. And I just thought that was such a masterful way of getting across that inclusive nature of the holidays.

Sidura Ludwig 21:14

Barbara, I was so excited when I saw that you decided to write about a sukkah hop. I said, “that is brilliant!” We live in a neighborhood where, when my kids were younger, their school was walking distance. My kids went to Jewish day school, and the school would do with the grade fives every year, a sukkah hop with neighboring sukkahs. And so, often I had groups of kids that would come over to be in my sukkah for a bit, and then also through our synagogue, we would do neighborhood sukkah hops. I thought, yes, absolutely, of course, that’s a great children’s book! [LAUGHTER]

Amy Fellner Dominy 21:42

I’d never heard of such a thing. I had never heard of a sukkah hop, so that was going to be my question for you, Barbara, is that like a real thing? It’s an amazing idea!

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 21:52

I did some research, and a lot of communities do it all over the world. Yeah!

Sidura Ludwig 21:57

I heard somebody talk once about successful picture books having many different doors that can bring the reader in, and one of the things that I was so impressed with was not just the rhyme and the rhythm, but the numbers, counting the different sukkahs, the 1234, you know, and for the very young reader, that’s going to be a really excellent doorway. No pun intended, of course, with you know the sukkah, with no door, a house with no door book! [LAUGHTER] And then in terms of the illustrations, I loved the diversity of families and all the different kinds of family units, having everybody together in this beautiful communal party under the stars.

Amy Fellner Dominy 22:21

That final illustration in your book was just so --wow-- to me. It was so much color and joy and life on the page, and energy. You come away from that with a big smile.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:47

It’s Tikkun Olam Time, so I want to ask each of you what action you would like to call listeners to take to help heal the world. Amy, let’s start with you.

Amy Fellner Dominy 22:58

Well, I will invite listeners to think about ways that you can open your doors to others, and you can take that literally or figuratively, even if that’s striking up a conversation, listening, engaging, neighborhood potlucks, finding ways to connect, think about and focus on things that we have in common.

Heidi Rabinowitz 23:21

Sidura?

Sidura Ludwig 23:23

Very similar to Amy’s, I wanted to call to listeners to really think about opening your doors. It’s so important to connect in person. Think about who can you bring over, who can you share a meal with, a cup of tea, a cup of coffee, a cookie, whatever. You know, who can you let in and bring in, and at the same time allow yourself to be brought in. When we open our homes, and when we allow ourselves to be open to other people’s homes, that’s how we really connect and share.

Heidi Rabinowitz 23:47

Barbara?

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 23:48

Well, I would certainly start off with the idea of connecting to nature. I’m also an environmental educator, and too often I’ve seen kids that don’t want to sit on the ground, even, because they’re afraid to get dirty, and they are afraid of bugs, and they don’t really understand the interconnectedness that we have with nature. So I think: support all different kind of nature organizations, or to just live more sustainably. And if they could get that message to their children, that would be a wonderful thing. And I also always want to put a plug in for supporting the American Library Association and your local libraries. I think that the message of Sukkot and that everyone is welcome is something that I think that is part of the library’s philosophy as well.

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:25

Thank you all. Is there an interview question you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Sidura Ludwig 24:33

Come to think of it, I get asked in person, but not necessarily in interviews about the origin of my name. So my name is Sidura, which comes from the word Siddur, prayer book. And when my parents were thinking of a name, I guess they had a boy’s name already, and they were thinking of a girl’s name. They wanted an S name. I was named for my great grandmother whose name was Sonya. The story that they tell was that they were on their way to synagogue, and my mother was holding a siddur, and she turned to my father and she said, “How would we feminize this?” And he said, “I guess we’d add an A at the end.” And that’s how, that’s how in 1976 I got named Sidura. No hair brushes growing up with the name Sidura on it, or stickers, you know, or anything like that! [LAUGHTER] But when I tell people that my name is Sidura and that I write books, it’s like a prophecy, right? You never know, when you’re naming a child! But my my name was something that I struggled with a lot when I was a kid because, you know, it wasn’t so common. But it’s something that I’ve grown to really appreciate now.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:28

That’s a fantastic story! Thank you for sharing that.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:31

What are you working on next, Amy?

Amy Fellner Dominy 25:35

Well, I have a a new middle grade book, A Monster Down Deep, themes of tikkun olam. So I’m very glad to kind of continue that. I am also focusing now on my other favorite Jewish holiday, which is Shabbat.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:51

All right, thank you. Barbara?

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 25:54

I am working on more holiday books and picture book biographies, some art themed books, and also I have a book about emergency preparedness. It’s an environmental story about a library that becomes a first responder, community helper after the devastation of a superstorm as a result of climate change. It’s based on a true story about the Coney Island Library. It’s a story that also talks about solar and how that can be helpful after a storm when the electricity goes out.

Heidi Rabinowitz 26:22

Sidura?

Sidura Ludwig 26:23

I’ve got another picture book coming out, but not till 2028. This one is a story that takes place at a Hanukkah party, and then I’m I’m working on a middle grade novel right now.

Heidi Rabinowitz 26:34

Great things to look forward to. Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Amy Fellner Dominy 26:40

AmyDominy.com, on Instagram @AmyDominy. Come find me on Facebook; the more friends, the merrier. My social media door is always open! [LAUGHTER]

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 26:40

BarbaraLerman-Golomb.com, and on Instagram I use my environmental educator name. I’m @MsBabsWow. And I’m also on Facebook as well.

Sidura Ludwig 27:04

SiduraLudwig. com. That’s my website, and I’m on Instagram and Facebook @SiduraLudwigAuthor.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:12

Well, we’re going to talk about your personal libraries now to see what books you’ll be sharing from your own shelves. So anyone who wants to hear about your picks can support the show, become a paid listener on Substack, and get access to the Share Your Shelf segments. But in the meantime, Amy, Sidura, Barbara, thank you for joining me in this imaginary sukkah at the Book of Life. Chag sameach!

Amy Fellner Dominy 27:37

Chag sameach, thank you.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 27:39

Chag sameach.

Sidura Ludwig 27:40

Chag sameach, thank you so much for having us.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:47

[MUSIC, PROMO] My next interview will be with Jill Rothstein of JBI Library, which serves the visually impaired and print disabled, and she’s going to be inviting you to make touch-friendly Hanukkah cards for blind Jews. I’m telling you now so you don’t miss the October 12th deadline for ordering supplies from JBI Library for this project. Check the show notes for details and keep listening past the end credits of this episode for a preview of Jill’s interview, in which she will tell us all about this special mitzvah project, but first, here’s Jill’s dedication.

Jill Rothstein 28:24

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, this is Jill Rothstein, the head librarian at JBI Library. I’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I’d like to dedicate my episode to all the readers of the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled and JBI Library, who struggle to read standard print but still love reading so much, they find a way.

Heidi Rabinowitz 28:55

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

Jill Rothstein 30:28

We invite classrooms of kids, or not only kids; it can be women’s groups or other volunteer groups, to make tactile Hanukkah cards for people who are blind or low vision. And that is touchable art, art that can be enjoyed and experienced with the fingers, not just the eyes. We provide the card, which has large print and braille, and then the kids get to make these cards with their own homemade art and send them back to us and redistribute them to our blind patrons, who get to enjoy a warm Hanukkah card greeting that’s accessible to them. The last day to order cards is October 12, and get them back to us November 12 so that we can send them out. You can find all the information about the Hanukkah card project, how to make tactile art, and how to sign up to get cards that you can then mail back to us for distribution, on our website jbilibrary.org.

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PLAY AUDIO PODCAST

Tashlich is the Rosh Hashanah custom of tossing bread or other small objects into moving water, to throw away our “sins” or our negativity. But today we’re going to learn about something different — reverse tashlich, in which we remove our sins from the water. We’ll explore the picture book biography, Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah: Reverse Tashlich for a Better World by Rachelle Burk, which profiles Rabbi Ed Rosenthal and his Jewish scuba-diving ocean cleanup project, Tikkun HaYam, or Repair the Sea.

To celebrate the new year, this episode’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment is available to everyone, free and paid subscribers alike! You’ll hear it at the end of the episode, so just keep listening. Shana tova!

Love, Heidi

NEWS

My “Jewish Joy” series continues on Multicultural Kid Blogs. Here’s my interview with past Book of Life guest Adam Gidwitz. READ HERE

Interesting article from the Jewish Telegraphic Agency: “Feeling excluded in the literary world, Jews are launching their own publishing houses” READ HERE

CALLS TO ACTION

Public libraries are invited to apply for the 2026-2027 cohort of Between Two Worlds, a national program from the Yiddish Book Center that explores Jewish culture and identity through Yiddish literature in translation. Deadline to apply: August 14, 2026. APPLY HERE

The Jewish Book Garden’s kidlit discussion series, "How Does Our Garden Grow?" will meet on Sunday, August 16 at 1:30PM ET for a Zoom discussion of the picture book Shabbat Is... by A.J. Sass. REGISTER HERE

The 2026 Jew­ish Book Coun­cil Vir­tu­al Writ­ers’ Con­fer­ence will take place on November 8, 2026. Pan­el proposals will be accepted until August 18. LEARN MORE HERE

EPISODE SHOW NOTES

• Buy Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah

• Rachelle Burk’s website

• Rabbi Ed’s Repair the Sea website

• The Undersea World of Jacques Cousteau trailer and playlist

• Tikkun Olam: Sign up for Reverse Tashlich and avoid single-use plastic

• Sample Share Your Shelf bonus segment — free for all subscribers this month! This is what the bonus segments always look like, take a peek.

SHARE YOUR SHELF SHOW NOTES

From Rabbi Ed’s Shelf:

• Why the Moon Only Glows by Dina Rosenfeld

• Hairy McClary from Donaldson’s Dairy by Lynley Dodd (see Sam Neill read-aloud video)

• The Korban Mincha

From Rachelle’s Shelf:

• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (hear 2008 Book of Life interview)

• Toby Belfer Never Had a Christmas Tree by Gloria Teles Pushker

And today, one from Heidi’s Shelf:

• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (not Jewish, but you’ll hear why when you listen to the segment)

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 0:00

[COLD OPEN] The book is alive. It tells a story. When my wife and I got married, I took the boutonniere that I wore and I pressed it in the section of the Torah portion for that week, and I wrote our names and the date. And somewhere along the line, somebody else is going to find this book. The book, it’s alive. It embodies to me books in general. Books are living things, and they tell stories, and not just the stories on the page, but the stories of the people who turn the page, and the stories of the people who listen to them, and the children who fall asleep to these stories, and the parents who cuddle with their kids, people who are praying from the books. That book to me embodies what books really are.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:51

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. Rabbi Ed Rosenthal is the founder of Tikkun HaYam, or Repair the Sea, a nonprofit dedicated to keeping our oceans clean. Rachelle Burk is the author of Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah, Reverse Tashlich for a Better World, a picture book biography about Rabbi Ed. Today, I’ve got both of them on the podcast for an inspiring conversation about citizen science and water Torah. You can find show notes, a transcript, and bonus content at BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com.

Usually, I start each episode of The Book of Life with a clip from within the interview, but today’s cold open is from Rachelle and Rabbi Ed’s Share Your Shelf segment. The Share Your Shelf bonus segments are a treat for paid subscribers to The Book of Life, but this time I’m sharing the segment with everybody for free. You’ll hear it at the end of this episode — just keep listening. If you’d like to hear other guests share their shelves, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription to support the podcast. Thanks, and Shanah Tovah. [MUSIC FADES]

Rachelle Burk and Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, welcome to The Book of Life.

Rachelle Burk 2:18

Thank you!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 2:19

Thank you for having us!

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:21

Rachelle, tell us about Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah. Just briefly, what is it about? Like an elevator pitch.

Rachelle Burk 2:27

Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah is a picture book biography about Rabbi Rosenthal’s organization Tikkun HaYam, which is about repairing the sea. It started with his organization at Hillel, the Scubi Jews, which he can tell you more about, and it eventually became this worldwide organization, and I found it so inspiring, I just knew that kids would too.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:52

So, Rachelle, how did you learn about Rabbi Ed and Tikkun HaYam, Repair the Sea?

Rachelle Burk 2:59

I had written already two Jewish true adventure stories. It started with Space Torah about astronaut Jeffrey Hoffman, who took the Torah into space. And then I discovered this awesome story about a Jewish mother and daughter who climbed Mount Everest and had a Passover Seder at base camp on the mountain. And I really wanted to do more true Jewish adventure stories, and because I’m a scuba diver, I really wanted to find one with that, and I put in lots of Google searches with holiday names and scuba diving, or sea. I could find nothing at all. Now, the illustrator of my two previous books was really determined to work on another book together, and he did research, and then pitched me the story, and I said, “Well, we found it! This is our next book!” And that’s how it came about. And another little interesting factoid is, when he told me about it and I started looking up the organization, and looking up about Ed, I discovered that he’s based in Tampa, and I was set to go to Tampa one month later for a school visit. And so we were able to meet, and the plan was to go on a scuba dive together….

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:09

Oh, that’s amazing! So it was meant to be.

Rachelle Burk 4:11

It was meant to be until, until the boat wouldn’t start. So we were all there, ready to go.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal

That’s right.

Rachelle Burk

But I got a lot of good interviews. I know we will ultimately go scuba diving together.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 4:20

We will, we will.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:22

So, Rabbi, how did the organization Repair the Sea come about?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 4:28

It came about because I worked with Hillel, the Foundation for Jewish Campus Life, for 23 years, and in an effort to engage students who wouldn’t normally come to Hillel, I started a Jewish scuba club. Because I was of the mindset that any activity becomes a Jewish activity when Jews do it together. So being an avid scuba diver, I started a scuba club at my Hillel, it was called Scubi Jew, and the students loved it, and it just grew over the years because the students who participated were mostly marine science majors, and so they were getting their passion for the ocean fulfilled through their studies. So it forced me really to do a — no pun intended — but a deep dive into what Judaism teaches about water. And what I found just sort of blew me away.

In our tradition, we see water on a very superficial level as an agent for purification, or a vehicle for miracles, or a metaphor, but there’s really so much more to it. And I shared that with the students, and it was a whole ‘nother… it’s like a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, there’s two great tastes that taste great together, [LAUGHTER] and Judaism and water in the ocean just go together beautifully.

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:48

So, you’re saying that there’s more to it than that surface level…

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 5:52

So much more!

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:53

Again, no pun intended [LAUGHTER]. Can you tell us a bit of that? What is the deeper meaning of water in Judaism?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 5:59

I mean, if we’ve got a couple hours, I could keep telling you. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, it’s… we think about miracles in water, we think about the parting of the Red Sea, or Miriam’s well, or Noah’s Ark, but what we don’t realize is, for example, in the very beginning of the Torah, where it says, Bereshit bara Elohim et hashamayim ve'et ha'arets, in the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And then it says, veruach Elohim merachefet al-peney hamayim, the spirit of God — it’s always translated as “hovered” on the surface of the water, but what people don’t recognize is that word for hovered is actually in the present tense, and so a better translation should be “the spirit of God is on the water,” because it’s not until the next verse, which says, and God said, ‘Let there be light, and there was light,” and that’s usually where people jump to, that’s where creation began. But the reality is that the water existed before God even spoke. And then when you start getting into other aspects of it, the parallels between our understanding of — call it God, call it whatever you want — and water: God is omnipresent, water is everywhere, God is MeChayei HaKol, the one who gives life to all. Water gives life to everything. And there’s actually a Kabbalistic text, which in the Kabbalistic cosmology, how the Kabbalah understands the nature of the world or the universe, they see everything in our world as a reflection of its true metaphysical spiritual self. So the question has to be asked, if everything in this world is a reflection of its true spiritual essence, what in our world is a reflection of what they refer to as the light, God. And Sefer HaBahir, a first century Kabbalistic text, states explicitly, Or... HaChayim Shel Mayim, that the Light, in our world, is reflected as water. And so when you think about the fact that every living organism on this planet is made up mostly of water, you begin to recognize that the spiritual essence of everything is interconnected. You know, water has no beginning and has no end. Maimonides said, God has no beginning and no…. you know, water that I’m drinking is billions of years old, but it’s fresh and delicious. There’s so much more there, and I could, I could ramble on and on. I hope you’re going to edit this, because otherwise it will be…. [LAUGHTER]

Rachelle Burk 8:37

I love listening to you talk!

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:40

Yeah, this is great! This is amazing.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 8:42

Thank you.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:43

So, you created Scubi Jew as a way for the Jewish Hillel students to get together. How did that evolve into Repair the Sea, Tikkun HaYam?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 8:51

Well, I was teaching some Scubi Jew students back in 2016 about tashlich, and I said to them, On Rosh Hashanah, we go to a body of water, and we symbolically cast off our sins or our negativity from the previous year, so that we can enter the new year with a clean heart. And one of the students — you know, when you work with college students, there’s one in every crowd — and this one student said, You know, Rabbi, there’s already more than enough human sin in the water, why don’t we take some of that out instead? And I said, That’s a great idea, let’s do a reverse tashlich! The school is Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, and it’s a waterfront campus. So I had five students, and they removed about 75 pounds of debris from the mangroves on campus, nobody had ever cleaned them. And the following year I had 10 students, and then I had this idea to reach out to all the synagogues in the Tampa Bay area and invite them to join us, and I was amazed at the response. Every synagogue participated. The following year, I reached out to other synagogues in Florida, and I was just motivated by the response I was getting, that everybody thought this was a wonderful idea, and they wanted to be a part of it. And I am passionate about Judaism, and I’m passionate about the ocean. Since nobody else in the Jewish environmental world is doing water in the ocean, I thought, why not? It’s got to be raised, because the Jewish community is not engaged in awareness about the ocean.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:18

So, I just want to make sure that our listeners understand about tashlich and reverse tashlich, so let’s define tashlich in the first place.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 10:28

Tashlich is a ceremony on Rosh Hashanah where we go to a body of water — a lake, the ocean, a river — and symbolically cast off the negativity that we have in us from the previous year as we enter the new year. And a lot of people do it with bread crumbs but I always tell people don’t use bread crumbs because it’s bad for the birds and it’s bad for the fish, it’s not their normal food, so use seashells or pebbles — it’s much better.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:55

That’s a good idea, I never thought of that. Reverse tashlich — again with the metaphors [LAUGHTER] — dive a little deeper into reverse tashlich. How does that work?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 11:04

The sad fact is that there is human pollution in every body of water. The reverse tashlich, really it encourages people to go to a body of water wherever they live — not everybody is on the ocean, we have teams joining us in Oklahoma, in Wisconsin, in Africa, all around the world. So they go to a body of water, and we have a service that goes with it, and connect to it from a Jewish perspective, that what we’re doing is the fulfillment of the mitzvah of bal tashchit, which is the prohibition against needless waste and destruction, and it also is connected to the mitzvah of tza'ar ba'alei chayim, which is the prohibition against causing pain to animals, because when the plastic and the chemicals and the debris gets in the water, the marine life ingests it, and it can kill them slowly and painfully. So that’s why we do this. People do beach cleanups all the time, and that’s wonderful. What we’re doing is connecting it to A) the new year and B) to mitzvot. And the idea is that whenever you have a beach cleanup, it’s a good thing, but when you have a beach cleanup and you do it as something that’s holy, you raise it to a higher consciousness and a higher level, and that’s the reason for the reverse tashlich.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:21

I love that. So, I’m a child of the 70s, so I watched The Undersea world of Jacques Cousteau on TV.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 12:28

Absolutely!

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:30

I enjoyed the shout-out in the book, but today’s young readers are probably not familiar with the show. So, Rachelle, why did you decide that it was important to include it?

Rachelle Burk 12:40

Because it’s part of Ed’s story, [LAUGHTER] That’s exactly the question that I asked him, what got you interested? Go back to your childhood, when did you first get interested in the ocean? And he told me how he used to watch that show and imagine himself like that, and if you see the illustration that Craig Orback did on that page, where he’s like lying on the floor watching television, but in his mind these, all these creatures are swimming around in his living room. He did an amazing job.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:09

So, for any listeners who are not familiar with Jacques Cousteau, could you tell a little bit about him?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 13:15

Jacques Cousteau was a French oceanographer, and he invented scuba. We know scuba as the name of this equipment that people use when they go diving underwater, but SCUBA is actually an acronym, it’s Self-Contained Underwater Breathing Apparatus, and it was invented by Jacques Cousteau. People were in the ocean long before that, but what he created made it possible for people to be untethered and become part of the environment, as opposed to being tethered to the surface for their air.

Rachelle Burk 13:48

You know, Ed, I’m glad that you answered that question, because I just learned something new. I did not know that Jacques Cousteau invented scuba equipment. I knew about the acronym, but I didn’t know that it was Jacques Cousteau!

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:59

I’ll put a link in the show notes to some YouTube videos of Jacques Cousteau, so people can get a taste of that.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 14:04

Oh, that would be wonderful! That would be wonderful.

Rachelle Burk 14:06

Yeah, really.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 14:07

And, as strange as it sounds, and it wasn’t in the book, because it’s a little creepy, one of my favorite movies of all time is The Creature from the Black Lagoon. [LAUGHTER]

Rachelle Burk 14:18

Oh, I love that one, I love that one! I still have an image of that black and white creature walking back into the lagoon.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 14:22

Yes, but what people have probably lost sight of is, if you go to the very beginning of the movie, the movie begins not with the creature, not with anybody in the Amazon. It begins with a narrator saying, In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth, and the earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep.

Rachelle Burk 14:43

Wow, I’m gonna have to go back and watch it now.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 14:45

Yeah, it starts off with Torah!

Rachelle Burk 14:47

[LAUGHTER] Wow!

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:49

That’s awesome. This conversation is going in directions I didn’t expect! [LAUGHTER] So, the illustrations by Craig Orback are fairly realistic. I can definitely recognize the actual Florida landscape in them. Do either of you have a favorite scene that you’d like to call out?

Rachelle Burk 15:09

There’s the end pages at the beginning that I really like, and Craig, and I talked about it because I said, this is kind of what I envisioned. I don’t tell him what to do with any of the other images, because there’s no way that I can ever imagine anything as good as an illustrator can, but I said I sort of imagine before it even starts, showing how one little piece of plastic can work its way into the sewer, and then into a little stream, and then how it just works its way right into the ocean, to make people really aware how one tossing away of something can end up harming an animal. And so I really love how he did it. It was better than anything I could have imagined. So that’s one of my favorites, even though it’s before it starts. And I also love, besides the one at the beginning, where the creatures are in the room, I love that one, the way it mixes the reality with the fantasy. He does it similarly in the scene where Ed is talking to the congregation, and he’s sort of wanting them to envision themselves as part of the ocean. He kind of incorporates the fantasy into it.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:06

We see people floating underwater, wearing prayer shawls, wearing kippahs, holding a Torah. Books are floating around! [LAUGHTER]

Rachelle Burk 16:14

Right. The text says “At Shabbat services, Ed spoke to his students about how the Torah teaches the importance of protecting our environment. If only they could see what he had seen on his underwater adventures, colorful reefs bursting with life.” So he’s imagining them seeing it, in a service that they’re under the ocean, surrounded by shark, a stingray, you know, turtles, fish, you know, of all kinds. So it’s really just a fantastical and fun illustration,

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:43

Awesome. Thank you. Rabbi, do you have a favorite illustration that you want to talk about?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 16:48

I love them all. I have to say, Craig did something so beautiful. He did this school of fish in the shape of a heart.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:57

Oh, yes, you’re right, it’s subtle.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 17:00

Yeah, it’s very subtle.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:01

To describe this scene: we have a bunch of divers with their scuba equipment on, and there’s some other creatures there watching them pick up trash. There’s an octopus and a manatee and a turtle helpfully carrying a shopping bag in its mouth, like it’s about to hand it over to them. [LAUGHTER] And you’re right, the school of fish that’s that’s schooling behind them is forming a heart shape.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 17:22

And I love this one, because what it’s saying to me is, marine life just lives. I mean, it’s there with you, and I like to think that they recognize that when we’re there, we’re trying to do some good for them, and so that’s what I saw in that picture.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:40

Yeah. I’ll just tell you that one of the illustrations I really like is the illustration of Rabbi Ed sitting on a rock at the edge of the water with your feet in the water, and I love how in this illustration, you’re dry but there’s rain happening just beyond you, [LAUGHTER] and that is so Florida to be sitting there in the sun and the rain at the same time.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal

It is so Florida! [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:06

Yeah. It’s Tikkun Olam time. So, this whole book and the whole Repair the Sea organization are about Tikkun Olam. So, you could go into more detail about repairing the sea, or if you’d like, you can call out any other action you’d like listeners to take to help heal the world.

Rachelle Burk 18:26

Well, as you know, I recently returned from a scuba trip to Indonesia, and whenever we dove near land, as opposed to the dives that were in the middle of the ocean (because we were on a live-aboard, we were living on the boat for over a week), but when the dives were near land, we encountered a deeply discouraging amount of garbage in the coral reefs. While I was away, I actually sent Ed a photo that I took of a jellyfish that had a piece of plastic trapped inside its transparent body, and I have not been able to shake that image. It’s just swimming around with this thing stuck inside its body that you can see through it. So, my Tikkun Olam challenge is actually, it’s really a Tikkun HaYam challenge, is I encourage listeners and any organizations they’re part of to sign up for Repair the Sea’s Reverse Tashlich program and any other ocean or beach cleanup. And also to seriously consider ways to reduce their use of single-use plastics, because it was an enormous amount of that in the water, so for me that’s what I would hope the takeaway would be, is how important the ocean is, and how whether it’s a straw or a plastic bag that just blows away in a drain in a suburb, that will end up in the ocean eventually.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 19:40

The book of Ecclesiastes says all rivers run to the sea, so no matter where you are, our garbage ends up in the ocean. You know, in the Jewish communal agenda, the environment is very low, especially after October 7, and it’s understandable. But water in the ocean is not even on the radar. And in the Jewish environmental world it’s all about climate change. The reality is that if our planet gets hotter, it’s not going to be very nice. I mean, we’ve got an idyllic situation now, but we’re humans and we will adapt, because that’s what humans do. But the ocean as we know it is dying, and there’s a very simple fact: if the ocean dies, we all die, because the planet cannot sustain life with a dead ocean. The ocean produces 50 to 70% of all the oxygen we breathe on earth, and what we’re doing to it is a gross violation, in so many ways, of Jewish values and ethics and mitzvot. And so, as Rachelle said, I would encourage everyone to either join a reverse tashlich team where they live, if it already happens, or start one. RepairTheSea.org, it’s under Cleanups. Last year’s Reverse Tashlich had 320 teams in 31 countries.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:58

Wow!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 20:58

We want more, because we want to raise this awareness. So join a reverse tashlich team or start one of your own, and as Rachelle said, get reusable products instead of single use. It’s so much better and so easy. It’s so easy.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:15

Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Rachelle Burk 21:18

RachelleBurk.com. Of course, they’ll probably misspell my name because everybody does, it’s R A C H E L L E B U R K, No “e” dot com.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 21:31

And for me it’s just RepairTheSea.org. It talks about our programs. Most importantly, we have a section on our website called Ocean Issues, what the issues are from a scientific perspective and a conservation perspective, and then what is the correlation in Judaism that connects us to it.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:51

That’s great. I love that.

I am not a scuba diver, but both of you are, so I want to ask you each to tell me a little bit about scuba diving and why you love it.

Rachelle Burk 22:02

I actually just got back from scuba diving trip in Indonesia. It’s hard to describe, as I can tell you, there’s nothing else like it that I’ve ever experienced. I didn’t learn to scuba dive until I was 52. I have close to 350 dives now. That’s how into it, you know, my husband and I are, and when you’re under the water, and when you’re seeing things that you didn’t even know existed, the marine life you’re seeing from a Jewish perspective, or any religious aspect… if anybody has questions about the existence of God, you can’t see these things without having a sense that this can’t be by accident. I never feel closer to the creator than when I am under the ocean. I never feel a greater sense of peace.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal

Me too.

Rachelle Burk

Yeah, yeah, with my busy, never-quiet mind, there is nothing that gives me the quiet and peace as I feel when I am under the ocean.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:57

That’s beautiful.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 23:00

What she said. [LAUGHTER]

I feel the same way as Rachelle, and I’m a terrible rabbi, because I feel closer to God when I’m under water than I do in any synagogue. Psalm 95 says, Asher lo hayam, the sea is God’s. When you think about it, you can put a human being anywhere on dry land, in a desert, on a mountain, in a forest, in a jungle, in a city, in a town, in the plains, and with the proper skills, that person can survive. But you drop a human being in the middle of the ocean, and they won’t. Why? Because the ocean is not ours, the sea is God’s. Going back to what I said before, every living being is mostly water. Our bodies are 70% water. 70% of the planet is water. So, when I’m underwater, I’m connected to everything. I do a lovely program with students. We do an underwater meditation on the Shema.

Rachelle Burk 23:55

Wow!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 23:56

Because, because when you’re underwater and when you’re connected to the water, you literally are touching every corner of the earth, or you’re connected to it.

Rachelle Burk 24:07

Can I add another sensation? And I think Ed will agree with this too. It isn’t just that sense of peace as you’re looking at the beauty, but everything that you see, the most phenomenal, the most strange, the most spectacularly gorgeous creatures under the ocean. You’re not just looking at them, you’re being with them.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 24:27

Yes!

Rachelle Burk 24:28

You know, I have pictures that I’m so close to a turtle, practically nose to nose. You know, they don’t all see you as a threat, and so you’re actually with them, you’re part of their world. While you’re down there, you can have a shark swimming right by you, and it doesn’t give you a second look, because it just sees you as one of them, and you start to feel like you’re really a part of it. There’s just no experience like it in the world. Is that how you feel too?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 24:54

Absolutely. If you go on safari in Africa, you have to stay in your Land Rover, otherwise the lions will eat you. But in the ocean, I’ve been diving with bull sharks, and everybody says, Oh, bull sharks. Not for a second did I feel any threat or danger. They are so graceful, and so powerful, and beautiful, and they just swam right around us, and there was never any worry.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:23

Wow. Well, do either of you have any scuba diving stories, like a particularly wonderful or eventful or unusual thing that happened?

Rachelle Burk 25:37

Many, many, many stories like that. Yeah, there was a time that we were just about to get back on the boat, and I could hear this little chattery sound, and I look around me, and suddenly we’re surrounded by dolphins! And all the dives I’ve been, I’ve only seen dolphins while I was underwater five times, so it’s a fairly rare experience, but to be surrounded by them… and they’re fascinated with you, just as you’re fascinated with them, and they’re playing with the bubbles that you’re making, you know, with your dive equipment, and they’re curious, and they’re going around, and then they leave, and then they come back. That was truly amazing.

Then there was another time that I was on a night dive, it was in the Philippines, and I saw the most beautiful octopus. It was very tiny, and it had these incredible blue rings visible on it. I didn’t know what I was looking at, but I was taking photos of it, and I get back on the boat, and I say this to the dive master, I said, Look what I saw, look what I took a picture of, and he says, Do you know what that thing is? You know that is that is the very rare, very deadly blue-ringed octopus, and the rings only appear when it’s feeling threatened. And of course, at this point I already was, you know, experienced to know you just don’t touch anything underwater, which is a good thing, because I might not be here talking to you right now! [LAUGHTER] So, those are those are two of many, many, many experiences. Oh, I got body slammed by an eagle ray during a night dive in Cozumel.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 26:59

Oh, really? [LAUGHTER]

Rachelle Burk 27:00

Yeah, I don’t think it liked my light, and it came right at me and slammed me in the chest.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 27:04

No kidding!

Rachelle Burk 27:05

Yeah, you can even hear me on my video going, OOF. [LAUGHTER]

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 27:09

You know, I think because the underwater world is so foreign to us as terrestrial beings, every experience underwater is just magical. When you breathe underwater: we’re not supposed to do that, and to do it and not die is kind of a big deal. [LAUGHTER]

I’ve only had encounters underwater with dolphins once, and it was the most magical experience I’ve probably ever had. I went early in the morning in Israel to the Katza dive site in Eilat. I was told that they would be there early in the morning, and there were no dolphins. They were getting ready to turn around and go back to shore, and all of a sudden I heard chirping. It was getting louder, and then I actually could almost feel my skin tingle because of their sonar, and next thing I knew, two huge dolphins came right up to me and my dive buddy! And you don’t touch anything, but they were right there, and I wanted to hug them, but I knew better. They were probably there for only a minute, but it was just, it was just magical.

And last year being in the water with whale sharks. You can’t scuba dive with whale sharks in Mexico, you can only snorkel with them there, but to snorkel with whale sharks is an incredibly humbling experience. They are just these gentle giants that don’t hurt anything and are about the size of a school bus, and when you’re in the water, and this magnificent being is swimming right towards you. I mean, we’re the ones who have to get out of their way [LAUGHTER], but when they’re coming right at you, and their mouths are open because they’re filter feeders or skimmer feeders, it’s just, you know, I think humans have to recalibrate our awe meter [LAUGHTER], because we don’t experience awe often enough. The awe meter was a phrase coined by Rabbi Jamie Korngold, who is a friend and who’s just amazing. She’s written some children’s books as well. She was the one who said Recalibrate our awe meter, because we don’t experience it enough, but when you’re underwater and you see these wonders, you can’t help it. You experience awe.

Heidi Rabinowitz 29:27

Is there anything else that either of you want to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Rachelle Burk 29:32

I would like to add that for any of those who say, Wow, scuba diving sounds fun, I just want to reiterate that I was 52 when I learned, and the group that I was scuba diving with, there were people in their 70s. If it’s something you’re interested in, and you’re already a senior like me, you can still do it. It’s not difficult physically, and so I really encourage anybody to look into it, and if it’s something that would interest you.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 29:55

Also being deeply engaged with the water is not easy. It requires a commitment. It’s easy to go for a hike in the woods and to meditate, but you have to learn how to be scuba certified. You have to learn how to sail anything that gets you on the water. You can’t just do it, and it takes that level of commitment to recognize that there’s something so incredibly powerful and awesome about the water that you can’t just walk into it, you got to really be prepared, but once you’ve made that kind of commitment, you’re hooked. That’s all there is to it.

Heidi Rabinowitz 30:36

It’s an interesting point that you can learn it when you’re older. How young can you scuba dive?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 30:42

They’ve got a junior certification at 10.

Rachelle Burk 30:45

Yeah, there’s restrictions on that, but you can be really young.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 30:48

Yeah.

Rachelle Burk 30:49

One of the things that has given me, I can’t express how much joy, is going on dive trips with my entire family. To be able to share it with your children is just such an extraordinary thing.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 31:01

My son is a diver. When he was actually, I guess he was 14, I took a group of Hillel students on a trip to Curaçao to combine scuba diving and Jewish heritage, and I brought my son along. We were holding hands and diving together, and it was just… it’s one of those memories of our kids’ childhood that we just never will forget.

Rachelle Burk 31:22

Doesn’t it make you like the coolest parent too?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 31:25

[LAUGHTER] Yeah, well, you know the reason I started Scubi Jew, and I’ll admit this: I am an incorrigible shadchan, a matchmaker. Scuba is like the most bonding experience you can ever have, because when you’re underwater, your life literally is in your buddy’s hands, and you’re seeing wonders that you can’t even imagine, but you can’t talk. And so you get above the surface, and it’s like, Oh my god, did you see that? Just so I started Scubi Jew when I was the campus rabbi at Emory University, and I wanted to buddy nice Jewish boys with nice Jewish girls… or nice Jewish boys with nice Jewish boys, I don’t care. Just to buddy them up together to strengthen relationships, maybe make a match here and there. I just think that it’s the most bonding experience you can have, and encourage parents and children alike to do it together.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:16

Rachelle and Rabbi Ed, we’re going to go talk about your personal libraries now to see what books you’ll be sharing from your own shelves, but in the meantime, Rachelle Burk and Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, thank you so much for speaking with me today, and Shana Tova. [MUSIC FADES IN]

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal

Shana Tova, thank you!

Rachelle Burk 32:33

Shana Tova.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:35

Share Your Shelf bonus segments are a treat for paid subscribers to The Book of Life, but this time I’m sharing the segment with everybody for free. Just keep listening! If you’d like to hear other guests share their shelves, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription at BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com.

[MUSIC FADES OUT] This is The Book of Life’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment with Rachelle Burk, author of the picture book biography Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah, and Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, the subject of that biography. Check the show notes for a link to their full interview.

So let’s set the scene by learning about your home libraries and how you organize your books, so Rachelle, let me start with you.

Rachelle Burk 33:25

I don’t actually save very many adult books, unless it’s a reference book that I’m going to go back to over and over. There’s so many books in the world, and I can’t get them all, so I’m not likely to read the same one again. The exception is children’s books. I’ve saved like a few hundred of the ones that my children loved the most, and of course, I know a lot of children’s authors, so I love collecting their books, signed copies when I can. So my children’s library is organized by type, like the age range of the children, and I have a separate section for my Jewish books, and within that, a separate section of my signed Jewish children’s books, and I’ve been saving all those for when I have my own grandchildren to share them with. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 34:06

All right, great. And Rabbi, how about your bookshelves?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 34:10

My bookshelves are out of control. [LAUGHTER] If we’re talking children’s books, my favorite children’s book was by Dina Rosenfeld, Why the Moon Only Glows. The story in the Torah about how the sun is the mightier, the bigger of the two lights. It’s about two children that their father is explaining this Torah story to, and I actually whited out the names of the two children and put my own kids’ names in [LAUGHTER], just try to make it more personal. As far as a non-Jewish children’s book, I used to live in New Zealand. Our son was born there, and the classic New Zealand children’s book is Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. [LAUGHTER] So that was a real favorite in our house, and still is.

Heidi Rabinowitz 34:59

That’s a great title.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 35:00

Well, in fact, it’s such a classic in New Zealand: during Covid, Sam Neill, the actor who’s from New Zealand, has a whole YouTube of him reading Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 35:11

Oh, how fun. I’ll have to look for that.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 35:13

You have to look for it. It’s great.

Heidi Rabinowitz 35:15

So I’m going to ask each of you what books you would like to share from your personal bookshelf. So, Rabbi, you shared children’s books. Do you have any other books that you wanted to mention from your own shelves?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 35:27

I have a book that is precious to me. When I was in rabbinical school, I was sent to a small synagogue in deep south Texas as a student rabbi, and there was a little building behind the synagogue they used to use for their religious school, and it had been empty for years. There were boxes in the Sunday school building that had just been sitting there forever, and could I look through them to see if I found anything? And I went, and the building hadn’t been opened in years, and it was like so hot and horrible, and there were lizards and snakes, it was terrifying. And there were boxes of books, and they were all old Sunday school books that, when you touched them, they just fell apart. And I put my hand in a box, and I hit something solid. It was a bima sized edition of an old sidur called Korban Mincha. And I took it out, I started looking at it. It was published by the Romm Press in Vilna in 1864. The Romm Press was the biggest Jewish publishing house in Europe prior to the Holocaust. And I started thumbing through the pages. It was such high quality paper. I got to the section of the Pilgrimage Festivals, the Shalosh Regalim, and somebody had put in the spine of the book four 4-leaf clovers and I thought, Oh my gosh, Who did that? And then I started turning more, and I saw splotches on the page, and I thought, What is this? And it was the Haggadah and the Dam, Tzefardeia, somebody dipped their fingers in the cup of wine and touched it to the book. And then I looked closer, and there were matzah crumbs, where we say the mitzvah of eating matzah, Al Achilat Matzah, and then I looked back a few other pages, and there were bread crumbs for the Bedikat Chametz, and then I kept looking through this book, and I got to the section of Selichot, of prayers before Rosh Hashanah. I got to the prayer for a sick child, and I turned the page, and there was a lock of blond hair with a blue ribbon around it, and then I moved it to the side, and underneath was written “Helen, May 22, 1895.”

Rachelle Burk 37:40

Wow.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 37:41

And the book is precious to me, not only because of the book itself as a prayer book. The book is alive. It tells a story. When my wife and I got married, I took the boutonniere that I wore and I pressed it in the section of the Torah portion for that week, and I wrote our names and the date. And somewhere along the line, somebody else is going to find this book. The book, it’s alive. It embodies, to me, books in general. Books are living things, and they tell stories, and not just the stories on the page, but the stories of the people who turn the page, and the stories of the people who listen to them, and the children who fall asleep to these stories, and the parents who cuddle with their kids, people who are praying from the books. That book to me embodies what books really are.

Heidi Rabinowitz 38:36

That is an amazing story. It’s like a real-world version of People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks about the Sarajevo Haggadah. She imagines what happened to make these artifacts present in the book afterwards. So you found the same thing, you found the actual stuff in the book that represents people living with the book and using the book! [LAUGHTER]

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 38:58

Yes, yeah!

Heidi Rabinowitz 38:59

Actually, it reminds me also of a personal book of mine. It’s not a Jewish book, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. When I was college age, I had a copy that I loved, and I reread, and then I lent it to my friend Matt so that he could read it. For years, I was like, What happened to my copy of The Dispossessed, whatever happened to that book? [LAUGHTER] Well, we didn’t see each other for 18 years... and then we reconnected… and now we’re married.

Rachelle Burk

Oh!

Heidi Rabinowitz

We each had — we each brought with us our copy of The Dispossessed, and when I saw his copy: that was my old copy [LAUGHTER] that I didn’t know for years what happened to it. And in it there was a note from when people used to take telephone messages in his mom’s handwriting, where she wrote, “Heidi called you, call her back,” [LAUGHTER] and it was stuck in the book as a bookmark!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal

Oh, that’s great!

Heidi Rabinowitz

That book now represents the earlier part of our connection and the later part of our connection. So that’s, you know, artifacts in books, it’s pretty amazing.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 40:05

I love it. That’s great.

Rachelle Burk 40:05

That is so weird. What a great story!

Heidi Rabinowitz 40:09

So, Rachelle, what book would you like to share from your personal bookshelf?

Rachelle Burk 40:14

It’s really funny, because even before Ed mentioned that book that he’s talking about, I was thinking of Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, and as he’s telling that story, I’m thinking, Oh, wow, I’ve got to tell him that, that this is just like the book I was going to recommend!

Heidi Rabinowitz 40:31

Oh, that’s so perfect! That’s the book you were going to talk about?

Rachelle Burk 40:33

That was the adult book. If you recall, there was the present day woman who actually found this Haggadah, and there were so many mysteries, because it was supposed to be printed in one place, and they had some artifacts in the book, like book plates that were created that was from one country, yet that there was flowers pressed in the book that was only from another… and so it goes back in time, and they have different chapters that actually take the reader back to that time, starting from when the book was written, and this goes back hundreds of years, and then it goes through how the book got in different hands and in different countries, and then finally where it is today. It was just an amazing book.

So, my complaint was, I listened to it in audio. There’s two different ways you can say Haggadah. You can say HagGAdah, or in Hebrew, they would say HaggaDAH. You’d think that the narrator of the book would have researched it a little, but continued to say it HAggadah the whole time, and it drove me absolutely crazy. [LAUGHTER] HAggadah, and it’s like, really?? It’s the one thing you should have gotten right in this book! But that was the one that I was going to share, in terms of a Jewish book.

Heidi Rabinowitz 41:36

That’s like so perfect that you shared that particular book after what we just talked about. I also want to point out that actually, because this podcast has been going for so long, I interviewed Geraldine Brooks about People of the Book, like 19 years ago, or whatever it was. So…

Rachelle Burk 41:54

Oh, wow.

Heidi Rabinowitz 41:55

Yeah. So, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Rachelle Burk 41:58

She’s pretty awesome. I just absolutely adore her writing. So, in terms of a children’s book, probably my oldest children’s book that I have on my shelf, but it’s also the one that is the most deeply personal to me, it’s called Toby Belfer Never Had a Christmas Tree. It was published by Pelican Books, which is a Louisiana publisher, in 1991. And this children’s book was written by my late, very beloved great aunt. It was the first in what became a series of picture books about a young Jewish girl growing up in rural Louisiana. And what makes this book especially meaningful to me is that, although it’s written as fiction, it is rooted in my own family’s history. What happened in the book really did happen. I’m a third-generation descendant of Russian immigrants who settled in New Orleans, where the Jewish community was and still is very small, and this book opened the door to conversations with my aunt about her experiences growing up as part of the only Jewish family in this small Louisiana town. So I think of this book in the context of L’dor Vador, the passing of stories, values, and identity from one generation to the next, and notably, this book is still in print since 1991.

Heidi Rabinowitz 43:11

And that’s quite a feat, because books go out of print quick.

Rachelle Burk 43:14

Absolutely, absolutely.

Heidi Rabinowitz 43:17

This is amazing. I’m so happy that we were able to have this conversation, because this has been just incredible. Was there anything else that you guys wanted to share before we wrap it up?

Rachelle Burk 43:27

Well, Ed and I have been planning to have a book release event underwater on a scuba dive in Florida. We’re working out the details of that, but it is going to happen. This is going to be the most exciting book release event that I’ve ever had.

Heidi Rabinowitz 43:40

So, won’t the book get ruined if you take it underwater? Like, how does that work?

Rachelle Burk 43:45

Well, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, yeah, it will. It could be worth it, or we also bat around the idea of laminating a photo of the cover and taking that, so it could be one of the other. You know, if we take it down and it’s all ruined and wet, it’s almost like a keepsake that this is the one that went underwater.

Heidi Rabinowitz 44:02

That’s true. Well, Rachelle and Rabbi Ed, thank you so much for sharing your shelves and for joining me on the book of life. Happy reading!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 44:10

Thank you, Heidi.

Rachelle Burk 44:11

Thank you, and thank you so much for having us.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Shana tova!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 44:15

Shana Tova to you.

Rachelle Burk 44:16

Shana Tova.

[MUSIC, DEDICATION]

Amy Fellner Dominy 44:20

Hi, this is Amy Fellner Dominy, author of A House with No Door.

Barbara Lerman-Golomb 44:25

This is Barbara Lerman-Golomb, author of The Sukkah Hop.

Sidura Ludwig 44:28

And this is Sidura Ludwig, author of Our Spectacular Sukkah. We’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast, and we’d like to dedicate this episode to all the sukkah builders, past, present, and future. It’s amazing how this temporary structure is something that we come back to again and again, year after year, and every year when we build a sukkah, it’s like we’re putting ourselves right in the Jewish story. So we just wanted to honor that with this upcoming episode.

Heidi Rabinowitz 45:06

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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This episode’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment is available to all Paid AND Free subscribers. Feel free to share widely!

Click the Play button above to listen to Rachelle and Rabbi Ed’s Share Your Shelf segment. You can hear their full interview HERE.

From Rabbi Ed’s Shelf:

• Why the Moon Only Glows by Dina Rosenfeld

• Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy by Lynley Dodd (see Sam Neill read-aloud video)

• The Korban Mincha

From Rachelle’s Shelf:

• People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks (hear 2008 Book of Life interview)

• Toby Belfer Never Had a Christmas Tree by Gloria Teles Pushker

And today, one from Heidi’s Shelf:

• The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (not Jewish, but you’ll hear why when you listen to the segment)

If you like what you hear, consider becoming a paid subscriber to support the show and gain access to every Share Your Shelf bonus segment!

TRANSCRIPT

Heidi Rabinowitz:

[MUSIC] Share Your Shelf bonus segments are a treat for paid subscribers to The Book of Life, but this time I’m sharing the segment with everybody for free. Just keep listening! If you’d like to hear other guests share their shelves, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription at BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com. [MUSIC FADES OUT]

This is The Book of Life’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment with Rachelle Burk, author of the picture book biography Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah, and Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, the subject of that biography. Check the show notes for a link to their full interview.

So let’s set the scene by learning about your home libraries and how you organize your books, so Rachelle, let me start with you.

Rachelle Burk:

I don’t actually save very many adult books, unless it’s a reference book that I’m going to go back to over and over. There’s so many books in the world, and I can’t get them all, so I’m not likely to read the same one again. The exception is children’s books. I’ve saved like a few hundred of the ones that my children loved the most, and of course, I know a lot of children’s authors, so I love collecting their books, signed copies when I can. So my children’s library is organized by type, like the age range of the children, and I have a separate section for my Jewish books, and within that, a separate section of my signed Jewish children’s books, and I’ve been saving all those for when I have my own grandchildren to share them with. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz:

All right, great. And Rabbi, how about your bookshelves?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

My bookshelves are out of control. [LAUGHTER] If we’re talking children’s books, my favorite children’s book was by Dina Rosenfeld, Why the Moon Only Glows. The story in the Torah about how the sun is the mightier, the bigger of the two lights. It’s about two children that their father is explaining this Torah story to, and I actually whited out the names of the two children and put my own kids’ names in [LAUGHTER], just try to make it more personal. As far as a non-Jewish children’s book, I used to live in New Zealand. Our son was born there, and the classic New Zealand children’s book is Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. [LAUGHTER] So that was a real favorite in our house, and still is.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

That’s a great title.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

Well, in fact, it’s such a classic in New Zealand: during Covid, Sam Neill, the actor who’s from New Zealand, has a whole YouTube of him reading Hairy Maclary from Donaldson’s Dairy. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz:

Oh, how fun. I’ll have to look for that.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

You have to look for it. It’s great.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

So I’m going to ask each of you what books you would like to share from your personal bookshelf. So, Rabbi, you shared children’s books. Do you have any other books that you wanted to mention from your own shelves?

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

I have a book that is precious to me. When I was in rabbinical school, I was sent to a small synagogue in deep south Texas as a student rabbi, and there was a little building behind the synagogue they used to use for their religious school, and it had been empty for years. There were boxes in the Sunday school building that had just been sitting there forever, and could I look through them to see if I found anything? And I went, and the building hadn’t been opened in years, and it was like so hot and horrible, and there were lizards and snakes, it was terrifying. And there were boxes of books, and they were all old Sunday school books that, when you touched them, they just fell apart. And I put my hand in a box, and I hit something solid. It was a bima sized edition of an old sidur called Korban Mincha. And I took it out, I started looking at it. It was published by the Romm Press in Vilna in 1864. The Romm Press was the biggest Jewish publishing house in Europe prior to the Holocaust. And I started thumbing through the pages. It was such high quality paper. I got to the section of the Pilgrimage Festivals, the Shalosh Regalim, and somebody had put in the spine of the book four 4-leaf clovers and I thought, Oh my gosh, Who did that? And then I started turning more, and I saw splotches on the page, and I thought, What is this? And it was the Haggadah and the Dam, Tzefardeia, somebody dipped their fingers in the cup of wine and touched it to the book. And then I looked closer, and there were matzah crumbs, where we say the mitzvah of eating matzah, Al Achilat Matzah, and then I looked back a few other pages, and there were bread crumbs for the Bedikat Chametz, and then I kept looking through this book, and I got to the section of Selichot, of prayers before Rosh Hashanah. I got to the prayer for a sick child, and I turned the page, and there was a lock of blond hair with a blue ribbon around it, and then I moved it to the side, and underneath was written “Helen, May 22, 1895.”

Rachelle Burk:

Wow.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

And the book is precious to me, not only because of the book itself as a prayer book. The book is alive. It tells a story. When my wife and I got married, I took the boutonniere that I wore and I pressed it in the section of the Torah portion for that week, and I wrote our names and the date. And somewhere along the line, somebody else is going to find this book. The book, it’s alive. It embodies, to me, books in general. Books are living things, and they tell stories, and not just the stories on the page, but the stories of the people who turn the page, and the stories of the people who listen to them, and the children who fall asleep to these stories, and the parents who cuddle with their kids, people who are praying from the books. That book to me embodies what books really are.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

That is an amazing story. It’s like a real-world version of People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks about the Sarajevo Haggadah. She imagines what happened to make these artifacts present in the book afterwards. So you found the same thing, you found the actual stuff in the book that represents people living with the book and using the book! [LAUGHTER]

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

Yes, yeah!

Heidi Rabinowitz:

Actually, it reminds me also of a personal book of mine. It’s not a Jewish book, The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin. When I was college age, I had a copy that I loved, and I reread, and then I lent it to my friend Matt so that he could read it. For years, I was like, What happened to my copy of The Dispossessed, whatever happened to that book? [LAUGHTER] Well, we didn’t see each other for 18 years... and then we reconnected… and now we’re married.

Rachelle Burk:

Oh!

Heidi Rabinowitz:

We each had — we each brought with us our copy of The Dispossessed, and when I saw his copy: that was my old copy [LAUGHTER] that I didn’t know for years what happened to it. And in it there was a note from when people used to take telephone messages in his mom’s handwriting, where she wrote, “Heidi called you, call her back,” [LAUGHTER] and it was stuck in the book as a bookmark!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

Oh, that’s great!

Heidi Rabinowitz:

That book now represents the earlier part of our connection and the later part of our connection. So that’s, you know, artifacts in books, it’s pretty amazing.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

I love it. That’s great.

Rachelle Burk:

That is so weird. What a great story!

Heidi Rabinowitz:

So, Rachelle, what book would you like to share from your personal bookshelf?

Rachelle Burk:

It’s really funny, because even before Ed mentioned that book that he’s talking about, I was thinking of Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book, and as he’s telling that story, I’m thinking, Oh, wow, I’ve got to tell him that, that this is just like the book I was going to recommend!

Heidi Rabinowitz:

Oh, that’s so perfect! That’s the book you were going to talk about?

Rachelle Burk:

That was the adult book. If you recall, there was the present day woman who actually found this Haggadah, and there were so many mysteries, because it was supposed to be printed in one place, and they had some artifacts in the book, like book plates that were created that was from one country, yet that there was flowers pressed in the book that was only from another… and so it goes back in time, and they have different chapters that actually take the reader back to that time, starting from when the book was written, and this goes back hundreds of years, and then it goes through how the book got in different hands and in different countries, and then finally where it is today. It was just an amazing book.

So, my complaint was, I listened to it in audio. There’s two different ways you can say Haggadah. You can say HagGAdah, or in Hebrew, they would say HaggaDAH. You’d think that the narrator of the book would have researched it a little, but continued to say it HAggadah the whole time, and it drove me absolutely crazy. [LAUGHTER] HAggadah, and it’s like, really?? It’s the one thing you should have gotten right in this book! But that was the one that I was going to share, in terms of a Jewish book.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

That’s like so perfect that you shared that particular book after what we just talked about. I also want to point out that actually, because this podcast has been going for so long, I interviewed Geraldine Brooks about People of the Book, like 19 years ago, or whatever it was. So…

Rachelle Burk:

Oh, wow.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

Yeah. So, I’ll put a link to that in the show notes.

Rachelle Burk:

She’s pretty awesome. I just absolutely adore her writing. So, in terms of a children’s book, probably my oldest children’s book that I have on my shelf, but it’s also the one that is the most deeply personal to me, it’s called Toby Belfer Never Had a Christmas Tree. It was published by Pelican Books, which is a Louisiana publisher, in 1991. And this children’s book was written by my late, very beloved great aunt. It was the first in what became a series of picture books about a young Jewish girl growing up in rural Louisiana. And what makes this book especially meaningful to me is that, although it’s written as fiction, it is rooted in my own family’s history. What happened in the book really did happen. I’m a third-generation descendant of Russian immigrants who settled in New Orleans, where the Jewish community was and still is very small, and this book opened the door to conversations with my aunt about her experiences growing up as part of the only Jewish family in this small Louisiana town. So I think of this book in the context of L’dor Vador, the passing of stories, values, and identity from one generation to the next, and notably, this book is still in print since 1991.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

And that’s quite a feat, because books go out of print quick.

Rachelle Burk:

Absolutely, absolutely.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

This is amazing. I’m so happy that we were able to have this conversation, because this has been just incredible. Was there anything else that you guys wanted to share before we wrap it up?

Rachelle Burk:

Well, Ed and I have been planning to have a book release event underwater on a scuba dive in Florida. We’re working out the details of that, but it is going to happen. This is going to be the most exciting book release event that I’ve ever had.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

So, won’t the book get ruined if you take it underwater? Like, how does that work?

Rachelle Burk:

Well, yeah. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, yeah, it will. It could be worth it, or we also bat around the idea of laminating a photo of the cover and taking that, so it could be one of the other. You know, if we take it down and it’s all ruined and wet, it’s almost like a keepsake that this is the one that went underwater.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

That’s true. Well, Rachelle and Rabbi Ed, thank you so much for sharing your shelves and for joining me on the book of life. Happy reading!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

Thank you, Heidi.

Rachelle Burk:

Thank you, and thank you so much for having us.

Heidi Rabinowitz:

Shana tova!

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal:

Shana Tova to you.

Rachelle Burk:

Shana Tova.

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Author Lesléa Newman has appeared on The Book of Life Podcast many times, and over the years she’s become a good friend. She writes remarkable books for children and she’s versatile, writing in many different formats for all ages. Her newest book is a poetry collection for adults, The Last Flame Last, a suite of eighteen poems in response to October 7th. Click here to LEARN MORE about the book.

With antizionism and antisemitism running rampant right now, this book is sure to receive pushback, but YOU can do something to support the publishing of works on this important topic: pre-order this book!

The Last Flame Last is available for pre-order from now until September 25, 2026, and it will be released on November 20. Pre-orders are important because they determine the print run and author’s royalty rate, and Lesléa will be donating a portion of her royalties to Beth Israel Congregation of Jackson, Mississippi, to help them rebuild after the January arson attack that heavily damaged their temple. Click here to PRE-ORDER THE BOOK.

Lesléa says:

To the people who ask, “How could you write a book of poems about October 7th and all the antisemitism that has followed?” I answer, “How could I not?” To the people who tell me, “That takes a lot of courage,” I say, “I don’t feel very brave.” And to the people who simply say, “Thank you,” I respond wordlessly, with tear-filled eyes.

October 7th knocked me to the ground. October 8 th threatened to keep me there. Not knowing what else to do, I turned to my usual coping method: writing. I have a bookmark with a quote on it by Pablo Casals: “my cello is my oldest friend, my dearest friend.” That’s how I feel about my pen. It is my oldest and dearest friend. And who better to turn to in times of crisis than an old, dear friend?

When I am wrestling with unwieldly emotions, I always turn to poetry, often formal poetry. I find it helpful to have a container to pour my feelings into. And so I wrote “October 7th Sestina” which is one long howl of grief for all the lives that were destroyed on that terrible day.

After I got that poem onto the page, I was able to exhale. Other poems followed and helped me move through the coming days of mourning the dead, praying for the hostages, and taming my own fears and anxiety. And later still, writing poems helped me deal with the antisemitism that exploded all over the world and unfortunately continues to this day. A poem about a 90-year old man whose mezuzah was snatched off his neck, a poem about a statue of Moses in a public park that I saw being vandalized, a poem about a group of Jews in Boulder, Colorado who were set on fire …. unfortunately the world supplies an endless amount of material for writing such poems. [See other poems here: Hear, O Israel | If I Forget Thee]

When I realized I had enough poems—a suite of 18—to turn into a book, my emotions were mixed. I was thrilled at the thought of having another poetry collection under my belt. I was also terrified at the very real possibility of pushback. How I wish I lived in a world where publishing a Jewish-themed poetry collection about October 7th didn’t fill me with anxiety. More importantly, how I wish I lived in a world where October 7th had never happened and I didn’t have to write these poems at all.

But we do not yet live in that world. And it falls upon every one of us to perform acts of Tikkun Olam to repair the imperfect world in which we do live. I know from past experience—I have been writing books for 45 years—that the most effective way for me to bring about change is to use my voice to bear witness. I hope that the poems in The Last Flame Last will offer readers a chance to question, to grieve, to mourn, to rage, and finally to hope alongside me.

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PLAY AUDIO PODCAST

This month I’ve got a 2-part series for you: “New Faces,” which will introduce you to new leadership at historic Jewish publishing houses.

In Part 1 of “New Faces” you met Leila Sales, the new Editorial Director at Kar-Ben Publishing.

Now in Part 2 of “New Faces” you’ll meet the leaders at Behrman House and Apples & Honey Press: retiring owners David Behrman and Vicki Weber, and new owner Derek Stordahl. Jewish educational publisher Behrman House was established over 100 years ago in 1921, while its trade imprint, Apples & Honey, was founded just over ten years ago in 2014. I spoke with David, Vicki, and Derek about the history and future of the business.

Love, Heidi

NEWS

The Jewish Book Village has posted a how-to guide on Instagram, Supporting Jewish Authors. READ HERE

CALLS TO ACTION

Mizrahi Women Authors on Story, Identity, and Visibility, Wednesday, July 22, 4PM ET. Sponsored by ALA EMIERT, on Zoom. REGISTER HERE

The Jewish Book Garden kicks off its Zoom discussion series “How Does Our Garden Grow?” with a discussion of the picture book Shabbat Is… by past Book of Life guest A.J. Sass, on Sunday August 16, 1:30PM ET. REGISTER HERE

Fight censorship by calling your Congressional representatives about book banning bills. Learn about 3 bad bills from Authors Against Book Bans, and find your reps’ contact info HERE.

SHOW NOTES

• Behrman House website, Facebook, and Instagram

• Apples & Honey Press website and Instagram

• Press release about the change in leadership

• Past Book of Life interviews with Vicki Weber in 2017 and 2018

• Tikkun Olam suggestion: Support Jewish day schools and congregational schools

• Part 1: New Faces: Leila Sales at Kar-Ben Publishing

• Derek’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment (with comments from David and Vicki)

• Credits

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Derek Stordahl 0:00

[COLD OPEN ] Nobody ever asked me, are you a beekeeper, and, and yet I am.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:03

Wow!

Derek Stordahl 0:05

I don’t know why people don’t ask that!

Vicki Weber 0:06

Especially now that you, now that you own Apples and Honey Press. You should be a beekeeper!

Derek Stordahl 0:11

I know, exactly. Yeah!

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:12

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is the Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. Behrman House has been publishing Jewish educational materials and children’s books for over 100 years, and up until now has been a family-run business. But David Behrman and his wife, Vicki Weber, are about to enter their well-deserved retirement, and they are passing the business out of the family into the capable hands of their friend and colleague Derek Stordahl. I spoke to all three of them about the history and the future of Behrman House and its children’s imprint, Apples and Honey Press. This is part two in my two-part New Faces series. Part one introduces you to Leila Sales, the new editorial director at Kar-Ben Publishing. If you haven’t heard it, go back and listen. You will find show notes, a transcript, and bonus content at bookoflifepodcast.substack.com And if you’d like to hear Derek Stordahl’s Share Your Shelf segment, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription to support the podcast. Thanks! [MUSIC FADES]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:33

David, Vicki, and Derek, welcome to The Book of Life.

David Behrman 1:36

Thank you.

Vicki Weber 1:37

Thank you.

Derek Stordahl 1:37

Great to be here.

Vicki Weber 1:38

It’s terrific!

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:40

David and Vicki, you are the outgoing publishers at Behrman House, and Derek, you are incoming. Let’s start by talking about the history, because I know that Behrman House is over 100 years old now. So, what are some of the milestones, and how has Behrman House evolved over the last century?

David Behrman 1:58

Behrman House is 105 years old. It started in 1921 as a bookstore in Lower Manhattan. The milestones of the firm are, I think, four. It was a bookstore with a little bit of publishing up until World War II. Shortly after that time, as synagogue religious schools started to be formed in the suburbs, this firm began publishing. The firm was formed by my grandfather. After the war, my father took it over, and he started publishing for religious schools, and we became the leading educational publisher in North America. There was a period of time when we did a lot of online and digital stuff, starting, I think, in the mid 90s, so that would be the third phase, and then we launched Apples and Honey Press to do children’s trade publishing. We now have, I think, 150 -- Vicky, correct me, 150 titles in print?

Vicki Weber 2:54

165!

David Behrman 2:55

I lost count! Okay, 165 titles, a number of award winners. I guess the last phase, at least for now, is Derek taking over the firm and bringing it into the next thing that it will be, whatever that is.

Heidi Rabinowitz 3:09

What changes did you purposely make, and what changes just occurred organically?

David Behrman 3:15

I don’t think a commercial firm can change completely on its own, it must respond to the marketplace, and it must respond to readers’ needs, and in our case, schools’ needs. But the intentional decisions that were made, I think, were first, to go into the education business. It was a very intentional decision of my father’s. And then the second critical intentional decision was the decision Vicki and I made to start Apples and Honey Press, which gave us a new imprint and a new way into a very different set of readers and children in North America. So those are the two critical decisions, but neither one could have been made without there being a place for those things that we decided to do to be received and read, and hopefully, appreciated.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:03

That makes sense. David Behrman, has Behrman House always been a part of your life. Did you always plan to be part of the family business?

David Behrman 4:13

No. Vicki will tell you that I swore -- we’ve known each other since college -- that I swore I would never go into the family business. [LAUGHTER] My father used to say he had no choice. He came back as a private in the army from serving in Europe in World War II, and went straight into the family business. I practiced law for a while in New York, I think about five years, and I was a consultant at McKinsey for another five years. So I joined the firm at the age of, I think, 34.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:40

Once you did join, were you glad to be there?

David Behrman 4:45

My father was very good about not pressuring me to come into the business. I love this business. I love this business because it has a practical and an aesthetic component. One needs to make the trains run on time, and the place has to work, and the books have to get printed, and I, that appeals to my managerial instinct. But ultimately, we have to make beautiful books, meaningful books. If we do that, we will be successful. The place has been around for a while, and I think has proven itself. It’s about character education, and it’s about meaning, personal meaning, and it’s about children’s growth, and it’s about color and design and engagement of children. So I’m very pleased to have both those pieces in my life.

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:33

That’s a wonderful combination. I love how you described it. Vicki, was working with Behrman House part of the deal when you got together with David?

Vicki Weber 5:41

[LAUGHTER] No, not at all. I can’t say working at Behrman House was ever on my bingo card until it actually happened. Like David, this is not a first career for me. My training is in economics and financial analysis. I had about a 12 or so year career on Wall Street as a financial analyst, and then was lucky enough to take some time off and be at home with our kids. And it was during that time that an executive editor at Behrman House called me up one day and said, I have this project that I’m working on and I need some help and maybe you can help me. And so I did a few freelance projects for Behrman House, largely in the Introduction to Judaism section, and then a few years later we had an employee who went out very suddenly on a medical leave, and he was the person in charge of making sure we had reprinted all the books we would need for the coming school year. And it wasn’t clear whether those orders had been placed, so David asked me to come in on a temporary basis and kind of figure that out. And it was a great thing to be doing on a part-time basis when your kids are in school and the school is down the street, and that was the beginning for me.

David Behrman 6:55

I used to work for Vicki on the college newspaper, she was the editor in chief and I was the assignments editor.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:01

Oh, wow. So you’ve taken turns being each other’s boss, kind of?

David Behrman 7:04

[LAUGHTER] That’s a longer conversation.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:07

So after like 90 years in business, Behrman House created Apples and Honey Press. So, after so much time as a purely educational publisher, why at that time did you feel that you needed to create this new imprint?

David Behrman 7:24

We did do some children’s publishing in the 60s, and in fact, when Derek was thinking about buying Behrman House, he found these books, Jeremy and Judy, and he said, Look at these, and they’re like the old Golden Books with a Jewish angle. I think he might be thinking about bringing them back. So we always dabbled, but you can’t dabble anymore, because you need a marketing operation, and you need to have a regular list every season. So we did it because we wanted to reach children in a different way, and we reached them in the religious school, and we reach a lot of children that way, but it’s in a very specific context, and there are children we don’t reach who are in day schools or who aren’t in religious school, and it’s a very different environment, and there’s less educational content, but there’s more engagement, there’s more storytelling, and it’s just a different way to exercise the creative juices of the firm.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:21

You’ve produced some wonderful books, some of my favorites.

David Behrman 8:24

Oh, thank you. Which one is your favorite?

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:26

Oh, I can’t pick just one, but I’ll tell you that there are two books by Leslie Kimmelman about Eve and Adam...

David Behrman 8:33

Oh, yes!

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:34

Just gorgeous, and the flipped script, kind of, the way that those characters are envisioned are just amazing.

David Behrman 8:43

I think Leslie is a genius. What I love about those books is they’re subversive, just a little bit. They’re not Adam and Eve, they’re Eve and Adam.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:53

Right.

David Behrman 8:53

There’s a line in the first book that says Eve is obviously very curious and strong, and Adam “is good to look at.” So, there’s a feminist piece, and then in the second book is a brilliant psychological exploration of separation. We all are afraid to go out in the world, we’re afraid to go out in kindergarten, we’re afraid to leave the garden, and she turns the story of the snake, which is sometimes punitive, into a story about natural consequences and God being a guide and a coach, and you have to go out in the world and take your chances and have faith that God is with you, but also that you can make your way in the world. I think she’s a genius.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:32

Yeah, I love that interpretation.

David Behrman 9:34

You have to help us come up with the third one. Actually, “us” is Derek. Derek would love to hear from you with the third in the series of Eve and Adam.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:41

[LAUGHTER] All right, I’ll think about that!

David Behrman 9:43

Good!

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:43

So, recently, Apples and Honey has published several books that are not explicitly Jewish, like Aren’t You a Strange Bird and The Tightrope Wanderer, or The Big Bad Wolf and the Masquerade Ball. They are related to Jewish concepts, and they include explanations in the back matter, but they aren’t as overtly Jewish as one might expect from a Jewish publishing house like yours. So, what is your thought process in selecting those stories for publication?

David Behrman 10:09

I think that many stories are universal. Religious traditions share many common themes. If you think about Tightrope Wanderer, there is the Talmudic notion of the narrow bridge, and there is the admonition that we are not obliged to complete the task, but that we are not allowed to cease in the attempt, and that is explicitly mentioned in the text several times. So, there are Jewish values embedded in a story that is secular, and I think that it’s important for children to understand that they have these Jewish lives, and they have these lives that aren’t explicitly Jewish, but that contain Jewish themes, and Jewish themes can inform those, what we call the secular lives. And so that these two worlds aren’t so separate as we sometimes present them, that allows them to have a more holistic view of their lives and of what Judaism can do for them.

Vicki Weber 11:07

And if I could add to that: I was asked to be a judge recently at an essay contest sponsored by a local Federation, and what their youth director had done with these seventh and eighth graders was to ask them to think about what they really like to do in their lives, and then to write an essay about how that thing was Jewish. And there were essays about playing the violin, playing soccer, all of the things that kids that age do. And what they were trying to do was to figure out what values are exemplified in those activities, the sportsmanship, or the dedication, or the practice, or whatever it was. And these kids were so excited about that notion, because so often a lot of Jewish literature is trying to say, This is what Judaism is, and so this is what you should think about it. And this was having these kids think about their lives, and then try to see how these values are exemplified in a lot of other ways, how they actually live them in their day-to-day lives. And I think a lot of these stories also do that.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:13

Derek, did you have anything you wanted to add?

Derek Stordahl 12:15

I’m just sitting here listening, thinking, wow, these guys are really smart. [LAUGHTER] How can I be as smart as they are? No, I mean, I think that that observation about the integration between the secular and the religious life really makes a lot of sense, and creating a division artificially isn’t necessarily the best thing for a reader, for a parent who’s reading that book to a child. So, looking at that holistic approach is a way to expand the reach for Apples and Honey Press.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:42

Derek, what is your background, and how did you come to join Behrman House?

Derek Stordahl 12:47

Well, my background is a long story of publishing, from my first career being in a kind of general literary publisher that published adult and children’s books, to working at HarperCollins San Francisco, which was a spiritual and new age publisher, on through reference and education and children’s books and adult books, and most recently at Holiday House and Peachtree, the children’s book publishers, where we published award-winning titles, the Caldecott, the Sydney Taylor Award, and of course had the backlist classic Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:18

Ah, that IS a classic!

Derek Stordahl 13:20

Eric Kimmel, yeah. So because publishing is a world of relationships, at some point David and Vicki and I all connected through some mutual friends, that was probably five years ago, maybe a little bit longer. And so we had lunch every few months and talked about the world and what was happening in publishing and how we each might do better in what we were publishing and how we were reaching audiences. So you know, we’ve been friends for a while, and one of those things of serendipity, where we were having lunch and having a conversation about what’s next, and somehow it ended up being Well, maybe you should be thinking about Behrman House. And, and so I did.

David Behrman 13:20

When we needed to know how the big boys do things, we would have lunch with Derek and ask him, How do you handle this problem? And he would tell us, because Behrman House is a small place, so it was an instructive relationship.

Derek Stordahl 13:20

I’ve always been an admirer of the dedication and care that David and Vicki have put into the publishing at Behrman House and Apples and Honey Press.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:20

What aspect of the company is most exciting for you?

Derek Stordahl 13:41

Well, I really love the combination of things. I mean, the fact that there is a really dedicated relationship at Behrman House with Jewish educators, I think is fantastic, and is something that we’ll continue to support and build on. And the growth in Apples and Honey Press, and the opportunity to reach more Jewish kids, and reach more kids in general, is also fun. And so, for me, it kind of ties into a couple of different areas. You know, I worked in educational publishing in different ways, academic publishing, as well as kid and trade publishing, and in different categories. So, one of the things I’ve always loved about publishing is that you’re learning something every day, it’s never the same, makes it challenging and fun and exciting.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:07

David and Vicki, what are you proudest of accomplishing in your time at Behrman House and Apples and Honey?

Vicki Weber 15:13

Well, actually, I’m going to give some kudos to my partner and husband. I don’t think Behrman House would still be around if it wasn’t for him, the way publishing has changed, the way Jewish education has changed, the way the Jewish communal group has been changing over the last 20 years. Under different leadership, I think Behrman House would have, like many other Jewish publishers, dwindled away. And it’s been his vision and dedication and persistence, he’s the most persistent person I’ve ever known in my life, has has really allowed it to have renewed vigor. I guess we made the decision in 2016 that we would do things dramatically differently. Until that time, Behrman House had been much more vertically integrated. We did our own fulfillment, we did our own warehousing, we did our own shipping, we did our own packing of boxes, and we made the decision that we should double down on our core skills, which were in editorial and content producing, and let go of those things that were no longer going to be the engine of success that has allowed the company to really continue to blossom in a very, very different economic environment. We are much leaner, we have lower fixed costs, we don’t have a warehouse anymore, and that’s made a big difference. But I think it’s been his vision over the years that has really allowed this to be something that we can pass on to Derek, that’s very, very strong and has some exciting opportunities looking ahead.

David Behrman 16:55

Thank you. I would divide what I’m proud of into three pieces. First of all, that we have maintained our educational business when almost every other Jewish educational publisher has fallen by the wayside, because we’re very, very focused on the educator and the child, that is the mantra of this place. And so to be really the last one standing was tough to do. The second thing is that we just have a terrific staff. This is a place of very committed people who do really good work, and that makes everything a little bit more fun and a whole lot easier. And then the third thing is that we’ve been able, with Apples and Honey, to position it as a place that can move into the future, so Vicki and I can depart with a place healthy and with a robust future in the hands of somebody who we think is going to do really good things with it, and so we can feel like we’re not just dropping the ball or closing the door or anything like that, and so that’s a really nice feeling.

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:02

Is there anything you wish you could have a do over, or that the stars had aligned differently?

Vicki Weber 18:08

I have one, actually. Behrman House was really early to digital education, and I would suggest that we were probably too early. We had an extraordinarily robust digital system that was based on CDs for computers. It was used all over the world, actually. And then very, very quickly computers changed. Laptops were coming out without CD ROM drives, and we were trying to find a way to get online. However, the schools and synagogues were way behind in terms of their ability to handle materials that needed Wi-Fi connections and other kinds of infrastructure, so from a moment of great promise we actually weren’t able to keep that part of it going very well. We still have digital materials, we still have ways for people to use materials online, but it was not possible to continue to develop in that arena, and I think being as much as 10 years too early meant that it was not sustainable.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:14

So getting a head start was not actually a good thing in this case.

Vicki Weber 19:18

In this case, possibly not. [WRY CHUCKLE]

David Behrman 19:20

We spent an embarrassing amount of money on our digital effort that was not used well in the schools, just because it wasn’t time, and we could have spent it on making great books. Vicki’s absolutely right.

Vicki Weber 19:36

We weren’t in a position to be able to teach teachers how to use the internet.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:41

Right.

David Behrman 19:42

I would add one other thing about risk taking. We could have done Apples and Honey Press five years earlier. We just were a little bit too cautious, and so we weren’t cautious enough on digital, and we were too cautious on children’s trade. But you know, you live and learn.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:00

Well, considering all of the successes and challenges we’ve just talked about, David and Vicki, what advice do you want to give Derek as he gets started?

David Behrman 20:10

Oh, I’ve given him so much advice already, I don’t know! [LAUGHTER]

Vicki Weber 20:14

Go with God!

David Behrman 20:17

You know, some publishing firms are run editorially and some are run financially. There’s no right answer. This place has been run editorially since forever...

Vicki Weber 20:30

Despite my best efforts. [LAUGHTER]

David Behrman 20:31

Right, right. And sometimes, to its detriment, I was not focused enough on the financial end. And I think Derek is bringing a little bit more financial focus, which is very important, and I’d say: make sure to get that balance right. You know, it’s a Goldilocks moment, right? You don’t want it too hot, and you don’t want it too cold. You want it just right, and what’s just right, that’s, that’s where the art is.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:52

Well, that sounds like very good advice, actually.

David Behrman 20:54

The first thing my father said to me when I started was, it’s all about taste. How do you know when a manuscript is good? How do you know when the art is right? And there’s a lot of taste there, and getting it right is hard, and it’s judgment-based. Just have to be very intentional and thoughtful.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:11

Derek, do you have a message for the librarians and teachers and authors and readers who have long-standing relationships with Behrman House and Apples and Honey? At this time of transition, what would you like to say to everyone?

Derek Stordahl 21:25

I’m just grateful for their support of Behrman House over the years, and Apples and Honey Press. I think they’ll see continuity here, along with some evolution. We’ll see continued support of great books for Jewish kid readers, books that librarians can share with their readers, teachers can use, and we’ll see continued commitment to Jewish creators, authors, artists, as well as some new things. We’re going to experiment a little bit. I also want to reinforce something David said, which is, there is a great team here, and people that really care about the quality of the books, how they are received by children, how they’re received by those children’s adults. And so I think the trust that Jewish educators, librarians, teachers, kids, parents have put into Behrman House and Apples and Honey Press is something that they can continue to feel comfortable with.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:15

All right, excellent. It’s Tikkun Olam time, so any or all of you, what action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Vicki Weber 22:26

That one, I think, falls to me, and given our role in Jewish education over many years, and especially congregational education, and to some extent day school education -- in a world in which a lot of philanthropic organizations spend their time and their money chasing the latest new experiment, I would really like to see your listeners go out and support their local day school and their local congregational school. Because these educators are so dedicated, so talented, so energetic, and I don’t think a lot of them are getting the kind of support and attention that they deserve. And so I would really love to see people get out and provide volunteer and financial support, as well as enthusiasm. A lot of Jewish educational institutions and schools have gotten pasted by the media and pasted by different kinds of studies that, that in some cases aren’t, I think, that well put together. And this is an opportunity to really provide support in the places where our children are being educated every single day and week.

Heidi Rabinowitz 23:47

All right, that’s a great suggestion. Thank you. Where can listeners learn more about Behrman House and Apples and Honey?

Vicki Weber 23:55

Well, I am very delighted to say that Behrman House and Apples and Honey Press are different than many other publishers of all sizes and shapes, because we have our own e-commerce site and a very robust website. So you can go to BehrmanHouse.com, we have our online catalog there that you can flip through. There is also ApplesAndHoneyPress.com

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:23

And are you on social media as well?

Vicki Weber 24:26

We’re on Facebook for Behrman House, and we’re on Instagram for Apples and Honey Press, and also Behrman House. And you can also, on our website, sign up for our weekly newsletter.

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:36

All right. Excellent. Is there an interview question you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Derek Stordahl 24:43

Well, I’ll say, you know, nobody ever asked me, Are you a beekeeper?

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:47

Wow!

Derek Stordahl 24:47

And, and yet, I am. I don’t know why people don’t ask that!

Vicki Weber 24:51

Especially now that you, now that you own Apples and Honey Press, you *should* be a beekeeper!

Derek Stordahl 24:55

I know, exactly. Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:57

Oh, that’s so perfect!

Vicki Weber 24:58

It is!

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:59

That is so perfect to have a beekeeper running Apples and Honey Press. Tell us about beekeeping. How did you get into that?

Derek Stordahl 25:06

Oh gosh, well, you know that’s a whole other.. that’s probably a different podcast, but I’ve been a beekeeper for 10 or 12 years, just in our backyard and around our neighborhood. I have had hives at different times, and you know, it’s a great way to focus and forget about just about everything except not getting stung, and you know it’s a great way to be in tune with the seasons, to do something good for the world, and for your gardeners next door, and to have delicious honey. It’s a lot of fun.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:31

So now you can have Apples and Honey branded honey!

Derek Stordahl 25:36

I could, that’s a great idea.

Vicki Weber 25:38

Maybe it’s a gift with purchase idea.

Derek Stordahl 25:41

Yeah, right? At our pop-up shop, we can give some honey gifts.

David Behrman 25:45

Derek, I never asked you, how did you start? How do you think of, oh, I should keep bees? I mean, it’s not an everyday conversation thing.

Derek Stordahl 25:53

When I was a kid growing up in Montana, we’d be out hiking through the fields, fishing or whatever, and you’d see these big commercial beehives set up in fields that were there for pollination, and I always was kind of curious about that. And then many years after that, we were walking around Berkeley, California, and there was a house that had beehives in the front yard, and you know, Berkeley is a little bit, you know, it’s Berkeley, and that’s not so surprising that you’d see something like that. I just, just surprised there weren’t chickens with the bees. But I thought, well, if you can do it in Berkeley, you can do it in New Jersey. And my wife got me a gift, a starter set, and took lessons, and then you know the moment of truth came to order the bees. Paid for the bees, and started going.

Heidi Rabinowitz 26:16

You take like a class, or you have to be an apprentice, or how did you learn how to beekeep?

Derek Stordahl 26:41

I took classes from the local beekeeping association, read a lot of books about beekeeping and bee biology and all that kind of stuff, and then you go out in the field with another beekeeper. And I think that was probably the only moment I really got doubtful about it was when they opened the hive and there were bees everywhere and the adrenaline kind of kicked in, I was like, oh my gosh, but nobody got stung, nobody died. It was all fine.

Vicki Weber 27:05

On one of our early meetings with Derek, he was actually waiting for a box of bees, and he had to get home to make sure that he, he got the box of bees through the postal service.

Derek Stordahl 27:16

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:17

Wow. So now I’m just picturing the mailman holding a box that’s buzzing.

Derek Stordahl 27:21

Pretty much. Yeah, it’s like three pounds of bees. It’s in a mesh box, yeah. Basically, it’s like, Wow, there’s a lot of bees in that box.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:29

Do the bees mind being in a box and traveling through the mail? Does it seem to upset them?

Derek Stordahl 27:34

Not so much. They go with food and with the queen, and so they’re fairly docile about the whole thing. And then they’re ready to find a home by the time they get to you, and so into the hive they go, and all being well, they thrive there.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:47

That is amazing. It’s not an answer I expected, but I love it.

Derek Stordahl 27:50

Well, see, nobody asks, so there you go.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:53

Thank you for bringing that up. Is there anything else that any of you would like to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

David Behrman 28:00

I would just say that I’m sure Derek and our colleagues here would just really like to hear from people about what the firm should be publishing and how things are going, and are the books working in schools. Kibbitzing is really important to us. [LAUGHTER] It really is.

Heidi Rabinowitz 28:14

I love that. Well, we’re going to take a look at your personal bookshelves and see what books you’ll be sharing from your own shelf, so anybody who wants to hear about that can become a paid listener on Substack to get access to the Share Your Shelf segments, but in the meantime, David and Vicki, mazel tov on your retirement and Derek, mazel tov on your new job.

David Behrman 28:35

Well, thank you.

Vicki Weber 28:36

Thank you.

Derek Stordahl 28:36

Thank you.

Heidi Rabinowitz 28:37

And thank you all for joining me on the Book of Life.

Rabbi Ed Rosenthal 28:42

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] My name is Ed Rosenthal. I’m a rabbi and founder of Repair the Sea, Tikkun HaYam. I’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast, along with Rachelle Burk, author of Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah. I’d like to dedicate my part of our episode to my wife, Mindy, who gave me two wonderful children, to whom I read many Jewish children’s books while they were growing up, and to my children who have given me Jewish grandchildren who love reading Jewish children’s books.

Rachelle Burk 29:09

I’m Rachelle Burk, author of Diving Deep on Rosh Hashanah: Reverse Tashlich for a Better World. I dedicate my part of this episode first and foremost to Rabbi Ed Rosenthal, without whom there would be no Tikkun HaYam, and certainly no book. I also dedicate it to the thousands of individuals around the world who participate in annual beach and waterway cleanups, doing their part to repair the sea and in turn repair the world.

Heidi Rabinowitz 29:45

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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PLAY AUDIO PODCAST

This month I’ve got a 2-part series for you: “New Faces,” which will introduce you to new leadership at historic Jewish publishing houses.

In Part 1 of “New Faces” you’ll meet Leila Sales, the new Editorial Director at Kar-Ben Publishing. Kar-Ben, now an imprint of Lerner, was established in 1975 when two friends, Judyth Groner and Madeline Wikler, created the independent press Kar-Ben Copies to publish Jewish children’s books. It’s still going strong over 50 years later!

Part 2 of “New Faces” will post on July 16 and will feature an interview with the leaders at Behrman House and Apples & Honey Press: retiring owners David Behrman and Vicki Weber, and new owner Derek Stordahl.

I am happy to report that both publishers are still in very good hands!

Love, Heidi

NEWS

Past Book of Life guest Emily Barth Isler was interviewed on the 2 Kid Interviews YouTube channel about Three Pieces of Broken Glass. WATCH HERE

CALLS TO ACTION

The Holiday Highlights committee of the Association of Jewish Libraries is seeking new members. If you are well-versed in Jewish children’s literature, consider applying. APPLICATION HERE

Past Book of Life guest Jean Meltzer is creating a Jewish Joy Hub for for Jewish creatives: authors, artists, performers, filmmakers, educators, designers, creators, storytellers, and more, to connect with audiences. Launching in September, 2026. INTEREST FORM HERE

The Movement Against Antizionism (MAAZ), together with Stop Antizionism and The Institute for the Critical Study of Antizionism, are releasing an open letter calling on American Jewish organizations to address antizionism with the same seriousness they have applied to other forms of anti-Jewish hate. SIGN IT HERE

SHOW NOTES

• Kar-Ben Publishing

• Leila Sales’ website

• Book of Life interview with past Kar-Ben leadership: Joni Sussman and Fran Greenman-Schmitz

• The Book Engineer

• Champions of Change podcast from Capitol One

• Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Land film from John Deere

• Highlighted Kar-Ben Book: The Right Blessing by Rabbi Kerry M. Olitsky and Rabbi Samantha Orshan Kahn

• Tikkun Olam suggestion: support National Public Radio

• Leila’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment

• Remembering Jane Yolen (1939-2026)

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Leila Sales

[COLD OPEN] I want to alleviate everybody’s anxiety, and like, let them know that I’m on their team, and I’m, you know, I’m part of this with them, and I, I want to learn from them.

Heidi Rabinowitz

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. Kar-Ben Publishing has been producing Jewish children’s books for over 50 years. After the recent retirement of 20 year veteran Joni Sussman, we’ve got new leadership at Kar-Ben with editorial director Leila Sales. Here’s my conversation with Leila about the behind the scenes transition at the beloved institution that is Kar-Ben.

This is part one in my two-part New Faces series. Part two will introduce you to Derek Stordahl, the new owner of Behrman House and Apples and Honey Press. You can find show notes, a transcript, and bonus content at bookoflifepodcast.substack.com and don’t forget, if you’d like to hear Leila’s Share Your Shelf segment, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription to support the show. Thanks! [END INTRO]

Heidi Rabinowitz

Leila, I am so pleased to welcome you to the ecosystem of Jewish children’s books, now that you are leading Kar-Ben!

Leila Sales

I’m so excited to be part of this community, this huge and creative and well-developed community.

Heidi Rabinowitz

So, as many listeners know, Kar-Ben is the largest publisher of Jewish children’s books, and it’s been around for just over 50 years, and many of us who are librarians or teachers or authors have a long running relationship with Kar-Ben, so we are very interested in its inner workings. So, in 2024 Joni Sussman retired, and she had been the publisher at Kar-Ben for 20 years. And at the 2024 summer conference of the Association of Jewish Libraries, she introduced her replacement, Fran Greenman-Schmitz.

Leila Sales

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

And I did a joint interview with both of them that aired on the podcast in January 2025 (and I’ll link to that in the show notes). So that wasn’t very long ago, and it’s kind of surprising that just a little while later Fran is gone, and we have another new person heading up Kar-Ben Publishing, your lovely self, Leila Sales. And I don’t want to dig into any dirty laundry, but can you tell us anything at all about this quick turnover? Because I can’t help but be curious.

Leila Sales

Sure, and honestly, there are limits to what I know. You know, I know what you said about Joni, and I’m very much aware of the enormity - I’m going to say - of the responsibility of coming in and inheriting this list that has been created with Joni’s vision for 20 plus years. She was an expert in every regard, right? She’s an expert on the processes at Kar-Ben. She’s an expert in Kar-Ben’s backlist. She knew everybody who wrote for Kar-Ben, or represented authors who wrote for Kar-Ben, or probably wanted to write for Kar-Ben, you know. And so it’s really big shoes to fill, and I did meet with Joni right after I took the job. I went to Minneapolis, and we met, and she was very warm and welcoming, and you know, gave me her cell phone number and told me I could call her with anything. And even, you know, there have been a few things that have come up where I just know that the institutional knowledge is there with Joni, and I don’t have it yet, and it’s so great of her that she still will occasionally... you know, she’s retired, she’s enjoying her retirement, but she, she’s willing to tell me things that she knows when I need it, is really valuable. There’s honestly not much that I know about Fran’s tenure, and I never met her, we didn’t overlap. My understanding is that Joni had sort of formed the role of publisher of Kar-Ben in her image, and they thought they could bring in Fran to do exactly what Joni had been doing, and they discovered that that was not in fact the case, that what Joni was doing worked because she was Joni, so they did some restructuring before they brought me in. Joni, and then Fran after her, had been the publisher. I’m not the publisher, I am editorial director. Kar-Ben has been now more integrated into Lerner’s overall systems, which we already had been in many regards. We already had the whole Lerner design team. Our marketing, publicity is now under the same marketing and publicity team that handles all the rest of Lerner’s imprints.

Heidi Rabinowitz

I had been going to ask you about that difference between publisher and editorial director. Can you explain a little bit about what the difference actually is?

Leila Sales

My role is more focused editorially, so obviously on acquiring the books, giving the editorial feedback, helping the art director to pick the right illustrators, helping them to give art direction. I come from an editorial background. I was an editor for more than a decade at Viking Children’s Books at Penguin. A publisher is going to spend more time in meetings with people from financials, budget, sales, and marketing, forecasting.

Heidi Rabinowitz

So is somebody else playing the role of publisher for Kar-Ben?

Leila Sales

Yes, so that’s now been incorporated into Lerner’s overall list, and so we now have the same publisher of Carolrhoda, of Millbrook, of Zest.

Heidi Rabinowitz

So within the Kar-Ben imprint, you’re the editorial director, but a lot of other elements are, as you say, integrated with Lerner. Are there other people who are purely working for Kar-Ben, editors, and so on?

Leila Sales

I am the only one who’s working purely for Kar-Ben.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Oh, wow! Okay.

Leila Sales

We share a design team. It’s, we share a publicity and marketing team. We share a sales team.

Heidi Rabinowitz

So the people who edit Kar-Ben books are not just editing Kar-Ben books, they’re editing books for any of these imprints?

Leila Sales

I am the only one editing Kar-Ben books.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Oh! That’s a lot of work!

Leila Sales

It is. Yeah, so our current goal is 13 books a year in two seasons, six or seven in the spring, and then six or seven in the fall. Joni had been doing slightly more, so I think our director of sales would like me to ultimately get up to a higher number, but first I need to sort of figure out what it is that I’m doing.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Wow, okay, that’s a big job. I didn’t realize what a big job it was that you were doing all on your own!

Leila Sales

Yeah, you know, Lerner is a small publisher. I come from big five, right? So it’s just a different experience in a lot of regards. I’m really loving getting to see this other way of approaching publishing, so much about it’s just so different. You know, at the big five, or at least at PRH, they were really only interested in big books, and any book that you acquired that didn’t wind up being big, was sort of considered to be, I don’t know, a failure maybe an overstatement, but a disappointment at the very least. If you didn’t believe that a book could sell a minimum of 15 or 20,000 copies, my boss would tell me, like, just don’t bother to sign it up. And, of course, often you’re wrong. You predict a book will sell 20,000 copies and it sells 2000. Most books don’t sell tens of thousands of copies, but you couldn’t go into it believing it would sell 2000 copies. At Lerner, that’s just not the perspective at all. It seems to me, so far, to be a lot less directed by sales goals, and particularly at Kar-Ben, I think everybody understands that while, of course, it’s great to have a breakout hit that’s going to have a really wide audience, the purpose of Kar-Ben is to publish Jewish children’s books, and some of those books are probably going to have quite niche audiences. You know, I’m working on a book right now about Lag BaOmer, and I think we all understand and are okay with the fact that probably there aren’t tens of thousands of people out there who want a book about Lag BaOmer, and that’s okay.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Right. Right. And I have to say, I’m excited to hear you’re doing a Lag BaOmer book, because there are like two books on Lag BaOmer.

Leila Sales

Right, you have to be a small press to do it. My strong feeling on books is like not every book has to be for every person, but every book is for someone.

Heidi Rabinowitz

I like that. That’s really good. You’ve worn so many hats in the world of publishing. Can you tell us about some of your varied experiences?

Leila Sales

Yeah. Yeah, I consider myself to be an editor first and foremost. I also am an author: middle grade and young adult novels. I have a my first adult book coming out, and then I have my first chapter book coming out, 2027. I started doing book packaging. I was director of book publishing for a women’s sports brand called Together, and that was creating books to be part of their brand. I sort of had the idea of, like, if you want an audience, if you have something to say, there’s probably a book that you could have, and maybe you don’t know how to write it, and maybe you don’t know how to make it, but, like, I do.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Is that The Book Engineer?

Leila Sales

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Okay, so on your website I saw that you have this project, The Book Engineer, and I wanted to hear a little bit more about that. It sounds like you’re saying that non-book related brands, like clothing, or like... what is it, that you’re encouraging them to also include books in their brand? Tell more about that.

Leila Sales

Yes, you know, The Book Engineer, it’s a catch-all for all of the publishing expertise that I bring, but yeah, I think the primary part of it is working with non-book brands in order to figure out what publishing lines look like for them, whether that be just an individual book or an entire imprint or publishing program. So for example, earlier this year I worked with the United Way to create a picture book that they could give away at a gala that was focused on kids’ literacy. For the women’s sports brand I was talking about, they mostly do merch, they do t-shirts, they do hats, they produce TV shows and YouTube shorts, and that sort of thing. And so the idea of, okay, you have this audience of people who care about women’s sports, and you have particular brand story that you’re trying to tell, and so what does it look like to tell that through books? So I packaged for them this really great book called Play It Forward, which is a collection of 25 essays about underreported stories of women breaking barriers in sports. Right now, I’m working with a personal financial literacy brand, so I’m creating a line of children’s books to get kids to care about personal finance and, like, understand that money isn’t scary or boring.

Heidi Rabinowitz

That’s so interesting! It reminds me of a book that probably was not as high quality as what you’re talking about. When I was a kid, one of the books in my household was actually an advertisement for Jell-O. [LAUGHTER]

Leila Sales

Yeah!

Heidi Rabinowitz

And it was a story about, the kids wanted to make a present for their mother’s birthday, and they tried to sew something, but they didn’t know how, and they tried to build something, but it broke.

Leila Sales

So they make her a Jell-O...

Heidi Rabinowitz

So they made her a Jell-O dessert, and everybody was happy.

Leila Sales

Yeah!

Heidi Rabinowitz

You know, I liked it because it had bright colors, and it was about dessert.

Leila Sales

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz

But you know, it didn’t have any real literary value. But it sounds like what you’re doing is like taking that and putting some actual content into it.

Leila Sales

Yes, yes, absolutely. Because it’s not supposed to just be an ad, it’s more like if you’re a fan of something, what are all of the ways in which you can engage with that thing, you know, books being one of them. I came to the idea because I was looking at how much entertainment out there is in fact funded or produced by brands, right? So, there’s a great podcast that is produced by Capital One Bank, or there’s this really interesting film that is produced by John Deere tractors, you know, they function as marketing, but they are not advertisements. They’re genuinely worthwhile content that you would consume because you’re interested in it. And I was like, why are books getting left out of this?

Heidi Rabinowitz

I’m just curious, what podcast is from Capital One, and what movie was from John Deere?

Leila Sales

The Capital One podcast is called Champions of Change. Actually, I guess they have a few. And then the John Deere film was called Gaining Ground: The Fight for Black Land. It was at all these film festivals. Emmy-nominated director, the legacy of Black farming in America. I mean!

Heidi Rabinowitz

All right, that’s cool. So I’m just curious, looking at the books that are coming out from Kar-Ben, with all this transition behind the scenes, where is the line? Like, which books are YOUR books?

Leila Sales

Publishing generally works a couple years out, so the final files are headed off to the printer a year before the book is published, so all of fall ‘25 I think, was Joni’s. Spring ‘26 I think those were all Joni’s acquisitions. Fall ‘26 I am actively working on right now. Joni had acquired all of them. The art team had already signed up illustrators, and I came in around the time that we were finalizing sketches for them. Spring ‘27 books were already acquired, but I’ve been part of the process of choosing who the illustrators are going to be and doing some fairly substantive edits on the text. I think my spring ‘27 authors probably have had the hardest go of this transition because Fran had edited their books and they believed the text to be done, and then I came in, and because it was still before any illustrators had been picked or started sketching, it wasn’t too late for me to change text, so for some of them I had more big picture ideas than for others about how I thought the text could be improved. And then fall ‘27, about half of the books on it had already been acquired. I have acquired the other half, and now I’m starting to look to spring ‘28 and that list is completely blank.

Heidi Rabinowitz

So spring ‘28 will be the first purely Leila list.

Leila Sales

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Cool, exciting!

Leila Sales

It is exciting. It’s a big responsibility. Yeah, and you know, just trying to get a balance. Every year we want to do a new Hanukkah book, new Passover book, a new Purim book, new Rosh Hashanah book, or other high holidays book, right? So those are sort of givens, but then the question of, well, what are those books, and how do you have a new take on these topics that we’ve been publishing books about every single year for many years? You know, and then beyond that, when things are not holiday specific, of having a good balance of age ranges and fiction versus nonfiction and tone, and also topic. You don’t want to have four picture book biographies about notable Jewish Americans on the same list, right? You want to have, ideally, something for everybody.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Right. Are there any changes that you’re anticipating, either in the general field of publishing Jewish books, or changes that you would like to make at Kar-Ben?

Leila Sales

I don’t feel like I yet have a strong enough handle on how everything is done to know for sure what changes I’d want to make, like I would never want to be like Elon Musk going into Twitter. [LAUGHTER] It seems to me that one of the goals in all of the books that we select is the hopes that PJ Library might take it for their families, which makes sense, because they take such massive quantities, you know, since so many Jewish families are signed up for PJ Library, and they’re getting 12 free Jewish books a year, they may not be inclined to go out and purchase yet more Jewish books on their own. But obviously PJ Library has specific sorts of books that they’re looking for, they are not interested in everything. And so one of the challenges that I’m already coming up against is figuring out what are the books that we don’t expect PJ Library to take, but that we think are still worth including on Kar-Ben’s list, knowing that that market wouldn’t be there, but believing that another market would be. That’s still something that I think I need to figure out.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Yeah.

Leila Sales

I’m interested in doing books that have crossover appeal to a wider market, because those are ones where you don’t need a PJ Library order for those to be a success. I’m still feeling really open to just sort of seeing what’s out there and what resonates with me, you know. I’m always thinking about the reader first and what they’re going to want to pick up.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Absolutely, yes. Well, that’s interesting about the opportunity and the challenge that PJ Library poses for a publisher like Kar-Ben.

Leila Sales

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Are there other particular challenges that you’re noticing?

Leila Sales

So far, for me, it’s also coming into this community, which is so well formed, you know. Kar-Ben has such a significant backlist, like we have so many Kar-Ben authors, and I want all of them to feel valued, so many of these writers are so networked, and I have this sense of they are talking to each other about, you know, who is this new person to Kar-Ben, and what is she doing, and what does she want? I want to alleviate everybody’s anxiety, and like, let them know that I’m on their team, and I’m, you know, I’m part of this with them, and I want to learn from them.

Heidi Rabinowitz

For all the authors who may be listening, what are you looking for right now in submissions to Kar-Ben?

Leila Sales

I am always looking for good stories where there’s real conflict, something that immediately hooks your attention, a main character who is relatable and someone who has agency, so that they are empowered to take action on their own in order to solve this conflict or answer this question, and that then leads to some sort of resolution that feels earned and not a foregone conclusion. I like humor, you know, adventure, action, whimsy, fantasy. Like what I would sum up, all of that is things that lend themselves to good illustrations. If illustrations would just be the family sitting around the dinner table or kids sitting around their desks at school, that’s probably not going to be as visually engaging.

Heidi Rabinowitz

And in terms of Jewish content, is there anything in particular that you’re looking for?

Leila Sales

New takes on the holidays are always good. We want to do every year a new Hanukkah book, new Passover, New Purim, New High Holidays. So finding new ways to approach those holidays is like always good. Then I think stories that incorporate people leading Jewish lives and having Jewish identities and engaging in Jewish traditions, but that the point of the story isn’t necessarily to tell you, here is how to lead a Jewish life, or here is what this celebration is or means, that just sort of incorporates those aspects of being Jewish into a story.

Heidi Rabinowitz

I know that just like with children, they’re all your favorites...

Leila Sales

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz

...but for the list of spring 2026 is there any particular book that you would like to call out?

Leila Sales

Oh my gosh, one that I think is really interesting is called The Right Blessing. It is about a transgender Jewish child whose parents say the blessing over the children every Friday night, and this child knows that they’re getting the wrong gender blessing. They don’t know how to tell their parents that, because they don’t want to upset them. Once they do work up the courage to tell them, their parents are very supportive, and then they get the blessing that they wanted. It’s a happy ending, so it’s simple, but I think is going to be really valuable for some families.

Heidi Rabinowitz

That sounds beautiful. Yeah, that’s good. It’s wonderful that you are providing that kind of content, because I think that is something that is so needed.

Leila Sales

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

It’s Tikkun Olam time.

Leila Sales

Mmm!

Heidi Rabinowitz

So what action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Leila Sales

Media literacy is really important to me these days. So many people, either we tune out the news entirely because it is depressing and upsetting, or we are getting news from sources that have an agenda where the agenda is not simply to inform us. So I am a huge believer in National Public Radio. I think they do such good journalism. I believe in them. I donate to them every month. I certainly encourage people to do the same, but also, even if you aren’t a donor to NPR, I think just listening to NPR is a really great way of knowing what’s going on in our world.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Good, thank you. Part of the inspiration for my podcast was Fresh Air with Terry Gross, who also happens to be Jewish.

Leila Sales

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Is there anything else you want to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Leila Sales

Editing is an art, and it’s an art that I take very seriously. For a picture book, to figure out how to make it work can take a really long time, but then the satisfaction when it does work, of, oh, it’s only 600 words, but every single word is the exact right word in the exact right place, and every page turn brings you something new. You know that’s the best part of this job for me.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Leila Sales, thank you so much for speaking with me, and we all wish you the best of luck at Kar-Ben.

Leila Sales

Thank you so much for having me, Heidi. I’m really happy to be here!

[MUSIC, TRIBUTE]

Heidi Rabinowitz

Author Jane Yolen passed away recently on June 11th, 2026, at the age of 87. She was the incredibly prolific author of four hundred and fifty books, both secular and Jewish. She wrote the landmark 1988 Holocaust novel, The Devil’s Arithmetic, and she was the winner of the 2022 Sydney Taylor Body-of-Work Award. I interviewed Jane Yolen in 2018, along with her co-author Barbara Diamond Goldin, about their book Meet Me at the Well: The Girls and Women of the Bible. I’ll put a link to that episode in the show notes. But for now, here is an excerpt of that interview, in memory of Jane Yolen. [MUSIC FADES]

Jane Yolen

And then there’s a story — Barbara’s tired of hearing me tell it — the story of Yael.

Barbara Diamond Goldin

I’m not tired, but I have heard it a bunch of times. [LAUGHTER]

Jane Yolen

[LAUGHTER] Which, I always bring it up when we’re doing a talk. The story is buried in Deborah’s story. And Deborah, we can all agree: first woman judge, there is nothing bad you can say about her. But then there’s this little story embedded in it, where, when the Jews have actually overthrown the Canaanites, who were the fierce warriors with those chariots with scythes on their wheels, and Sisera, the head of the Canaanites is running away, leaving his men, running away. Comes to a little encampment between the Canaanites’ area and the the Jews’ area. This little group of people were like the Switzerland, right? They didn’t dare side with anyone. So they were the safe place where it was.

So he runs in, opens the tent, and goes in, and there’s a woman standing there, and he says, “Woman,” he says, “I’m tired. Bring me something to drink, I will lie down to sleep.” So she brings him something to drink, he lies down asleep, she takes a tent peg, she puts it on on his head and goes, BAM! and kills him.

And I go, “What?! Why did she kill him?” There is no reason that I could suss out why she killed him. So it was always puzzling to me. And in the Bible class, it was just there, you know, it’s just hanging there. But when we decided to do Deborah as one of them, and we came upon the story of Yael, I did some research in feminist books about the Bible. And one woman was an anthropologist, and she said, Look, this is what we know about this community. Hosting was very important to them, as it was too, as we see in many of the Jewish stories. Hosting was important. A woman had to keep herself sacred and apart. So she was living in her own tent. Her husband would come and visit her. Her husband was the head of the community. And when Sisera comes in and he walks into her tent uninvited, without a male escort from their people, he has already basically called her indecent, called her a, you know, a woman who sells herself, who opens herself to other men. He also has said she was a bad host because she didn’t immediately offer him something to drink or something to eat. So in order to save herself and her husband, both of whom would have been thrown out of the community because she had dishonored herself and him, she had no other way of dealing with this than killing him.

Heidi Rabinowitz

Wow.

Jane Yolen

You know, even shrieking wouldn’t have done. You had to [KNOCK].

Heidi Rabinowitz

That’s quite a story!

Barbara Diamond Goldin

She’s a good storyteller! [LAUGHTER]

[MUSIC, DEDICATION]

David Behrman

Hi, this is David Behrman.

Derek Stordahl

Hi, I’m Derek Stordahl.

Vicki Weber

And hi, I’m Vicki Weber.

David Behrman

...from Behrman House Publishers, joining you soon on the Book of Life podcast. We’d like to dedicate this episode to all of the educators in religious schools around North America, who educate our children, and to the authors who put their trust in us as we bring their books to life and into the public eye.

Heidi Rabinowitz

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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Author Jane Yolen died today at the age of 87, and I’d like to share this memory of her.

In 2018 I was was living in Massachusetts, which gave me the delightful opportunity to visit Jane in her home to interview her for The Book of Life Podcast. Along with her co-author Barbara Diamond Goldin, we were talking about Meet Me at the Well: The Girls and Women of the Bible, a collection of fascinating and empowering short stories. Barbara and Jane both had so much wisdom to share, but all of us in the room — Barbara, me, my husband Matt, and Jane’s daughter (also named Heidi) were all enraptured by Jane’s storytelling. She just swept us all away. I’m glad to have this recording of her voice to share with you.

I’m also glad to share this tribute that Susan Kusel and I created on The Jewish Book Garden.

The Jewish Book Garden

Jane Yolen: Her Memory IS a Blessing

Jewish author Jane Yolen passed away today at the age of 87, surrounded by family. She was the incredibly prolific author of 450 books, the recipient of six honorary doctorates, and the winner of countles…

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3 months ago · Jewish Book Garden, Heidi Rabinowitz, and Susan Kusel

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What better way to kick off pleasure reading season than with a fun Jewish romantasy? A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon offers a richly-imagined fantasy realm, a magic school, puzzles, quests, adventure, and of course, romance. When I got to the last page and realized it ends on a cliff-hanger, I was low key distraught! That’s why I had to call up author Hannah Reynolds to chat with her about this delightful romp, such a departure from her usual contemporary YA romances.

I also have to give Hannah credit for excellent use of Instagram in promoting her book. Check her account for clever posts like “5 days until A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon and 5 ways I was inspired by Provence, France” or “What’s Your Cozy Romantasy Book Title?”

Love, Heidi

NEWS

My “Jewish Joy” series continues on Multicultural Kid Blogs. Here’s my interview with past Book of Life guest Ana María Shua. READ HERE

CALLS TO ACTION

Jewish American Heritage Month is over but the education continues! Check out the curriculum offered by Noa Tishby (Israeli author and TV star) on Judaism, the Holocaust, Antisemitism, and the Land of Israel, for grades 6-12, at Eighteen Education. Great for use at any time of year! Tell all the teachers you know!

The Israeli Institute for Hebrew Literature has launched an online Book Club, with live interviews of Israeli and Jewish authors. The first meeting will be on Sunday, June 7 at 12:00PM ET and the theme will be “Coming to America: An Israeli in the US — in Literature and in Life” with host Jamie Dembo interviewing authors Tehila Hakimi and Joshua Cohen. REGISTER HERE

SHOW NOTES

• Hannah Reynolds’ website and Instagram

• Buy A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon

• The Jewish Book Garden’s Summer Reading Club

• BookBub (Hannah’s day job)

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Hannah Reynolds 0:00

[COLD OPEN] I’m like, this romance novel is medicinal. I’m like, you go read it, take it with your vitamin D, and you will be a happier human being. [LAUGHTER] You can just become happier by reading a book, ideally. You know, what an easy way to just improve your life.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:16

Well, thank you for watching out for our health! Take two rom-coms and call me in the morning.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:21

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. As the summer reading season begins, I’ve got a delightful beach read for you: a young adult romantasy called A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon by Hannah Reynolds. Hannah is already well known for contemporary YA romance, but she’s made a strong leap into the fantasy genre with this cozy, slow burn romantic adventure fantasy. Speaking of summer reading, check out the Jewish Book Garden’s Summer Reading Club, which offers lots of fun ways to enjoy Jewish kidlit. I will put a link in the show notes at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com, where you can also find a transcript and bonus content. And don’t forget, if you’d like to hear Hannah’s Share Your Shelf segment, you can get access by upgrading to a paid subscription to support the show. Thanks! [END INTRO, MUSIC FADES]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:27

Hannah Reynolds, welcome to The Book of Life!

Hannah Reynolds 1:30

Thanks, thanks for having me.

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:32

Hannah, I’ve always enjoyed your rom-coms, but A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon is something else. This is well researched and exciting, yet it’s cozy romantasy with a bit of a Hogwarts vibe. So, tell us about this book.

Hannah Reynolds 1:49

Well, first, thank you so much for reading both this one and all my other romantic comedies. This is about a girl who is attending a magical academy on a river island. She accidentally summons a demon. It is very different, because it is a fantasy world. There is a lot of magic, there’s magical creatures. The boy our main character falls in love with is a demon. But I do feel like at the heart of it, it’s also very similar to all my other books, in that it is both a romantic comedy -- the core of the story is just about the relationship between the two characters -- and as there always is in my books, the B line is, “and they solve a puzzle,” because I love puzzles! And so I think of it as a similar creation to the others, if shelved in a different area of the bookstore.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:37

What was the inspiration for this book?

Hannah Reynolds 2:40

I had always wanted to write a fantasy novel. In fact, the first novels that I ever tried to write were fantasy novels. My dad read to me and my brother when we were very little. He would read us a chapter a night from Patricia C. Wrede, Lloyd Alexander, you know, Alice in Wonderland, and so that’s really what I cut my teeth on. But it turned out that was a harder sell in the publishing world, even though I signed with my agent with a fantasy novel -- it was a young adult retelling of Queen Esther -- but it never quite worked, so all of a sudden I had six contemporary novels published before we were really ready to send a fantasy novel out. So the genesis was just, like, I’d always wanted to do something like that. And then I’d had this sort of plot in the back of my head: what if a girl, you know, she didn’t have a boyfriend, she was maybe embarrassed or she needed an excuse, and she made up a boyfriend... you know, that sort of like “I have a girlfriend, she goes to school in Canada,” kind of thing, [LAUGHTER] but then what if that person showed up, and then you’re sort of caught in the middle of this lie where you don’t want to admit to people that you spun this elaborate web, and there’s this other person now claiming that they are your partner, and you’re like, oh, I don’t know. So then of course my twist was like, well, what if he’s a demon! That was sort of where the core plot of it came in in that way, and then everything else, I usually layer in after. I usually start with the initial meet cute or relationship between the couple, and then this book has also, there’s some ancient scrolls that need to be deciphered, there’s some mythology in there that you get to later on. But that was all layered in later on, as opposed to, you know, the initial genesis of the novel.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:23

So you’ve actually been a fantasy writer hiding under the guise of a rom-com writer this whole time! [LAUGHTER]

Hannah Reynolds 4:32

That’s how I felt for years.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:34

That’s very funny.

Hannah Reynolds 4:35

Yeah!

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:35

So Daziel the demon is our romantic lead, and Jewish demons are not at all like Christian demons. They’re not actually evil. In your opinion, is “demon” really the right translation for the Hebrew name Shaydim?

Hannah Reynolds 4:51

Oh, that’s such a good question. Not really. I’m no scholar, but I have a friend who is; she wrote her dissertation on Jewish demons. I talked to her a bit, and I read a lot of different articles, and I think, unsurprisingly, there’s no one straight answer when it comes to what is a shayd and what are demons. When you look it up, one of the things that people will call the shaydim, are maybe “the gods of foreigners,” is sort of one way of looking at it. I read a lot of different descriptions where they were bound by Jewish laws, they were actually part of the Jewish community in a strange way, but again, these are all different separate stories, so it leaves a lot of room for interpretation.

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:33

So, can you describe what are Jewish demons, what are shaydem, in folklore, and in your book?

Hannah Reynolds 5:40

In folklore, a lot of old scholars would say that they are everywhere. I can’t remember the exact numbers, but there’s thousands for every single person that exists. They are causing small bad things to happen to you, like acne to break out, or just like clogs in your sink, and so they’re just sort of like small and troublesome. They can gather a lot in your bathroom. They’re not necessarily super malicious, but they’re maybe not like very smart, and there’s tons of them. They’re invisible. One little thing I was able to include in the novel was: scatter ash on your floor, and if in the morning there’s chicken claw prints, that means demons have been there!

Hannah Reynolds 6:23

And then there’s also more human-like shaydim, where they do have human form, they can eat and drink, they are very intelligent, they can argue with people, they can be brought to court. You see one story where a shayd attacks local people going by for damaging his home, but they didn’t know he was there, so that who’s in the wrong? And then so he’s ordered to pay money to the people, so then you can see there’s this very human-like interaction going on. Then you have the king of the demons, demons who do become very powerful, very intellectual, maybe they study the Torah. There’s the story about King Solomon binds a demon with a ring, and he helps raise the temple, so that’s an incredible amount of power. But there’s nowhere that I could find, like, here’s seven different types of demons. What I found a lot of are like, some people think there’s three, some people think there’s seven, some people think there’s twelve. Again, many, many different answers for every single question that you could have.

Hannah Reynolds 7:21

While that didn’t give me a lot of structure, it did give me a lot of freedom in how I wanted to structure my world. So I decided in my world I would have both the high shaydim, sort of like court royal shaydim, who do appear like human, who are very powerful and can do many things. Then also wild shaydim, who are less powerful, a little bit more chaotic, much less human. That’s not really drawn from anything, that’s just from me sort of reading a lot of different source material and being like, all right, there’s no hard and fast rule, so I’m going to play with this a little bit and do what I think would be a fun world.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:57

I love that, and I think that it’s very Jewish that there are a zillion answers...

Hannah Reynolds 8:01

Yeah, definitely.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:03

...to the question. So, the world of this story is not actually explicitly Jewish, and yet it’s an entirely Jewish fantasy realm with really strong world building. So, can you talk about how you pulled that off?

Hannah Reynolds 8:17

You know, so many of the Jewish fantasy authors who I dearly love, a lot of their worlds are inspired by our world, and so a lot of the stories focus a little bit more on historical periods where we were dealing with trauma. All of the stories about the people who correspond to Jews in these novels, they’re often in ghettos, they’re often under attack, and I didn’t really want to tell that story. That was just not the one that I was interested in. Here, I just wanted to make the entire world Jewish, and basically everyone in this world is pretty Jewish, and so everything is incredibly normalized, and no one is standing out because they’re Jewish. Nobody is feeling othered, that’s simply the way of life for everybody, including for the demons. So, the demons also have rabbis, and there are specific things like a mezuzah that is against demons. It’s like blowing the shofar, that’s supposed to banish some demons too. So, those kind of things from the medieval era, it’s about how to protect yourself from demons. They show up there a lot, so I think I just decided that the baseline standard was everyone was a little bit Jewish, so that was very fun. But again, not based on any specific time and place, except Provence, a little bit in France: the terrain, the flowers, the winds, those are all very much a part of southern France, and that has nothing to do with Judaism. I just love France, so that’s just sort of the style.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:52

Well, that makes sense. You take different bits and pieces and bind them together... which is kind of like the magic that they do!

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:59

The magical creature, the Ziz, is an important part of this book, and I was somewhat familiar with this creature because of the 2001 picture book, The Hardest Word: A Yom Kippur Story by Jacqueline Jules. But tell us more about the Ziz.

Hannah Reynolds 10:14

Sure, so I was very familiar with the Behemoth and the Leviathan, and I didn’t actually know that there was a third great beast in that trio, which is the Ziz. And the Ziz is the ruler of the sky, the birds. There’s a lot of very interesting stories about it. It’s massive, first of all, you know, it has a wingspan big enough to block off the sun. If it stood in the ocean, the ocean only comes up to its ankles. You know, once it dropped an egg, and the egg flooded cities. So you know these really interesting stories of a beast. Not very many pictures of what it’s supposed to look like, but it is sort of a griffin-like creature, if you will. A ziz itself, I believe, means a little of this, a little of that, which is what this is, is supposed to taste like.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:03

Taste like!?

Hannah Reynolds 11:05

Yes! Taste like at the feast that is to be served to everyone at some point.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:10

When I read about it in the story, it sounded like it was important to help balance the world, so I’m surprised that anybody would want to hunt and eat it.

Hannah Reynolds 11:20

Ah, yes, that, that didn’t make it into my version, that’s that’s more from Jewish lore’s version. In my world, nobody’s trying to eat the Ziz at all. That was me, perhaps cherry picking a little bit of what part of mythology I wanted to include. I did add my own things to it, you know. In mythology, I don’t think that these creatures die or have children, but in my version, I decide that they could all depend on each other, and there could be a cycle of life and death for them.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:51

Okay, well, it was a well-evoked magical creature.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:56

Words are very important in this world, and carving words on objects is a way of casting spells, and this seemed like a very Jewish concept that words can change reality. So, can you talk about that?

Hannah Reynolds 12:07

Yeah, yeah, I have always thought about how much work it must be to do magic, and I wanted it to be something that is a lot of work, but is also accessible to anyone who is interested in it. So, a lot of fantasy novels, you have somebody who is very special, you know, they are lucky to have these amazing powers, there may be one in a million. And I wanted this to be a story where really anyone could do magic if they worked hard enough at it. Maybe you don’t want to do it, because you do have to learn how to write a spell, and you do have to try over and over again. I thought of it very much like coding, actually, where you’re just constantly trying it and being like, “Oh, did that work? And you’re like, “It actually didn’t. Let’s go back to the drawing board and try it another time.” That was sort of how I built my system.

Hannah Reynolds 12:54

And then, yes, I just think words are so important. They have so much weight, and people aren’t always as careful with them as I think we could all be. People also have different definitions sometimes for the same words. A really easy way I think to get in an argument with somebody is because you maybe are trying to say the same thing but you disagree on the meaning of the words that you’re using, and so I think it can be very important to define things in the first place, so you really understand what you’re both talking about. And so I think I’ve always just cared a lot about language, and so that makes its way into my books.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:37

Tell us about something really interesting that you learned in your research for this book, something you were able to use, and maybe also something that ended up on the cutting room floor.

Hannah Reynolds 13:46

Oh, that’s so interesting. The first thing that I can think of that ended up in the cutting room floor: Paz is this little magical salamander friend that Daziel has. He sits on Daziel’s shoulder, he made it to the cover, he’s just like fun and friendly. But in the very first version of this, when I was reading up on magical salamanders, I read that they are created by being burned in these magical fires for seven years, and then almost as soon as they’re born, someone kills them -- they might have eaten them, or they like use their blood -- and then they are immune to fire. That I actually had in the very first version. Daziel meets Naomi, the heroine, and to prove that he is a demon, he has her eat the salamander, also to protect her, which you don’t find out till later. And then, then the salamander is fine, he like pops back into existence, but then she’s immune to fire after that. And then I had a lot more fire going on in the story [LAUGHTER] that had to tie back into how shaydim are born of fire and ash. And that all got chopped, that was a little bit too much, I think, and a little more action-oriented than the book actually ended up going.

Hannah Reynolds 15:00

Like, another fun one that did stay in was this myth about having red string tied around your wrist, and this shows up in Jewish culture, but actually also in a lot of different cultures around the world. Part of this bracelet is protective against demons, but then one thing that I found out in one of these Jewish folklores that I was reading, was that if it fell off it meant that you had just met your husband. And so I kept that in, and Naomi, she wears her bracelet, and it falls off as soon as she meets Daziel.

Hannah Reynolds 15:31

I thought it was pretty interesting, because I realized that if you’re not familiar with Jewish mythology as a reader, you’re not going to recognize any of these as Jewish, so I’ve actually had a lot of readers who didn’t realize that any of these were sort of like call outs. I think a lot of Jewish audiences read this book and can immediately tell that there’s a lot of Jewish mythology in here, and other readers who are less familiar actually don’t recognize where it all comes from.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:58

Yeah, that makes sense to me. It’s an extremely Jewish book, but because it’s not laid out explicitly, somebody without that knowledge could definitely just read it as a straight fantasy and not realize where all this is coming from.

Hannah Reynolds 16:10

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:11

When I got to the end of the book and I found out it ends on a cliffhanger, I freaked out!

Hannah Reynolds 16:16

Oh no, I’m sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:20

So I hope it’s the first in a series?

Hannah Reynolds 16:23

Yes! Just to be very frank, authors don’t really have control over publishing schedules. So I had written this book with the intention of it being part of duology. I think that is very clearly set up for a second book. So my publisher cares about sales, right? So that’s simply how the business works. They’ll publish the second book if there’s enough sales for the first book. If there aren’t, then I will probably end up distributing it myself. If I had thought that this was the only book being published, I never would have ended it on such a clear division between the first half of the story and the clear intended second half.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:01

So it’s interesting that you’re saying that it’s a duology, because I was figuring it would be a trilogy. Now that you focused on the Ziz, I thought there should be a book about the Behemoth and a book about the Leviathan. But no, it’s not structured that way?

Hannah Reynolds 17:14

In my head, it was always going to be: Daziel is in Naomi’s world, the human world, for the first book, and then the second book, she is in his world, where she goes with him for the summer to live at his court, and be like, okay, would I be interested in living in this world? And the first book, very much, you know, the initial stages of a romance, and the second book, a lot more of a “now we are in a relationship, and how does that work?” especially because they’re so young, you know, they’re 18, 19 years old, and they’re still figuring out what a first relationship is like. So that was my structure of it. Having actually heard that, and the Behemoth is bigger in the second one, I’m like, oh, maybe eventually there could be a third one as well.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:57

The more the merrier, I think, because I really enjoyed it.

Hannah Reynolds 18:00

Oh, thank you.

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:01

And so, how can we, as listeners and readers and fans, help make that happen? So, obviously, we should run out and buy the book. Is there anything else that we can do to make this a reality?

Hannah Reynolds 18:12

The best way is to leave reviews on your platform of choice and to tell your friends about it. I don’t know, it’s not on the readers. I hate for it to be on anybody’s shoulders. So, I’m just like, the second story is coming, you know? And I would love for it to be with my publisher, but if I have to self-publish it, I... I would never abandon a story halfway through. I just feel like that’s, that’s not the done thing, really, [LAUGHTER] or it’s not what I want to do. But reviews are always very helpful.

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:42

That’s a relief. Because I was definitely left hanging. I wanted more!

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:47

On Instagram, you posted a video about how little power an author actually has over the title of a book, and A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon is a charming title; as you said in your video, it captures a whimsical vibe. But it wasn’t your top choice, and really the book is not a practical guide at all. So, can you tell us what your own original top choice for a title was?

Hannah Reynolds 19:10

Yeah, so when I’m writing a book, all of my Word documents are all labeled the POV character’s story. So, this was called Naomi’s Story the whole way through. When I talked about it with my friends, I called it the Demon Book. When I talk about the sequel with people, I call it Demon Two. Oh, and then we called it The Demon’s Betrothed for a long, long time. That was the working title. We must have gone back and forth with my publisher about the title, about 30 different titles. I think the one that I really liked had Winds in it, because you know, there are a lot of winds in this book. There’s also trends in titles, and marketing weighs in on titles a lot, definitely more, I would say, than the author does. I like this one too, but again, it’s not really a guide to anything. So what I sort of learned at this point when to pick my battles, and this was not a battle that I cared as much about, so I was like, okay, that’s cute. But my working title for the second book, which is also not a guide, is A Whimsical Guide to Marrying a Demon, because I did sort of like the format.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:22

It is a hook.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:23

Can you recommend any read-alikes for A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon, especially any Jewish read-alikes?

Hannah Reynolds 20:31

I can’t think of other Jewish cozy fantasy. That isn’t to say they don’t exist, I am sure they exist. There’s definitely lots of Jewish fantasy now, like Rena Rosner, Sacha Lamb, Ariel Kaplan, AR Vishny, Allison Saft. Allison Saft is actually a little bit cozy, but she’s not always Jewish. It depends, like, which of her book. Naomi Novik, I think; I would never dare compare myself to Naomi Novik, but Spinning Silver is a very Jewish fantasy, not cozy, but I really enjoyed how Jewish that was, and how much of a romantic fantasy that was. But what I was really thinking of was the romantic fantasy novels that I read as a child, as opposed to the romantasy that is out now, which I think is a little bit sexier, a little bit more focused on the romance. I really think of mine as one where it’s really 50% romance, but there’s a whole other plot line, and if you just want romance, I think you might be a little disappointed. Growing up, I read a lot of Sherwood Smith, Diana Wynne Jones, Patricia C. Wrede, Tamora Pierce - these authors were the ones that I was pulling on, sort of these childhood favorite authors.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:49

Thank you for those recommendations. I definitely think that Night Owls by A.R. Vishny would be a good match. I think it is somewhat cozy and does have sort of a puzzle that needs to be solved, so I think that would be a pretty good read alike.

Hannah Reynolds 22:03

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:04

In a 2021 article in Kirkus, you were quoted as saying “young adult fiction and romance go hand in hand, because I think of them both as genres of optimism.” So, can you talk some more about that?

Hannah Reynolds 22:17

Yeah, I think that a lot of contemporary fiction, especially when you’re reading a lot more literary fiction, you know it’s grappling with what we’re all grappling with day to day, and that can be very depressing. And as an artist, it can be very fulfilling to write work that is very depressing for a variety of reasons, [LAUGHTER] you know, you’re like, oh, I really nailed that one! But I think both YA and romance are very actively choosing to be optimistic, and that is because it’s a really important thing that people need in our lives. I recently was talking to a school about the power of reading uplifting fiction. I did a lot of research. You know, I was like, Oh, I’m gonna go talk to the school. They’re from 7th grade to 12th grade. For some reason, I was really convinced that the teenagers would not believe me if I didn’t come armed with a lot of facts. But what I really find is that you’re gonna live a lot longer if you’re a happier person, and laughter, in particular, has a lot of huge benefits. It de-stresses you, it decreases anxiety, it can decrease depression. There’s actually some interesting studies about how laughter can improve your memory, and being happy, of course, also is very good for your health, and can lower a lot of bad health risks. And so what these books are doing is they’re actually just making you a happier person, which can make you a healthier person, especially I think for teenagers that is wildly important because they can be so stressed, but I think also everybody is so stressed. I’m like, this romance novel is medicinal, I’m like, you go read it, take it with your vitamin D, and you will be a happier human being. And so I just really believe that makes such a huge difference in your life. And so if you can just become happier by reading a book, ideally, you know, what an easy way to just improve your life.

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:18

Well, thank you for watching out for our health! Take two rom-coms and call me in the morning. [LAUGHTER] Yeah, I love that.

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:27

So, up until now, you’ve written realistic contemporary rom-coms, and I’ve always enjoyed your Nantucket-based stories about that large Sephardic family, the Barbanels and the Golden Door series. So, tell us a little bit about this series, and are there any more entries forthcoming?

Hannah Reynolds 24:43

There’s about 12 cousins, and I could see a story for all of the cousins. They all have their own distinct personalities. A shy cousin was up next, and then some rambunctious triplets. That is my publisher’s decision, whether or not they wanted more. I would love to write more. And what I would actually really love to do for that world is to write some of the adult stories. The mystery that the teenagers are solving is often about, like, oh, and here’s this woman who, in the 1800s disguised herself as a man and fell in love with a sailor on a ship and went traveling the world, and also here’s a through line about the Nantucket whaling industry. [LAUGHTER] So, I would love to write that historical novel. I deeply love historical fiction, so I’d love to write some of those about the Barbanels.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:34

You have another series of rom-coms for adults called the New York Leopards series, involving members of a football team called the Leopards, and this also has Jewish representation. I’ve never read them, because they’re not kids books. I don’t even have time to read adult books!

Hannah Reynolds 25:49

That’s really fair.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:50

But can you tell us about this series?

Hannah Reynolds 25:53

So, these are the first books I ever wrote. I wrote these books when I was very young, like 22 and 23, about being 22 and 23. I did recently get the rights back to them from Harlequin and self-published them, which is a whole, a whole experience. I have so much respect for people who learned the self-publishing industry. The heroine of the first book, Rachel, is Jewish, and her partner is Irish Catholic, and it’s a real clashing of their two worlds. It was fairly early, it was 2013. There weren’t a lot of traditionally published Jewish books out there, and I got a little bit more attention for it than I was expecting, which sort of startled me. And then the second book I really dialed back, and I was like, oh, there’s no Jews in this book, because I didn’t really want any attention. But I got many letters from people who said that they wanted this book about one of the boys on the football team who was Jewish. And I had never actually intended to write about him. He had sort of been an entrance point for the heroine of the first book to befriend this team, because this boy sort of attached himself to her, and he was like, Hello, please be my friend. So then I went, and I wrote a book about him and his childhood best friend, Tamar. It was a very early romance novel where both leads were Jewish, and it’s been like really, really nice how much it touched people.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:18

It’s interesting that they made more impact than you expected them to.

Hannah Reynolds 27:24

I had never considered writing about the Jewish experience. I was just writing about my experience. I had never published a book before, so I didn’t really understand what reception was like.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:36

It’s Tikkun Olam time. So, what action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Hannah Reynolds 27:43

So many people can feel burned out by everything that is going on right now. So I would just like to encourage people to do smaller actions, which perhaps feel easier, like maybe you can do a bystander training; here in Massachusetts we have a great one with hotlines for if you see ICE around in your neighborhood. I think a lot of states have similar trainings that you can do. There’s a lot of things that you can do around the election period, just to make sure that people are able to vote; there’s a lot of voter suppression going on right now. So I think that just anything that you can do that feels within your wheelhouse, like that, you know, I think is really a great way to stand up and give back to the community.

Heidi Rabinowitz 28:27

Thank you very much. Is there an interview question you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Hannah Reynolds 28:32

Well, it’s a really silly one, but one question that I like to ask people is, is there anything sort of silly going on in your book, like a little secret treat or something? And so, in my book, it’s that palindromes saved the day. My name, Hannah, is a palindrome, and my whole life people have liked to remind me of that fact, in case I somehow forgot. [LAUGHTER] And in this book, the word Ziz is also a palindrome, and the fact that it’s a palindrome is sort of like a huzzah moment for everybody. So that’s very, very silly, but it’s something that made me personally very happy, and I feel like that’s the fun thing about being a writer is that you get to crack yourself up and like have fun with yourself all day long, and that’s sort of what I feel like the point of creating art is. Yeah, that made me very happy. That’s my silly little one.

Heidi Rabinowitz 29:28

Well, I love that, and it’s not even that silly, because they’re trying to translate a lost language, and so being able to spot a palindrome really helps them crack that code. So, it’s, it’s actually important, it’s not just silly!

Heidi Rabinowitz 29:41

Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Hannah Reynolds 29:46

You can follow me on Instagram at @HannahElisaWren. Unfortunately, it is all too complicated to find, because it’s Elisa with an s and Wren like the bird. But you can also just go to my website at HannahReynolds.net which has links to all of my books, all of my social medias, and more information there.

Heidi Rabinowitz 30:09

Hannah, we’re going to talk about your personal library now to see what book you’ll be sharing from your own shelf, so anyone who wants to hear about your pick can become a paid listener on Substack to get access to the Share Your Shelf segments, but in the meantime: Hannah Reynolds, thank you so much for speaking with me today. Such a pleasure!

Hannah Reynolds 30:28

Thank you for having me.

Leila Sales 30:33

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, this is Leila Sales, the Editorial Director at Kar-Ben Publishing. I’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast, and I’d like to dedicate my episode to my mother, because I’m obsessed with her. She’s the cleverest person I know. She is endlessly entertaining and endlessly entertained by everything in the world. She has the best sense of humor. She’s fascinated by Jewish religion and culture. She’s just my role model.

Heidi Rabinowitz 31:11

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

[MUSIC, PROMO] It is 1918 and Bluma has waited four long years for her husband, Sender, to bring her and their three daughters from Romania to America. When the tickets fail to arrive, she takes their fortune into her own hands.

Packing up her children, Bluma journeys across the ocean to rural Ohio—only to discover a crumbling farmhouse, a failing farm on the brink of foreclosure, and a husband more interested in studying Talmud than in actual farm work. In a strange new country, can she protect her dreams for her daughters: education, independence, and marriages built on love?

Join me for a conversation with author Miriam Flock about her powerful novel, Wild Grapes, on the Nice Jewish Books podcast. [MUSIC FADES]

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For Jewish American Heritage Month, May 2026, I posted daily Resources to help you find, promote, interact with, and/or create great Jewish books for kids. You can see the original posts on The Book of Life’s Instagram or Facebook.

Here, in one convenient list, are all of those Resources, including links.

1. The Jewish Book Garden: Substack Hub for Jewish Kidlit

2. Jewish Kidlit Mavens: Facebook Group

3. Jewish Joy series: Author Interviews

4. Diverse Jewish Kidlit Database: on LibraryThing

5. New Jewish Kidlit: Monthly Flyers

6. Holiday Highlights: Booklists, Best New Jewish Holiday Kidlit

7. Love Your Neighbor: Booklists, Jewish Kidlit for All Readers

8. Evaluating Jewish Rep in Kidlit: Guide for Libraries

9. Media Pitch Kit: For Promoting Jewish Books

10. Sydney Taylor Book Awards: Best Jewish Kidlit of the Year

11. Blog Tour Archives: Sydney Taylor Book Award Author Interviews

12. Sydney Taylor Manuscript Awards: Most Promising Unpublished Jewish Kidlit

13. National Jewish Book Awards: Kidlit Categories

14. Canadian Jewish Literary Awards: Kidlit Categories

15. Vine Awards: kidlit categories

16. Association of Jewish Libraries: Professional Org

17. Jewish Book Council: Professional Org

18. PJ Library & PJ Our Way: Free Jewish books

19. The Tell Institute: Education Project

20. Artists Against Antisemitism: Authors Raising Awareness

21. Jewish Kidlit Wishlist: Authors, Take Note!

22. Jewish Kidlit Publishers: Handy List

23. Sydney Taylor Portal: Info Hub on All-of-a-Kind Family Author

24. @KidlitKippot: Jewish Rep in Illustration

25. Jewish Kidlit History: Presentation

26. A Place at the Table: Presentation on Jewish Inclusion

27. Cheering On Jewish Books: Presentation

28. Poster & Bookmarks: Celebrating Jewish American Heritage

29. All-of-a-Kind Podcast: Jewish Kidlit Deep Dive

30. The Book of Life: Jewish Kidlit Podcast

31. Summer Reading Club: From The Jewish Book Garden

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PLAY AUDIO PODCAST

Worlds collide! Today on the podcast, I’m talking about one of my other Jewish kidlit projects, and as my partner Susan Kusel points out, it’s a very meta moment. Susan, my good friend and most frequent podcast guest, joins me to talk about our Substack website and e-newsletter, The Jewish Book Garden. Susan is the dreamer who comes up with great ideas, and I’m the one who likes to dig in and get the details worked out — it’s a good combination!

I’m truly excited to introduce you to The Jewish Book Garden, and to our Summer Reading Club and forthcoming Zoom discussion group!

Love, Heidi

NEWS

I’ll be posting daily during Jewish American Heritage Month this May on Instagram and Facebook, sharing Jewish literary resources that will help you find, promote, interact with, or create Jewish books for kids. See INSTAGRAM / FACEBOOK

My “Jewish Joy” series continues on Multicultural Kid Blogs. Here’s my interview with past Book of Life guest Joanne Levy. READ HERE

CALLS TO ACTION

“A Century of Literature for Jewish American Children,” is a free online class from the Jewish Study Center on Wednesday, May 6, 2026 at 7:00PM ET. REGISTER HERE

“Telling Our Stories: Claiming Space for Jewish Narratives on Library Shelves,” is a free webinar on Thursday, May 14, 2026 at 7:30PM ET on Zoom. The Book of Life is a community partner for this event. REGISTER HERE

“Beyond Jewish Joy” is a free webinar on Wednesday, May 20, 2026 at 2:30PM ET from the American Library Association's Ethnic and Multicultural Information Exchange Round Table (EMIERT). They will showcase titles for youth with exemplary Jewish representation. REGISTER HERE

SHOW NOTES

• The Jewish Book Garden

• The Jewish Book Garden Summer Reading Club

• Jewish American Heritage Month | Canadian Jewish Heritage Month

• Heidi’s Tikkun Olam suggestion: support Indivisible.org

• Susan Kusel’s website

• Susan’s Share Your Shelf bonus segment

• Susan’s past appearances on The Book of Life:
  o January 2018: The Big Reveal, 2018 Sydney Taylor Book Award Winners
  o January 2019: Beyond the Holocaust and Holidays: A Writing Symposium

  o January 2019: The 2019 Sydney Taylor Book & Manuscript Award Winners
  o October 2020: The Mitzvah of Voting
  o January 2021: The Sydney Taylor Shmooze
  o March 2021: The Passover Guest
  o February 2022: The 2022 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour: The Gold Medalists
  o April 2022: Holiday Highlights: The Best New Passover Books

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Susan Kusel 0:00

[COLD OPEN] In a very meta moment, there will be an announcement on The Book Garden about this Book of Life podcast, which is about The Book Garden. So...

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:11

Yes! Oh my gosh, it’s a hall of mirrors, you’re right!

Susan Kusel 0:14

There we go!

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:15

That’s very funny.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:16

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. My friend Susan Kusel has all the Jewish literary bases covered. She’s an author, she’s a synagogue librarian, she’s been a buyer for a bookstore, and like me, she’s a past Chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. We are basically best book buddies, and we do a lot of projects together to promote Jewish kidlit. Our newest project is The Jewish Book Garden, a website/newsletter on Substack. In this episode, Susan and I break down what The Jewish Book Garden is, who it’s for, and what you can expect to find in your inbox when you subscribe to it. Don’t miss our announcements about our Summer Reading Club and our new seasonal Zoom discussion group! You can find show notes, a transcript, and bonus content at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. [MUSIC FADES]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:27

Hi Susan, happy Jewish American Heritage Month, and also Canadian Jewish heritage month!

Susan Kusel 1:32

Hi Heidi, lovely to talk to you. I think we have determined that I am your most frequent podcast guest.

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:40

That is true.

Susan Kusel 1:41

That’s my goal, is to appear as much as possible on The Book of Life. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:46

I believe you have been on the podcast at least eight times in the past, so this is number nine. You’ve been on the show as the Chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, as the author of The Passover Guest, to talk about various projects that we do together. And that’s what we’re going to talk about again today, is one of our projects. So would you like to reveal to our listeners what we are going to talk about this time?

Susan Kusel 2:10

So today on The Book of Life, we want to talk about The Jewish Book Garden.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:15

JewishBookGarden.substack.com. It’s a website. It’s an e-newsletter. It is a hub for our various projects. We were thinking about three interconnected groups of stakeholders when we created it. So the first group is the creators of Jewish kidlit, like authors and publishers. The second group is advocates for Jewish kidlit: librarians, bloggers, influencers, people who promote these books. And then the third group is the readers who consume the books. And on our About page at The Jewish Book Garden, we explain this with lots of fun garden-y, [LAUGHTER] garden-y metaphors about blooming and growth and things like that.

Susan Kusel 2:59

Feasting on Jewish books and harvesting Jewish books and growing Jewish books. The garden metaphor was huge, which I actually love!

Heidi Rabinowitz 3:07

We’re trying to nurture the growth of this literary community who is interested in Jewish children’s literature. And you fit into all three of those categories, Susan!

Susan Kusel 3:16

[LAUGHTER] Right, as a, as an author and advocate and a reader. So you may notice it’s not called The Jewish Children’s Book Garden. We wanted to just leave the door open because we might get to a point where we’ll discuss adult books. Right now it really is focused on children’s books, but we purposely didn’t caveat that.

Heidi Rabinowitz 3:39

So let’s talk about how The Jewish Book Garden evolved from our previous website, The Sydney Taylor Shmooze.

Susan Kusel 3:47

We founded the Shmooze five years ago with our friend Chava Pinchuk. So at the time, it felt like every month there was a new mock award blog popping up: Calling Caldecott, and Heavy Medal which is about the Newbery, ones about the Geisel and the Sibert. And I really wanted one to reflect the Sydney Taylor Book Award. Heidi, Chava and I are all former chairs. So the idea was books that were eligible for Sydney Taylor, and we thought had a shot at the award. But what we ended up doing was way beyond that. We review nearly every single Jewish children’s book published in the year, not just books we thought might win. So I felt that we had outgrown this. That wasn’t the point anymore. The point was a very complete Jewish book review blog.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:42

We literally took the book reviews, five years worth of book reviews, from the Sydney Taylor Shmooze, and migrated them to The Jewish Book Garden. And we have the same team of wonderful volunteers continuing to review books for us. And we’ve now organized them by age group, which is also a change from the Sydney Taylor Shmooze. We’ve got separate sections where you can look at reviews for board books, picture books, middle grade, or young adult. You can actually subscribe separately: if you just want to hear about picture books, for example, you can adjust your subscription to only get emails about that.

Susan Kusel 5:19

So the other thing that’s been really cool is it’s given an opportunity to highlight previous posts.

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:26

Yeah, so we’ve been actually curating our existing reviews into new posts, if there’s a holiday coming up or a topic that we think needs discussion. When that antisemitic crazy person drove their truck into the synagogue in Michigan, we thought, well, you know, literature is the way to process things -- at least for us, it is. And so we put together a post of books about antisemitic acts against temples, in hopes that people can use that literature to discuss difficult issues with kids. That’s kind of a dark example, [LAUGHTER] but we’ve been doing that kind of curation posts for holidays coming up, for National Library Week...

Susan Kusel 6:11

Poetry Month. We just did one on Independent Bookstore Day. It’s really cool. We have a platform in a way that we haven’t before. It’s also given us an opportunity to talk about news in the industry.

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:27

Yes, we were able to put up a post as soon as the press release came out about the turnover at Behrman House. Behrman House has been around for over 100 years in the Behrman family, and now it is leaving the family, but under, you know, very good stewardship. That was a big deal to be able to share that.

Susan Kusel 6:45

A very big deal!

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:46

I am also going to be sharing that in the future on The Book of Life, because I just recently interviewed David Behrman, Vicki Weber, and the new owner, Derek Stordahl. We have multiple ways of sharing our news, [LAUGHTER] but see, this is one of the exciting things, is that The Book of Life is not siloed now from my other projects, because I can share Book of Life episodes on the Jewish Book Garden so that people will get to hear those interviews who might not otherwise have been aware of them.

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:46

Another thing about The Jewish Book Garden is that we’ve got a Resources page. So if you click on the Resources tab at the top...

Susan Kusel 7:05

Under the Resource list, we have awards, we have book lists, organizations, podcasts (including this one that we’re talking on right now), a list of Jewish publishers...

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:39

Some of the resources on this list are joint projects of ours, which finally have a home [LAUGHTER] where we can talk about all of it together. One of those things is the Jewish Kidlit Mavens group on Facebook, which has over 2000 members.

Susan Kusel 7:54

We started it about five, six years ago. I think a lot of our projects start this way, where I’ll say, “hey, what if we” -- fill in the blank. And Heidi will be like, “and here it is.”

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:06

When I get excited about something, I just go.

Susan Kusel 8:08

You just go. So, so one of the projects which evolved that way is the Holiday Highlights committee through the Association of Jewish Libraries, AJL.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:20

Right. So the Holiday Highlights lists come out for the spring and fall publishing seasons. We are trying to promote the best new children’s books about Jewish holidays.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:30

Another resource is the Media Pitch Kit that we created specifically aimed at helping publicists and authors and publishing houses to promote Jewish children’s books, although it really can also be used for adult books.

Susan Kusel 8:46

Yeah. So this list includes Jewish blogs, podcasts, newspapers and websites that you can pitch your book to.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:57

And it’s somewhat crowdsourced, so we are happy to get additional information from people about other places that books can be pitched to. So let us know if there’s something not in the pitch kit that you think belongs there.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:09

One other resource that we should mention is our wish list of books that we are hoping that somebody will create; topics that we feel are underrepresented.

Susan Kusel 9:21

The Jewish Book Council has a seminar every year for Jewish children’s book creators, and I’ve spoken at it many times and made suggestions on books that I would like to see. And so this list evolved from my, you know, back of the napkin notes, to an actual list. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:41

Well, let me ask you off of this wish list, just a few of the things that you wish for the hardest.

Susan Kusel 9:50

I would love to see more about Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. I’d love to see STEM topics: science, technology, engineering and math. Poetry, actual poetry collections. Fantasy and science fiction. Books about holidays that are not about Hanukkah and Passover. Comedy and Jewish joy. Craft books, more children’s cookbooks. There really are almost no early readers, if you think of Elephant and Piggie, or The Cat in the Hat, that have very short, simple sentences.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:25

A couple other things I’m going to mention that are actually not joint projects [LAUGHTER]. On LibraryThing, I’ve created a diverse Jewish kidlit database. And I also wanted to mention the Evaluation Guide for libraries about how to evaluate Jewish children’s books individually, and also to evaluate your library collection, to see if you have a solid collection of Jewish children’s books on your shelves.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:52

One of the reasons I wanted to have you on today, Susan, to talk about The Jewish Book Garden, is that we actually have an announcement about our Summer Reading Club!

Susan Kusel 11:02

The purpose of summer reading programs is typically to address what we call summer slump, where a kid’s not in school every day so they’re less likely to read. So the idea is to keep up reading through the summer so that there’s not a big dip in progress by the time they get to the next school year. So summer reading programs have been developed as fun, engaging ways to do that.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:27

So in order to prevent the summer slump and also for adults participating to deepen their knowledge of the genre of Jewish children’s literature, we’ve created a virtual Summer Reading Club that anybody can participate in from anywhere. And if you go to the Programs tab at the top of JewishBookGarden.substack.com, you will find our Summer Reading Club post where you can download the handbook. The handbook will get you book logs, reading recommendations, a book bingo game, badges you can earn, book related crafts, and a certificate of achievement. You are in charge of your own achievement. [LAUGHTER] This is a self directed club. You don’t have to sign up. You don’t have to turn in anything. You can fill out that certificate with your name and the number of books you read, and nobody is checking on you. So that’s, it’s just up to you, but we would love to hear from you about what you’re reading and how you’re enjoying the activities that we’ve offered.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:26

I do want to point out that The Jewish Book Garden is designed for grown ups who love Jewish children’s literature, so the Summer Reading Club is the same, although kids are definitely welcome to participate, because, after all, our ultimate goal is to get kids to read these great Jewish titles. So you, the listener, can participate; any children in your life are welcome to participate. If you are involved with a Jewish summer camp, you can invite those kids to participate. So it’s really designed to be flexible for all ages. And participating by reading more Jewish books over the summer, no matter what your age, is also really helpful to the industry as a whole, because whether you’re buying books or borrowing them from the library, all of that is helping to increase the market for Jewish books. So it’s actually not only helping your summer slump or your knowledge of the genre, it’s also helping the whole ecosystem of Jewish children’s literature.

Susan Kusel 13:27

And this is really important, because we would like more publishers to publish Jewish books. They look at statistics like how many books are bought, or library usage and things like that. And so the more we read, the more we check out, the more we talk about, the more we advocate for this field, the more those books are going to get published and used and read.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:52

Exactly. So we’ve created this Jewish Summer Reading Club, not only for fun, but also as an entertaining, joyful way to boost the whole entire field of Jewish children’s literature. So we hope that you will help us do that and have fun doing it.

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:10

One of the summer activities is to kick off a discussion series on Zoom. We will publicize the date on The Jewish Book Garden, so do please subscribe so that you will get that notification. Susan, this was one of the ideas that you brought to the table, as you so often do, based on a book club that you used to run, live in person in your own neighborhood, right? Tell us about that.

Susan Kusel 14:37

So for several years, I used to run a book discussion group for adults called DC Kidlit, to explore all sorts of different types of children’s books. The concept is to try some different areas that you may not have. So instead of all, let’s say, young adult fiction, it’ll be like, here’s a graphic novel you might want to try or here’s a biography, to help kind of guide into places that you may not be familiar with. People would discover a whole new genre or something they never would have read. So what we’re going to do is, once a season, we’re going to have a discussion where we’ll let you know in a lot of advance what the book is going to be, and we’ll all get together and discuss it on Zoom like a virtual book club.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:25

So we’ll be starting this book discussion series this summer, but it will continue once a season.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:31

So the Summer Reading Club is self directed. The book discussion group is interactive. How can people interact in other ways with The Jewish Book Garden? Let’s talk about that. So first of all, you can subscribe so that you receive all of our posts in your email.

Susan Kusel 15:50

So we really hope that you leave comments. We really love hearing what you have to say. A conversation is so much richer. We really want to know what you think.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:00

You can Like and leave comments. And we also have a chat feature very similar to Facebook, where someone can start an initial conversation and then people can leave replies on that same thread. But I think the most important way that you can interact with us is to get in touch. Send us suggestions, send us ideas, submit review copies if you’re an author or a publisher, give us feedback. Please reach out to us at JewishBookGarden@gmail.com... or at BookOfLifePodcast@gmail.com or through the Jewish Kidlit Mavens. There’s so many ways to reach us!

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:39

So as always on The Book of Life, it’s Tikkun Olam Time. So Susan, would you like to share a tikkun olam suggestion? What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Susan Kusel 16:52

Well, first, I just want to say how lovely I think this segment is. The action I would love to see is: speaking up. I think that making your voice heard is so important. There are so many different ways to do this. They can be small things such as sharing your comments, participating in discussions. They can be larger things such as calling your Congressman. I really hope that you vote in every single election. I vote on, like the primary of the school board, everything, no matter how big or small it is. Right now it’s Jewish American Heritage Month in the month of May, and speaking up within the context of Judaism is just more important than it’s ever been. As I’m sure you know, antisemitism, it’s beyond on the rise. It’s...

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:51

Off the charts, actually.

Susan Kusel 17:52

A flood. It’s off the charts. It’s, It’s really unbelievable. I’ve never seen this like this in my lifetime. And speaking up about things that you see, about harmful stereotypes, about inaccurate depictions... the Jewish community is such a minority in the United States and in the world, and people aren’t aware always that we’re there. And so make your voice heard. So for example, if there is a mandatory meeting on Yom Kippur in your organization, say something. Maybe the person who scheduled that meeting, they’re not trying to be mean, it just never occurred to them that that day was being observed. They may not be familiar with the holiday. But I think we always need to make our voices heard.

Susan Kusel 18:41

I think we also just have to be honest with ourselves that it is getting harder to publish Jewish books. Editors and publishers are a little more hesitant, and I think that it’s important to not give up. A lot of people wonder, should they still be writing Jewish books? Keep writing. We need to hear your voice. It may be harder to get published, but if we stop writing, that would just be tragic. Please keep writing. Please keep speaking up. Please keep sharing Judaism with the world.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:18

I love that. Thank you, that’s a really great suggestion. I’m actually going to make a Tikkun Olam suggestion kind of related to what you just said. I would suggest getting involved with or making a donation to, or at least sharing social media posts about Indivisible, which is a grassroots organization that is working really hard to protect democracy in the United States, and it’s shocking how badly democracy needs protection. So everything we can do is so importan. I think it’s very appropriate for Jewish American Heritage Month and for all Americans to support Indivisible.org.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:00

So speaking of Jewish American Heritage Month, I wanted to mention my Instagram project to celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month throughout the month of May. Every day on Instagram, I will be doing a post where I name a resource like some of the resources that we mentioned earlier, that helps people find or promote or interact with or create great Jewish books for kids. And I will be announcing that on The Jewish Book Garden, because, as we can see now, everything is meshing together. [LAUGHTER] But if you go to @BookOfLifePodcast on Instagram, you will see those daily posts, and I will also put a link in the show notes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:42

Is there anything else you want to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Susan Kusel 20:47

So, Heidi, you said that I have been on the show a number of times and that this is number nine.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:53

I think this is number nine.

Susan Kusel 20:55

So my goal is for 18. I just want to keep going.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:58

[LAUGHTER] You’re halfway there, you’re halfway to chai!

Susan Kusel 21:01

Halfway to life! I just find this to be a really extraordinary podcast. I’m really glad that The Book of Life is now being featured in The Jewish Book Garden, because I think not enough people are aware of this podcast, and the work that Heidi has done on it is extraordinary. It’s always just timely and interesting, and these interviews just across the entire industry! I really want everyone to hear them, so I’m glad that you’re able to include those posts now, although The Book of Life does have a separate Substack as well.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:40

Yeah, it’s kind of funny, because now I’ve got Substacks all over the place,[LAUGHTER] and so I just, actually, I just want to take a moment to make sure people understand the difference. At The Jewish Book Garden, we’ve got a general interest Jewish children’s literature Substack, where we talk about every aspect under the sun. That is a free Substack. Everybody can subscribe to it and receive all the information with no paywall. On The Book of Life Podcast Substack, people can subscribe for free, but there is also a paid level. If you would like to support the show and get a little bit of bonus content, get the Share Your Shelf segments where the guests share books from their own personal bookshelves, then you can upgrade to paid. So two separate Substacks. But I hope that you’ll subscribe to both of them, because if you’re interested in Jewish children’s literature, they are both definitely for you.

Susan Kusel 22:36

In a very meta moment, there will be an announcement on The Book Garden about this Book of Life podcast, which is about The Book Garden, so...

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:47

Yes, oh my gosh, it’s a hall of mirrors! You’re right.

Susan Kusel 22:50

There we go.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:51

That’s very funny. Well, Susan, we’re going to go take a look at your personal library now to see what book you’ll be sharing from your shelf. So anyone who wants to hear about your pick can become a paid subscriber on The Book of Life Substack, BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com, to get access to the Share Your Shelf segments, but in the meantime: Susan Kusel, thank you for joining me on The Book of Life once again!

Susan Kusel 23:18

Thanks for having me, Heidi, yet again, and I hope many more to come.

Hannah Reynolds 23:23

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, this is Hannah Reynolds. I’m the author of A Practical Guide to Dating a Demon. I’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I’d like to dedicate this episode to my grandmother. She is from Paris, and much of this book is inspired by France. She really passed along her love of France to me, so I thought it would be nice to dedicate the episode to her.

Heidi Rabinowitz 23:57

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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PLAY AUDIO PODCAST

When The Remembering Candle came out last year, it was so gorgeous that I knew I wanted to include it on the podcast — and when it was named a National Jewish Book Award Finalist and a Sydney Taylor Book Award Notable, I was even more determined to schedule an interview. Then I read A Flame Burns On, and was amazed to find that I actually do need more books about yahrzeit candles in my life! These two picture books are the same and different, both quiet and heartfelt and comforting, but each with its own focus, vibe, and style. They offer a beautiful way to learn about Jewish customs, and to find solace when in grief.

Love, Heidi

NEWS

My “Jewish Joy” series continues on Multicultural Kid Blogs. Here’s my interview with past Book of Life guest Lee Wind. READ HERE

Read “Judy Blume, Jewish Legend,” an interview on GOLDA with Mark Oppenheimer, Judy Blume biographer. READ HERE

CALL TO ACTION

The current administration has been trying to eliminate IMLS, the Institute of Museum and Library Services, and to cut its funding. There’s been a lot of push and pull in the courts, bringing IMLS in and out of danger. At this time (before April 17, 2026) it’s important to urge your Senators to sign the “Dear Appropriator” letters in support of library funding, but even if you are reading this after that date, there’s a lot you can do to support libraries. See “Show Up For Libraries” HERE.

SHOW NOTES

• Alison Goldberg’s website and Instagram

• Richard Ho’s website and Instagram

• Buy The Remembering Candle | Eighteen Flowers for Grandma

• Buy A Flame Burns On | Two New Years

• Suggested read-alikes: Goodbye: A First Conversation About Grief, Something Sweet: A Sitting Shiva Story, I Wish That You Knew

• Tikkun olam suggestion: support Food Research & Action Center, frac.org

• NPR story on yahrzeit candles

• Upgrade to Paid to access Alison and Richard’s “Share Your Shelf” segment

TRANSCRIPT

Note - If you are reading this in your email, you may need to click at the bottom where it says “[Message clipped] View entire message” to read the entire transcript.

Alison Goldberg 0:00

[COLD OPEN] I noticed that we both wrote in first person, which, yeah, I think is an interesting choice.

Richard Ho 0:06

It’s such a personal experience to navigate a loss, and I think it’s important for the story to take that more immediate first person perspective. To me, it just felt more real.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:15

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. I recently heard a piece on NPR about the little jars that hold yahrzeit memorial candles, and how some people repurpose these glasses to hold juice or to use as cookie cutters. It was an interesting look at how death is treated as a part of life in the Jewish tradition. That concept is very beautifully conveyed by the two picture books we’ll be talking about today. My guests are Alison Goldberg, author of The Remembering Candle, and Richard Ho, author of A Flame Burns On. Find show notes, a transcript, and bonus content at BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com, and if you’d like to hear Alison and Richard’s Share Your Shelf segment, support the show and click on “upgrade to paid.” Thanks! [MUSIC FADES]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:19

Alison Goldberg and Richard Ho, welcome to The Book of Life.

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:22

Thank you so much for having us.

Alison Goldberg 1:24

Thank yo.

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:26

So you have each written a picture book about yahrzeit candles, published within a year of each other, and this is after many years without even one picture book on this subject. So let’s start by explaining for those who may not know, what is a yahrzeit candle.

Richard Ho 1:43

So a yahrzeit candle is a custom in the Jewish tradition of lighting a candle on the anniversary of a loved one’s passing. So yahrzeit means either anniversary or time of year in Yiddish, and it’s basically this universal tradition that almost everybody across the religious spectrum in Judaism observes. On the anniversary of the day a person died, the custom is to light a candle the night before, and it burns from sundown to sundown. It represents a lot of different things, but largely it’s a way for families to remember the person who passed and to celebrate their memory, and also to mark the occasion of having lost that person. Did I miss anything, Alison?

Alison Goldberg 2:22

I would just add that some of the ways people observe it, including lighting the candle, is to go to synagogue or visit the grave site or recite special prayers or give tzedakah , and of course, sharing stories and memories is an important part of the tradition.

Richard Ho 2:41

Absolutely.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:42

So I’m wondering what inspired you both to write about this topic at this time.

Alison Goldberg 2:49

At several times in my life, I’ve really appreciated Jewish traditions for mourning. My dad died when I was a teenager, and I remember how important shiva was for all of us, gathering with family and friends, telling stories and performing the rituals. All of this helped create the space for talking about grief and loss and remembering. And more recently, I looked around for picture books that might be resources for children who were grieving. And when I found very few picture books on this topic that approached it from a Jewish perspective, I was motivated to write one. I chose to write about yahrzeit because I think it’s a particularly accessible ritual for kids. They’re very familiar with candles, whether from birthdays or Hanukkah or Shabbat. And I wanted to explore how ordinary, everyday moments can make up our memories of someone who’s gone.

Alison Goldberg 3:42

The other reason I was inspired to write about yahrzeit is, I think it’s really important to share the idea with kids that it’s not that we grieve once and then our grief is over. Yahrzeit is an annual ritual, and so it creates a space for grieving year after year, and how that looks or feels might change over time, but the ritual creates an opening for that to take place. And I think, I think that’s a really important message to share with children.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:10

I just want to dig a little deeper. You were saying that you wanted to write a book that would help children who were grieving, but what made you think of that in the first place? Why was grief something that you were contemplating?

Alison Goldberg 4:21

There was a year when I went to several funerals, and, you know, there were young children present at those funerals. And I thought about the importance of Jewish tradition in sort of creating a framework for processing some of that. So that’s when I sought out resources thinking, well, this, this is an important topic to to share with children, to find picture books that might help introduce some of these traditions and help frame a conversation. And as I said, I just couldn’t find that many that approached it from a Jewish perspective. And so I wanted to explore that.

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:02

Okay. Richard, what brought you to this topic?

Richard Ho 5:04

So, as you know, Heidi, I didn’t grow up Jewish. I converted to Judaism as an adult. So I didn’t grow up with a lot of these traditions or customs; it’s something that I learned about later on. I converted back in 2007 and I got married in 2012, and in 2013 our first son was born, and then the following year, unfortunately, my wife’s brother passed away. So that was my first experience with shiva and mourning and the whole process and all of the customs that are related to that. And so because we had just had a son, it really struck me there was such a lack of children’s books, or really any sort of resources that help in a formal way, a child navigate something like this. And so as I was getting started with my own writing career, I was thinking of ideas for books, specifically picture books. And within the Jewish realm, there was such a shortage of books that address this topic. So it really felt like a niche that needed to be filled.

Richard Ho 5:59

As these things happen in publishing, things sort of happen in waves. So all of a sudden, you know, like completely separately, Alison and I were having basically the same idea at the same time, and we worked on our books, and the way that publishing works, like, it takes years for things to go from acquisition to publication. So who knows exactly when we were writing, like, it could have been at the same time, but I do remember we had already had the manuscript for A Flame Burns On acquired, and I saw the announcement for Alison’s book, and immediately I was like, wow, this is like, serendipitous in a lot of ways. Because I think one reaction could be competitive, like, oh, okay, so who’s going to get there first? But I think for all of us, especially in the children’s book world, especially with topics like this that are so underrepresented, the more the merrier. And there’s always a need for multiple books on every topic. And I think something like this deserves and really needs more than just one book. So when I saw that, I was just so happy, and I was so curious to read hers, and I’ve since read it and love it. And I think it’s one of those areas where we’re seeing more and more representation covering these sort of hard to cover topics, and I think that’s a great thing.

Alison Goldberg 7:02

Something I’ve been thinking about as I’ve been working on this project, is how invisible grief can feel in society, sometimes. That adults sometimes hide it from children, but that it’s a universal experience. Loss is a part of life, whether that’s something personally experienced through a death in a family, or friends experiencing it, that it feels like such an important part of social and emotional learning for children to be able to have vocabulary, to talk about it, have ways to process feelings about it, reflect on what they can do to support friends. The other aspect of this, of course, is that there’s so many different kinds of loss and experiences of grief. And so we both have these books about yahrzeit, but there are such different forms of loss represented in the stories. And of course, there’s so many other ways that people experience these challenges, so I totally agree that we need more of these books for these conversations to take place.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:07

Yeah, they definitely make great companions to fill out the bookshelf. Both of your books matter of factly depict Jewish families of color as a form of casual representation, but it comes from the illustrations, not the text. Was it your original intent, for either or both of you, that the families would be portrayed this way?

Richard Ho 8:29

I didn’t really have anything specific in the illustration notes for the story. I do remember actually, the main character started off by default being a boy, because our kids are all boys, and so I had written sort of from that perspective. But there was nothing in the story that necessarily pins it down to a boy or girl. So I’m always totally open to whenever the illustrator or the art director want to make a change there and change up, like, whoever is in the story. And I felt like it really worked well for this to have a daughter and a mother. Whatever the case is, I think the important thing is it’s a loss in the family. The difference, I think, between my book and Alison’s book is that, in Alison’s book, it’s a grandfather who has passed away. Here, it’s a relatively younger adult, an uncle. To Alison’s point, showing different stages of loss and different stages of grief is important, because not every loss is the same. I always delight in seeing what the illustrator and the art director come up with to elevate the story. There was nothing specifically that I had in mind for representation in our book.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:25

Okay, so that’s very interesting, because the last time you were on the podcast to talk about Two New Years, that book specifically was about an Asian Jewish family...

Richard Ho 9:35

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:36

...and A Flame Burns On depicts an Asian Jewish family without really leaning on the Asian part of their heritage. It’s really talking about their Jewish practice. But you can see from the illustrations that it’s an Asian Jewish family.

Richard Ho 9:50

So I’m actually not sure if it’s Asian. I think it was meant to be more Sephardic. I can’t actually confirm that. We could probably ask Carmel, the illustrator, but it’s interesting you said that because I didn’t get Asian when I saw it, it didn’t occur to me they could be Asian. It very well might be.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:03

Oh, that’s very interesting. Now maybe it was because I was associating it with your earlier book that was about an Asian Jewish family.

Richard Ho 10:10

Right.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:11

But yeah, to me, they appeared to be Asian.

Richard Ho 10:13

That’s so interesting.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:15

Okay, and then with The Remembering Candle, I know that Selina Alko has biracial children of her own, and so I believe that that is why she illustrated the family in that way. But Alison, do you have anything to add to that? Did you have any thoughts when you created the story about what they would look like?

Alison Goldberg 10:32

I did not identify anything in the art notes for the story. I love how Selina created this family that evokes this feeling that I had when I was working on this story. The representation comes from her. I will say that my book is with Barefoot Books, which is a really wonderful multicultural publisher, and I really appreciated that they also embraced some back matter about some of the other Jewish traditions that are related to death anniversaries, that they really encouraged that piece of representation in the creation of the book.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:13

I love the mention of non Ashkenazi remembering traditions in the end note. So can you tell us a little bit more about those traditions?

Alison Goldberg 11:21

Sure. I did some research, I read a bit about the Sephardic practice of meldado, which is an anniversary of a death. A meldado service includes reading Jewish texts and a communal meal. So I thought that was interesting, that it was similar and different in some of the customs.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:41

I would like to ask each of you if you have a favorite passage or illustration in the other one’s book.

Richard Ho 11:49

I love how the text and the illustrations both follow the candle burning down over the course of the 24 hours. And you can see the candle on the right hand side of every spread, and it’s getting lower and lower and lower with every spread. And I really just love that progression. That is the element that I love the most.

Alison Goldberg 12:07

I love that too. That was Selina’s brilliant idea. I pulled out one in your book Richard, where it says “my memories of him are filled with light.” That’s such a beautiful statement. And I love Carmel’s illustration of the child and her uncle fixing the bike. It’s such, like, an ordinary, lovely, close moment that becomes this sort of wondrous spread, especially with the beautiful fall leaves. It’s lovely.

Richard Ho 12:33

I love that as well. And all the credit in the world to Carmel. The bicycle as the motif was actually entirely hers, that was not in the manuscript. But it was a brilliant way to sort of tie together all the memories, right, not just like a general memory of an uncle, but something tangible that they did, an activity that they shared over the course of their years together. So I really love that as well.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:54

Yeah, the illustrations in both of these books are remarkable. So just to give kudos to the illustrators who are not here with us at the moment, Selina Alko’s collage illustrations for The Remembering Candle really focus on stars. The grandfather was a stargazer, so she ties everything together with that theme. And in A Flame Burns On, Carmel Ben Ami’s illustrations are going with that theme that you wrote about, that the memories are filled with light. So there’s the bright sunshine when they’re fixing the bicycle, and there’s the campfire, and there’s the birthday cake with the candles. So those themes of light actually are present in both books in kind of a daytime and a nighttime version. It makes sense, because we’re talking about a candle in both books. So you’ve both really found a way to tie in with the candle and expand on that concept of light. It’s beautiful.

Richard Ho 13:45

Thank you so much.

Alison Goldberg 13:46

Thanks.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:47

What other grief related books would you recommend as good companions to The Remembering Candle and A Flame Burns On?

Alison Goldberg 13:56

I would recommend Goodbye: A First Conversation About Grief by Jessica Ralli and Megan Madison. It isn’t specifically a Jewish book, but it includes Jewish representation and a yarhzeit candle, and it’s a really helpful resource for putting language to conversations about death and grief with young children. That is one I highly recommend as a companion to our books. And then I want to mention two that are coming out this year. One is called Something Sweet: A Sitting Shiva Story by Lesléa Newman and illustrated by Sarita Rich, about a child paying a shiva call to her best friend. Another is I Wish That You Knew by Rebecca Gardyn Levington and illustrated by Alyssa Russell, which is about an unveiling ceremony.

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:47

Do you find that it’s a hard sell because it’s a sad topic, and maybe some people are uncomfortable with it? Do you find that it’s difficult to promote these particular books?

Richard Ho 14:59

Specifically, because it’s a hard topic, I think there is a need, whether it’s from teachers or parents who are looking for a way to start conversations with these difficult topics, because there’s such a shortage of these sort of books, banding us all together and presenting, like, this ready made package of content is a great selling point. The need is out there and the desire is out there.

Alison Goldberg 15:21

It’s been interesting to do outreach. So far with my book, just generally, I’ve been reaching out to a lot of grief centers, and I’m finding that a lot of grief centers that work with families are eager to find more multicultural books to serve the families they work with. So a piece of this is finding the communities who are seeking the resources.

Richard Ho 15:46

Grieving and mourning are such universal human things that it doesn’t necessarily have to be limited to a Jewish audience. I think a lot of people outside of the Jewish community would find these books to be helpful in starting conversations about this topic.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:00

Since we’ve got both of you here, I’d like to ask if you have any questions for each other.

Richard Ho 16:05

Yeah, so I alluded before to the candle burning down, and my question to Alison was going to be, was that in the manuscript at the beginning, or was that a flourish that Selina added during the illustration process?

Alison Goldberg 16:16

Selina came up with the idea to include the candle burning, melting on the right side of each page. I love that that really incorporates the page turn for a picture book. From the beginning, I knew I wanted the story to really be anchored in the candle’s timeline, so that piece of sunset to sunset was always a part of the text. It really struck me how time operates in this ritual, that the candle is actually keeping the time. I think that is really cool, and I wanted to emphasize that through the structure of the book. So that’s kind of how that came to be.

Richard Ho 16:54

Beautiful.

Alison Goldberg 16:55

My question for you: while I was writing The Remembering Candle, I drew on and fictionalized some of my own memories with people in my life who’ve passed and I’m wondering in A Flame Burns On, did you include or adapt some of your own memories, and what that process was like for you?

Richard Ho 17:13

Yeah, I mentioned that it was my brother in law who had passed away, so I think that was the initial impetus for the story. So I always knew that I wanted to have an uncle, a child’s uncle, be the person who was being remembered in the story. Other than that, I think there’s nothing specifically biographical about him that I brought into the story. I think I wanted to make this in some ways, pretty open in general. One of the things I love about your book is you get so much into the detail about the grandfather and the relationships and the hobbies and the things that they talked about, and that’s, I guess, one area in which our books differ, is there isn’t too much of that in terms of, like, the backstory of the uncle other than the bicycle. I think the intention for us was to keep it pretty open ended, for the reader to come in and fill in the details of their own family and their own loss, to sort of like, superimpose on top of that. But it was something that I struggled with in terms of how much to bring in of real life and how much to keep it like sort of fictionalized.

Alison Goldberg 18:08

I noticed that we both wrote in first person. I was thinking about that, which...

Richard Ho 18:12

Yeah, umhm.

Alison Goldberg 18:13

...I think is an interesting choice for a picture book, and certainly connects to the topic, in terms of bringing it close, but also kind of the exploration of, what does it mean to me.

Richard Ho 18:26

Yeah, absolutely. I think it’s one of those things where picture books are meant to be read to a child by an adult, but at the same time, it’s such a personal experience to navigate a loss. And I think as an adult, like a caregiver or a teacher trying to walk a child through this. I think it’s important for the story to take that more immediate, like, first person perspective, because it is them trying to come to grips with something that’s a universal truth. But it’s such a big scary thing to wrap your head around as a kid. To me, it just felt like the natural entry point for a story to say, this is what we do, and this is what my mother does, you know, like, because it makes it more immediate and more real in a lot of ways.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:06

Is there anyone that you would like to actually go ahead and remember right now?

Richard Ho 19:12

Yeah, so I’ll say my brother in law, David Gordon. He was only 21 years old when he passed away.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:17

Oh my goodness.

Richard Ho 19:18

Yeah. So it was very tragic and sudden, and it was a tough time for the family, but I think having recently had our first child, it gave us something to sort of ground the experience. Going through my conversion process, I had been to many shiva houses, and I had experienced through others, what the grieving process is like, but this was the first time that it was like within family for me. So watching my wife go through it was very eye opening. And so I really wanted to capture, in some ways, what the aftermath is like, because there’s the immediate loss, and then there’s shiva, which is seven days. And I always found this to be so brilliant. There was such a wisdom to Jewish customs. There was such an understanding of human nature and what a person needs in the situation. So the idea that seven days you really need to sit with it for a while to process and to not have anything else going on, it’s really about a person coming to grips with the new reality. And then after that, the loss isn’t gone, it’s still there. And so there’s like a 30 day period, and then there’s a one year period. And all of these periods are specifically designed for the various stages of grief and healing. And I wanted to focus specifically on not just the idea of loss, but looking back after the loss and remembering the good things, because there’s so much about it that can be a downer and really sad, but the way to celebrate a person is to think about the joyful times and to think about the memories. So this dichotomy between dark and light, I really wanted to play with, with the candle and darkness and just showing kids that it’s not just about sadness and tears. Like, there’s still happiness, there’s still laughter, those memories never go away. And in that way, a person never really, truly leaves. And I think that was what the book tries to get across.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:07

Alison, is there someone you’d like to remember?

Alison Goldberg 21:10

I would like to remember my dad, Robert Goldberg. My childhood memories of him inspired some of the images in this book. In particular, the sleeping bag spread is drawn from a memory of him carrying me one night to my neighbors to check my ears when they hurt; the neighbor was a doctor. And he also liked to look at the night sky through a telescope, like the character in the story. I would like to remember him.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:36

Yeah, I just want to say that I love that sleeping bag story, when the grandpa carried his daughter in the sleeping bag, because it’s cold outside, to go visit the doctor next door to take care of her ear infection, that was just such a tender moment.

Alison Goldberg 21:51

It’s an example of how I took something that was anchored in memory and then blended it with other things. I don’t think I was in a sleeping bag. I loved sleeping bags as a kid, so I incorporated that, [LAUGHTER] and I wanted to capture just that feeling of care.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:11

Alison, a couple years ago, you came out with a picture book, Eighteen Flowers for Grandma, A Story of Chai, so you’ve written about both life and death, literally. So tell us a little bit about that earlier book.

Alison Goldberg 22:25

So yes, The Remembering Candle is the second in what I think of as a pair of books. Even though they have different illustrators, different publishers, to me, they really go together because of exactly what you said. So Eighteen Flowers for Grandma is about giving chai, a symbolic gift of life. And I was inspired to write it because my own grandmother graduated from college when she was 78 years old.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:51

Wow.

Alison Goldberg 22:51

And I always really loved that. Always found it so inspiring. She went back to school at a local community college to study art, and after doing that for a while, she realized she just needed a few more credits to get her degree. So she took some math classes, and she had her earlier college credits transferred from 50 years before, and she got her degree. And I wanted to make this a story about giving chai, because it’s something my family has done, and it’s something my grandma did, and I think it’s a really lovely way to celebrate a special occasion, to give a symbolic gift of life. And in that story, the girl, Sadie, the granddaughter, wants to come up with a special gift for this occasion of the graduation. They like to make art together, and Sadie goes on a sort of creative exploration to find the perfect gift for Grandma that is made by her, that sort of represents who Grandma is to her. So that is Eighteen Flowers for Grandma, and it’s illustrated by Jesse White and published by Red Comet Press.

Heidi Rabinowitz 24:02

I love the way you’re creating stories that explain these very Jewish concepts that haven’t gotten that much attention in the past. They really are helping me round out my synagogue library collection. Thank you for doing that. Richard, you’ve got more Jewish books coming out soon. Tell us about Golem, Golem, Golem, and Tov Is Good.

Richard Ho 24:23

Absolutely. Golem, Golem, Golem is coming out this fall, and it is my Hanukkah story. I’ve always wanted to do a Hanukkah story, but there’s tons of Hanukkah stories out there, and finding a new angle on it was sort of a challenge that I gave myself. And I don’t know how this realization came, but this idea that a golem is made out of clay, and dreidels traditionally were also made out of clay, like that connection clicked in my mind, and I was like, wow, okay, so let’s, let’s build a story around that. So that was a lot of fun. Unlike a lot of my more personal identity stories, this one was purely just fun and chaos and food flying everywhere and monsters running around. So that was a lot of wish fulfillment for me to be able to do a story like that. And interestingly enough, it’s the same illustrator as A Flame Burns On. It was completely separate process; in fact, Golem, I believe, sold first, to a different publisher. So Golem, Golem, Golem is published by Roaring Brook Press, and A Flame Burns On is published by Knopf. So the editors were different, and they each sort of independently found Carmel as the perfect illustrator for those particular stories.

Heidi Rabinowitz 25:24

Wow!

Richard Ho 25:25

So yeah, that’s sort of like serendipitous that they’re both coming out this year. So very excited about that. Tov Is Good will be coming out next year. That’s with Lynn Scurfield, who illustrated Two New Years, and I’m so thrilled to be working with Lynn again. The idea behind that was just the word tov is so common throughout Jewish practice. In Hebrew, it’s part of so many phrases that are just sort of like everyday phrases, whether it’s good morning or good night, mazel tov, like there’s so many terms that incorporate the word tov, which means good. So I wanted to figure out a way to, first of all, list all these terms, and then weave a story around it. That was a writing challenge that I gave myself. Is there even enough here to create a story? And so I ended up coming up with this idea of a boy who is going through a Shabbat where his brother is being bar mitzvahed. So there’s all these opportunities to use the different tov phrases throughout the course of the day. So that was just another fun story that shows the beauty of Jewish custom and Jewish tradition. Interestingly, for that one, I’ve seen a lot of the sketches now at this point and there, I also didn’t specify identity, but Lynn and the editor actually came up with the direction of having it be a mixed Asian and Caucasian family again, except flipped. So instead of the mother being Caucasian and the father being Asian, as it was in Two New Years, it’s going to be the father who’s Caucasian and the mother who’s Asian in this one. So we wanted to make it a clean break from Two New Years. This is clearly not the same family. It’s not a continuation of the story, but it’s very much in the same spirit of diversity and inclusion within the Jewish community. So thrilled about that one, and that’ll be coming out next year.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:01

Well, I guess I should say mazel tov! [LAUGHTER]

Richard Ho 27:03

Thank you!

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:06

Alison, you co wrote a guidebook called Creating Change Through Family Philanthropy. Can you talk about that?

Alison Goldberg 27:13

I worked for social and economic justice organizations for many years. As a part of that work, we wrote a guidebook for people who were involved in family foundations, to move more money to social and economic justice issues. I guess it was published in 2007 I think, [LAUGHTER] a long time ago. When I wanted to start writing children’s books, I really began with activism. My debut middle grade novel that will now come out in 2028 called The Lost Sea Garden is a climate activism story, but told from the perspective of whales.

Heidi Rabinowitz 27:52

Of whales!

Alison Goldberg 27:52

Of whales. It’s a middle grade underwater fantasy about whales. They’re trying to repair their world.

Heidi Rabinowitz 28:01

It’s Tikkun Olam time. So I want to ask each of you what action you would like to call listeners to take to help heal the world.

Alison Goldberg 28:10

I invite listeners to support an organization that I’ve supported for a long time called the Food Research and Action Center, or FRAC. And FRAC works to protect and strengthen the nutrition programs like school lunch and SNAP and WIC that are all facing very deep cuts right now, even as food insecurity continues to increase. So their work is really important to help prevent childhood hunger. And you can learn more at FRAC.org.

Richard Ho 28:45

And for me, I think just being conscious of the fact that there’s so much of the news that’s scary these days, and we’ve got four boys who are aware of things that are happening in the world, a lot of difficult conversations at home. And I think one of the things that I would like people to think of is this idea of allyship and neighborly care. I would just encourage people to reach out to friends and to family that are maybe in situations that are a little bit more precarious than ours. Think about friends or colleagues or people that you might know, neighbors that might be feeling kind of scared right now, and just making sure they’re okay. I think that’s something that we can all do.

Heidi Rabinowitz 29:21

That’s beautiful. Thank you. Is there an interview question that you never get asked that you would like to answer?

Richard Ho 29:29

That is a good question. Just in conversation with other authors over the last couple of years, commiserating about like, you know, publishers being more wary of acquiring Jewish titles and working with Jewish authors. Thankfully, I haven’t really had that experience, at least not that I know of like, I’m not sure what’s happening in acquisitions meetings, but I do get the sense that a lot of colleagues are having a difficult time getting their stories across the finish line. I guess the only thing we can do is sort of band together and just be there, like as a support system for each other. And there’s so many organizations out there that are so supportive to Jewish authors, including AJL and Jewish Book Council and PJ Library. And these are all amazing resources for people to not only find other like minded folks that are in the same position, but also like actually be able to do things to support each other. And I think it’s important to support those organizations as well at this time.

Heidi Rabinowitz 30:22

I would also mention the Jewish Kidlit Mavens group on Facebook, a community of over 2000 people supporting each other in the world of Jewish children’s literature. And then a new venture, The Jewish Book Garden, which is a Substack, which is another hub for projects related to Jewish children’s literature. And because it’s Substack, it also works as a community.

Alison Goldberg 30:44

I love what you said about community. It makes me think about how important writing community is to being able to do this work at all stages of it, and manage the ups and downs of the publishing process.

Heidi Rabinowitz 31:01

So, Richard, you told us about some forthcoming books, but I wanted to ask you both if there’s anything else that you are working on that we should be looking forward to. So Richard, if you have more; Alison, if you have something that you haven’t told us about....

Richard Ho 31:17

So this year is a very busy year for me. I’ve got five books coming out this year.

Heidi Rabinowitz 31:20

Five books!!

Richard Ho 31:22

Yeah, yeah. A picture book called The Dinosaur and the Bird coming out in May, another picture book in August, a Bob Ross biography called You Can Move Mountains. And then I’ve got, September 1st, Stories of the Rabbis coming out, which is my first middle grade book. And that’s sort of a compilation of mini biographies of famous rabbis throughout history. Those are all coming out this year. I didn’t plan it that way, and I would not have planned it that way. I think it’s a little bit crazy in terms of, like, trying to promote all those books in one year, but at the same time, very blessed and happy that they’re all coming out.

Heidi Rabinowitz 31:54

Okay, wait, I’ve lost count. Flame Burns On; Golem, Golem, Golem; The Dinosaur and the Bird one; Tov Is Good...

Richard Ho 32:03

Bob Ross.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:04

Bob Ross; and the Rabbis -- wait, that’s six!

Richard Ho 32:08

Tov Is Good is next year. That’s 2027.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:08

Oh, Tov Is Good is next year, okay. [LAUGHTER]

Alison Goldberg 32:08

Amazing.

Richard Ho 32:08

Right. Those are the five coming up this year, of which three, three are Jewish.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:16

My head is spinning. Alison, what else are you working on?

Alison Goldberg 32:21

In addition to the middle grade novel, I have a picture book coming next year called Some Wishes from Islandport Press, and it’s written in verse and explores the many ways that children make wishes, like a skipping stone or blowing dandelion seeds or through creative acts as well.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:40

Do you know who the illustrator is?

Alison Goldberg 32:42

I do, it’s Jeanette Bradley.

Heidi Rabinowitz 32:44

Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Alison Goldberg 32:48

AlisonGoldberg.com and I’m on Instagram, @AllisonGoldbergBooks.

Richard Ho 32:54

And I have a website, RichardHoBooks.com, and Instagram handle is @RichKarHo.

Heidi Rabinowitz 33:03

Alison Goldberg and Richard Ho, thank you so much for speaking with me today. It was a real pleasure.

Alison Goldberg 33:09

Thank you, Heidi.

Richard Ho 33:10

Thank you so much. It was an honor.

Susan Kusel 33:11

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi. This is Susan Kusel, author, librarian, and co founder of The Jewish Book Garden. I’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I’d like to dedicate my episode to you, Heidi. You have done so much for the Jewish children’s book community, including this podcast, which has been running for 20 years, an incredible milestone. I am truly grateful to everything you have done, and all the things we’ve been able to do together.

Heidi Rabinowitz 33:44

Well, thank you, Susan. I want to dedicate this episode right back to you, because without you, my partner in crime, I would not have accomplished half as much. So thank you. Meeting of the mutual appreciation society now in session!

Heidi Rabinowitz 34:08

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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The Passover Pet Surprise really did surprise me. This emotionally authentic story by Argentine author Ana María Shua ends ambiguously, challenging expectations in a way that feels like real life. It’s intriguing, and I question whether that would happen in a story written by a North American author. I also love the candy-colored illustrations by Ángeles Ruiz, which are full of surprising details that convey how thrilled the family is to celebrate together. Look at the way Mamá and Aunt Verónica lean in, cheek to cheek, while making matzah balls, or how Papá puts his hand on Uncle Ariel’s shoulder as they stand at the grill. The tortuga pequena opening wide to bite into a strawberry made me laugh aloud — I used to have a red footed tortoise who ate in just the same way. All this is to say, this book rises beyond a simple story about a seder. It is both familiar and it raises questions, perfect for a holiday where we are commanded both to retell and to inquire.

Love, Heidi

NEWS

Here’s a School Library Journal article about the film The Librarians, “The Librarians Director: I see the film as a movement.” READ HERE

Have you seen the #ThisIsWho trend sweeping across social media? It’s adorable: people post childhood photos labeled with their grownup roles. Look at this example from recent Book of Life guest Suzy Ultman HERE, and see a #ThisIsWho picture of little Heidi HERE.

CALLS TO ACTION

“Judy Blume: A Life, with Author Mark Oppenheimer” online, Wednesday, April 15, 11AM-12PM ET, ticket price $15 for non-members of Long Island Library Resources Council. REGISTER HERE

Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, MI recently suffered an antisemitic attack (Jewish Book Garden post HERE: “Books to Process Synagogue Attack News”). Donate to their emergency fund at temple-israel.org.

SHOW NOTES

• Author Ana María Shua’s website (in Spanish)

• Illustrator Ángeles Ruiz’s website

• Buy The Passover Pet Surprise or La gran sorpresa de Pésaj

• Read Heidi’s review of The Passover Pet Surprise on The Jewish Book Garden

• Tikkun Olam suggestion: support Magen David Adom

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TRANSCRIPT

Ana Maria Shua 0:00

[COLD OPEN] My grandparents on my father’s side, they were religious, but my father, he was absolutely against religion. My whole Jewish education when I was a child was the picture The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston! [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:19

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. Ana María Shua is an award winning Argentine author who has published over 100 books, including poetry, drama novels, science fiction, children’s literature, film scripts, short stories and microfiction or flash fiction. She is one of the foremost writers in Latin America, where she’s known as the Queen of the Micro Story. So obviously she’s a really big deal... and yet I was not aware of her until I read her first Jewish children’s book, The Passover Pet Surprise, also available in Spanish as La gran sorpresa de Pésaj. This emotionally realistic picture book with its joyful candy colored illustrations by Spanish artist Ángeles Ruiz, is about a little girl who misunderstands the meaning of the festival of freedom... or does she? You can find show notes, a transcript and bonus content at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com and if you’d like to hear Ana María Shua’s Share Your Shelf segment, click on “Upgrade to paid.” Thanks and happy Passover. [END MUSIC]

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:47

Ana María, you have published over 180 books in various genres, but I must admit that until recently, I was not familiar with your work. Other than The Passover Pet Surprise, are many of your books available in English?

Ana Maria Shua 2:05

Yes, but not my children’s book. Five of my novels have been published in English in the United States, published by university presses and small publishers.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:18

I’m glad to have a chance to learn more about your work and introduce it to more English speakers. Tell us about The Passover Pet Surprise, and what was the inspiration for this story?

Ana Maria Shua 2:31

Well, an editor asked me to write a Jewish Latin American story. And I love Pesah. I think Passover is the best of all Jewish holidays, because it’s not only for Jewish people, it’s for the whole world as a celebration of freedom for everyone. In this story, this little girl, she knows about Passover and freedom, and she decides to open a bird cage to let the birds be free, two little parrots. I thought that could be the center of the story, the core of the story, the structure. And all around this little idea is about how we celebrate Passover in Argentina. The story happens in a city called Mendoza in the north of Argentina. There’s a family who is split apart. Part of the family lives in the United States, in Miami, and the other part lives in Argentina.

Ana Maria Shua 3:37

A lot of the ideas came to my mind because my own family is split apart. On my mother’s side, my grandfather came from Poland to Argentina. I’m, you know, half and half: Sephardic and Ashkenazi. His six siblings went to the United States, and they have children, and the children grew up, and they have children. So I have a really huge family in the United States. Then many years after that, when the last terrible and bloody dictatorship took Argentina, my own sister had to escape from our country, and she went to live not far from Chicago in Evanston with her husband, who is Argentinian too, and they have children. And the children have children. They come to visit us in Argentina. So it was not difficult for me to think about part of the family in Miami and part in Mendoza, and the family in Miami comes to Mendoza to Argentina to spend Passover with the rest of the family. And there comes Jordanita.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:54

So many of the book reviews that I have read say the book explores the meaning of freedom. Jordanita hears the story at the seder about the importance of freedom, so she frees her aunt’s parrots from their cage, and she wants them to be free, but she doesn’t understand that releasing pets Into the wild might not be safe for them. So what IS the meaning of freedom that you were trying to convey in this story?

Ana Maria Shua 5:24

That’s a difficult question. I mean, are we free after all? Who is really free? But you know, I’m sure the little parrots will be more free if the cage is open. That is what Jordanita thought about, that’s all. I mean, after she did it, she is really worried about what could happen to those little parrots, because they have lived their lives always in cages. So are they going to be able to find food for themselves? Well, who knows? I think they will. I think they will be able. Of course, there are lots of little parrots in Mendoza, so they’re going to find a lot of friends and family. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:21

Well, that’s reassuring.

Ana Maria Shua 6:24

Yes, and they will be free.

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:26

Well, it’s interesting because the story ends without telling us what happens to the parrots. The parrots are loose, and we never see them again. So we don’t actually know if they’re okay or not, but I’m glad you think that they are. [LAUGHTER]

Ana Maria Shua 6:39

I think they are, yes, but we really don’t know. The book is ambiguous if Jordanita was right or wrong, and the adults are not sure about if it’s okay or not. They don’t know if she should be punished for what she had done. I think maybe that’s what I really want, when people read my books, to make themselves question, because I don’t have the answers. I have a lot of questions. And I think good literature is about questions and not about answers.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:16

And that’s perfect for Passover, to have lots of questions!

Ana Maria Shua 7:20

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:22

What is your favorite thing about Passover?

Ana Maria Shua 7:26

I just love Passover. My favorite thing is the way the whole Jewish people, everyone could find inside the guts to leave Egypt and go into the desert, who knows where, just to be free. That’s really courageous. And I admire, I absolutely admire that decision.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:54

I love that. Thank you. The family in the book has many pets. They have dogs, a cat, turtles, the parrots, and Jordanita’s family only has tropical fish. That’s why she’s so excited to go to visit her relatives who have so many fun pets. Did you grow up with many pets? Or do you have any pets now?

Ana Maria Shua 8:14

No, I wanted them, but I only had turtles, which I couldn’t have today because it’s forbidden. You can’t buy a turtle. I mean, you can adopt a turtle, but you have to have, you know, garden and green and a lot of things that I do not have because I live in an apartment, so I couldn’t have today a turtle, but when I was little, yes, I had a turtle and a caged bird, a canary, and that was all. I wanted, a cat or a dog.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:51

So in the book, you fulfilled that wish.

Ana Maria Shua 8:54

Yes. And when my girls were little, we had two cats, not at the same time, but one and then the other one, and we had turtles too.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:07

What do you think of the art by Ángeles Ruiz? Do you have a favorite illustration?

Ana Maria Shua 9:13

It’s lovely. I really love the Aunt, Aunt Verónica, with all that black hair all over. It’s really lovely. That character is my favorite.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:27

Yeah, everybody’s hair has a life of its own in these illustrations.

Ana Maria Shua 9:32

Mm-hmm, that’s true. Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:33

Yeah, especially Papá and the uncle. I’ll tell you, my favorite is the page where they’re getting ready for the seder.

Ana Maria Shua 9:43

Uh-huh.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:44

And Papá and Uncle Ariel are roasting meat on the grill. Mamá and Aunt Verónica are making knéidalaj. I just like how they look so excited to see each other, just like when you go on a visit you haven’t seen people in a long time, and you’re so thrilled to be together, they just look so happy and affectionate. I really love that illustration.

Ana Maria Shua 10:09

And I love the illustration where the children are playing with the hose, water sparkling all over.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:17

Mm-hmm, with their bathing suits in the yard.

Ana Maria Shua 10:20

In the yard, yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:21

Yeah. It has a lot of very realistic touches. The book was also released in the US in Spanish as La gran sorpresa de Pésaj. Did you write the book originally in Spanish or in English?

Ana Maria Shua 10:36

I wrote it in Spanish, of course. It was translated.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:41

I didn’t see a translator’s name on the English edition that I read.

Ana Maria Shua 10:45

Yes, somebody did it. I don’t know who it is.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:48

Maybe it’s because it’s a review copy. Maybe the final copy will say, but that’s interesting that it didn’t have the name on it. Will you be publishing more books in English, or do you have other Jewish children’s books that can be translated?

Ana Maria Shua 11:02

This is my first Jewish children’s book, except for a book about the wise men of Chelm, which I think is not only a children’s book, children and adults.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:15

This children’s book demonstrates just one of your many talents. You have published poetry, drama, novels, children’s books, film scripts, short stories, and microfiction. And I’m especially intrigued by that last one, can you explain what microfiction is?

Ana Maria Shua 11:35

Yes, I love microfiction. In Spain, they call me the queen of the microfiction.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:40

Ah, mazel tov!

Ana Maria Shua 11:41

[LAUGHTER] Yes! In English, I think today it’s called flash fiction. You have a very, very famous author who writes flash fiction, Lydia Davis, she had a Pulitzer Prize.

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:55

Okay, so explain what it is.

Ana Maria Shua 11:57

It’s very simple. It’s just very short stories. One page is the maximum, about 300 words, and there is no minimum. There is even one flash story by Guillermo Samperio (he was a good friend, a Mexican author), called The Ghost, and the rest of the page is blank.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:19

Oh, wow!

Ana Maria Shua 12:20

White, yes, that’s The Ghost. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:23

Amazing. So what do you like about that type of writing?

Ana Maria Shua 12:29

Well, I like everything. I think I love to express the maximum possible meaning in the minimum amount of words. I think that texts like The Ghost are only games. I expect more from literature, and I hope my own microfictions surpass that one.

Heidi Rabinowitz 12:54

Could you tell us a little bit about what it’s like to be Jewish in Argentina?

Ana Maria Shua 12:59

We have a very large Jewish community in Argentina, the largest in Latin America. I think we are very few, if we compare with the Jews in the United States, but we are quite a lot comparing to the rest of the continent. I feel we don’t have too much antisemitism in Argentina. I went to a public school, I went to public high school, I went to public university, and I really never felt any kind of discrimination because of being a Jew. One of my daughters, she’s really committed with the community. And she came to me the other day and she said, Mom, I think we have a very good thing about Argentina, because I was wearing today a t shirt that said, “I love Israel” the whole day, from morning to night, and I took a bus and the subway, and I walked in the streets, and nobody said nothing about it, so this is a good thing about Argentina.

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:13

Yeah, that’s amazing, because right now in the United States, if you wore a shirt like that all day, you would definitely get some pushback.

Ana Maria Shua 14:21

Yes, yes, and it’s happening in Europe too. But of course, we do have antisemitism, just like every other place. There’s a saying: What is the Jew? A Jew is someone that is a little bit less antisemitic than all the rest.

Speaker 1 14:39

[LAUGHTER] Oh, my goodness!

Heidi Rabinowitz 14:44

It’s tikkun olam time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Ana Maria Shua 14:54

If someone wants to support an institution, I recommend Magen David Adom, which is the Israeli Red Cross. Magen David Adom. I think it’s very important that when people think of improving the world for the whole humanity, they shouldn’t forget the people who are close to them, because being gentle and good and kind to your friends and family, that’s tikkun olam too.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:31

Okay, two good recommendations, thank you. What are you working on next?

Ana Maria Shua 15:37

Children’s books, I think. I wrote six adult novels, and I would like to write another one, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do it, because I’m going to be 75 years old in April.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:51

Oh, mazel tov!

Ana Maria Shua 15:52

Yes, thank you. But it’s not my best creative time.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:59

Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Ana Maria Shua 16:02

I do have a website. Yes. AnaMariaShua.com.ar.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:06

AR for Argentina.

Ana Maria Shua 16:09

AR for Argentina. Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:12

Is there anything else that you want to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Ana Maria Shua 16:18

Well, maybe I could talk a little bit about how I never had a Jewish education when I was a child, because my father was strongly atheist. He was against religion in a very, very strong way. My grandparents, on my father’s side, they were religious, but my father, he was absolutely against religion, and he didn’t want his daughters to learn anything about the Jewish tradition, because he was afraid that could be, you know, like a base to drag them into religion. So we didn’t have... absolutely no Jewish education. My whole Jewish education when I was a child was the picture The Ten Commandments with Charlton Heston.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:12

[LAUGHTER] Oh, my goodness.

Ana Maria Shua 17:16

You know, it took me many years. I mean, one of my grandfathers is called Mojżesz. Mojżesz was from Poland, the other one was from Lebanon, and he was called Musa. And it took me many, many years, I discovered they were both called Moses. Mojżesz and Musa, they were so different for me.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:42

Ana María Shua, thank you so much for speaking with me and happy Passover!

Ana Maria Shua 17:48

Thank you and happy Passover for you.

Richard Ho 17:50

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, my name is Richard Ho. I’m the author of A Flame Burns On.

Alison Goldberg 17:57

My name is Alison Goldberg. I’m the author of The Remembering Candle. We’ll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast.

Richard Ho 18:06

We’d like to dedicate our episode to anybody who’s celebrating the memory of a loved one, or to any parents or educators who are trying to help a child through a loss.

Alison Goldberg 18:15

If you are remembering someone, we hope your memories bring you comfort. May their memory be a blessing. [END DEDICATION]

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:30

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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I’m a sucker for a good growth arc, and Trouble Finds Evie Lefkowitz provides! Evie is not the only character whose worldview expands, either. The ensemble cast of middle schoolers demonstrate deepening understanding and relationships in a very satisfying way.

Author Diana Harmon Asher and her character Evie are both “the cantor’s daughter,” which incidentally reminds me of an interview I did in 2019 with Aria, the daughter of Cantor Sarah at my own temple, who at the time was seven and three quarters years old. If you’d like some reading recommendations from the adorable Aria, check out the episode Notes From a Young Reader.

Love, Heidi

NEWS

Chana Stiefel has provided a Jewish educational guide for her book AWE! on her website. FIND IT HERE

Here’s a somewhat depressing “Literary Activism” article from BookRiot, explaining the many ways the Institute for Museum and Library Services (IMLS) has been hollowed out, but ending with some suggestions for ways to fight back. READ HERE

CALL TO ACTION

Past Book of Life guest Sarah Aroeste is starting a Sephardic book club, Livros Lookout. The first meeting will be on March 17 to discuss Gateway to the Moon with author Mary Morris. JOIN THE CLUB HERE

The House of Representatives has introduced a nationwide book banning bill, H.R. 7661, which would ban LGBTQ+ books from schools. EveryLibrary offers this petition opposing the bill; please SIGN AND SHARE. You can also call Congress to oppose the bill using THIS CALL SCRIPT from 5Calls.org. Then go read some queer Jewish kidlit!

SHOW NOTES

• Diana Harmon Asher’s website, Instagram, and Facebook

• Buy Trouble Finds Evie Lefkowitz, Sidetracked, and Upstaged

• Diana’s Tikkun Olam suggestion: donate to food banks at community colleges

  ---

TRANSCRIPT

Diana Harmon Asher 0:00

[COLD OPEN] I think the country as a whole thinks they know what Jews are, but they don’t necessarily. Evie is a Jewish American, and she’s as American as she is Jewish. Her being Jewish adds to the story, but it’s not the whole story.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:15

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a podcast about Jewish kidlit. I’m Heidi Rabinowitz. If you enjoy a good heist story, here’s one with a lot of heart. Trouble Finds Evie Lefkowitz is a middle grade novel about a Jewish girl who gets into good trouble in order to right a wrong. Banding together with friends and frenemies helps her expand her thinking and bring more generosity into the world. Here’s my conversation with author Diana Harmon Asher.

Heidi Rabinowitz 0:56

Diana Harmon Asher, welcome to The Book of Life.

Diana Harmon Asher 0:59

Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to talk to you.

Heidi Rabinowitz 1:02

Yay! I’m excited to talk to you. Diana, just briefly tell us about Trouble Finds Evie Lefkowitz.

Diana Harmon Asher 1:10

Ok. Evie is the cantor’s daughter. Her father passed away a few years ago, and she’s faced with a couple of challenges as the book begins. The first is: her mother is starting to date, and her upcoming date is with the assistant principal of Evie’s middle school, which is just a horrific thought to Evie. The other thing is: her mother has volunteered her to tutor a boy who she used to be friends with in nursery school, then they went to different elementary schools, and she has seen him around, but they’ve never acknowledged each other, and all of a sudden she’s face to face in his room, having to tutor him. And that’s how the book opens, but it involves a lot of other friendships. There is a strange science project that involves some captive praying mantises that becomes a focus of all these friends. But it’s about grief in a way, and it’s about moving on in a way, and it’s about learning about other people who you thought you knew but maybe really didn’t.

Heidi Rabinowitz 2:21

What inspired this story?

Diana Harmon Asher 2:23

My father was a cantor. He passed away when I was 14. I remember that time so vividly, and it was such a turning point in my life, and I wanted to write about that and about the situation of having a parent who’s moving on, and how that affects you. When I first started the book, I did an early draft, and Evie’s father was a teacher, and it was sort of white bread, and when I went back to the manuscript years later, I just thought, now I’m going to draw on my own background and my own memories that were really important to me. And so I made her the cantor’s daughter, and that plays a big role in the book.

Heidi Rabinowitz 3:02

Well, sharing that experience, I think, makes the book very unique. You don’t read a lot of books about the cantor’s daughter. There are a few books about the rabbi’s daughter out there. In fact, there’s another one with “trouble” in the title.

Diana Harmon Asher 3:16

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 3:16

The Trouble with Secrets is about the rabbi’s daughters. But what makes the experience of being the cantor’s daughter special?

Diana Harmon Asher 3:25

I think part of it has to do with the music, because that’s such a visceral, such an important part of the Jewish experience. I guess being a rabbi’s daughter or son, you would be a little bit more in the spotlight. Cantors don’t get enough attention. You know, they’re the ones who are kind of in there training the b’nai mitzvah and forming a bond with these preteens at such a tender age. Kids loved my father, and the kids in the youth group just adored him, and that was a big role for him, and so I felt very special being his daughter.

Heidi Rabinowitz 4:03

Nice. What I found very significant in this story is the growth arc, how Evie moves from being very judgmental and also very easily embarrassed, worrying that other people are judging her, and then she moves to looking beyond first impressions. So can you talk about that?

Diana Harmon Asher 4:25

When she first is assigned this tutoring position with Joey, you know, that’s what the title comes from, Trouble Finds Evie Lefkowitz. There are many kinds of trouble, but she’s sort of thrust into a position with kids who are tagged as trouble, he and his best friend Tommy are known as, as trouble. And so she assumes that this is true until she gets to know them a little bit better and also realizes how they see her ,and they grow to understand each other in a different way. And she sees how these labels are put on kids, not only the troubled kids, but the good kids. You know, you get tagged as the Smart kid or the good kid or the troubled kid, and these are young people. They all have room for growth and change, and often teachers understand that, but sometimes they don’t, and I think the label itself creates what it’s tagging. You know, if you’re called trouble, you’re going to make trouble. They all work together in fun ways that I think helps her grow. It helps them all grow.

Heidi Rabinowitz 5:36

Did this kind of growth arc from judgmental to more open minded occur in your own life?

Diana Harmon Asher 5:44

That’s a good question, I think so. There were kids I grew up with who, looking back now, I can say I misjudged them. I realized that I didn’t understand everything that was going on with them as an adult. I think I do try to be more understanding of what someone could be going through. I don’t know if, as a kid, it happened as clearly as it happens with Evie, there was no praying mantis project to bring us together.

Heidi Rabinowitz 6:15

Do you want to tell us about the praying mantis project? Because I think now anybody who hasn’t read it is intrigued and wondering.

Diana Harmon Asher 6:23

Well, there was a project in my kids’ school where every year the teachers planted these praying mantis sacs around the school. The seventh graders were tasked with finding the praying mantises and bringing them in so that they could be observed. You also got extra credit if you brought in insects for them to eat. And it always struck me as just kind of an awful project. But in the book, one of Evie’s best friends, Spencer, really gets upset about this, and it’s very important to Spencer that they free these praying mantises. And into the picture come Joey and Tommy, and Rachel, who is Evie’s other friend, a Japanese-American girl, and that’s sort of what brings them all together and what helps them understand each other.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:14

So, yeah, they basically do a heist to free the praying mantises so that they don’t have to see them barbarically eating each other. [LAUGHTER]

Diana Harmon Asher 7:23

Yeah, that’s, that’s kind of it, yeah. And Spencer also gets upset about seeing these other insects being fed to the praying mantises. And he’s a very sensitive guy, and he ends up being a hero, in a way, and no one expects that of little Spencer. His role changes too. I think throughout the book, everyone’s role shifts, and they discover things in themselves that they didn’t know were there.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:49

Yeah, I think that was one of the things that really struck me, was how the kids kept defying expectations, even their own expectations.

Diana Harmon Asher 7:58

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 7:58

And being pleasantly surprised by themselves, that they were able to do things that they didn’t know that they could do.

Diana Harmon Asher 8:05

Yeah.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:07

So, Georgia Representative John Lewis, of blessed memory, used to talk about getting into “good trouble, necessary trouble,” meaning that when we see injustice, we should do something about it, even if it gets us into trouble with the authorities, and I love that Evie and her friends get into good trouble when they do this heist to free the praying mantises.

Diana Harmon Asher 8:29

Yes.

Heidi Rabinowitz 8:29

Can you talk about that? Why is it important to you to portray this in the book?

Diana Harmon Asher 8:35

They’re bugs, but I think it’s representative of what you’re talking about, that even if it’s a small thing, if you see something that you really feel needs to be corrected, you do something about it. The point also isn’t just the praying mantises. It’s the fact that they’re standing up for their friend because it means so much to Spencer. They’re doing it for him as much as they’re doing it for the insects, and I think for kids, that’s also something important to understand, that standing up for a friend, getting behind a friend, I think that’s something they can see in their own lives. That’s important.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:14

Right, I mean, you say it’s just bugs, but I think it doesn’t matter what it is in the specifics, what matters is that they are standing up for what they feel is right, even if the authorities are telling them something different.

Diana Harmon Asher 9:30

Right.

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:30

It’s a template for activism, even if their practice or their warm up to becoming activists is to free praying mantises.

Diana Harmon Asher 9:40

Right!

Heidi Rabinowitz 9:40

You know, maybe they’ll go to a march next time. So...

Diana Harmon Asher 9:44

Right, yeah. I hope it does come through that way. And when I write, I try really hard not to make it too message-y. I don’t want to hit kids over the head with a message, but I think when you have a story like that, they’ll get it. They’ll get it.

Heidi Rabinowitz 10:01

In an interview on Deborah Kalb’s blog, you said it was really rewarding to bring Chaucer’s idea of fellowship into the book. So can you tell us more about Chaucer’s idea of fellowship and how it applies to your book, and why you’re so into Chaucer?

Diana Harmon Asher 10:17

Oh, well, my freshman English teacher was Bart Giamatti, who was an absolutely brilliant man who actually became commissioner of baseball. He was the president of Yale University after he was my freshman English teacher, and he just was a fanatic about baseball. So I adored him, and we studied Chaucer, and he just made it so fascinating and funny and deep. Many classes, he would bring baseball into it, and he compared baseball to Chaucer, believe it or not, talking about how the runner goes to first base, where he’s sort of got some company, he’s got the coach. Then when the runner is on second base, he’s as far from home base as he can possibly be, and that’s the journey. And the whole idea is to come home. And the whole idea in The Canterbury Tales is that they’re on this pilgrimage, and they get there, and then they want to come home. So he tied all these things together in this amazing way. And so I’ve always just had a great affection for Chaucer and that idea of fellowship, that these strangers come together from different places. But I kind of saw the parallel with these different kids coming together, Italian Americans, Japanese Americans, Jewish Americans, they all grow to understand each other and share in this quest

Heidi Rabinowitz 11:47

That is very cool. I haven’t read Sidetracked, but I did read Upstaged, and it seems like this fellowship idea is kind of woven through all of your work. Tell me if I’m right that Evie Lefkowitz is the most Jewish of all of your books. Is that true?

Diana Harmon Asher 12:03

Yes, definitely. I think the theme of friendship is in all of them. And I love developing the group, that each one has a personality that comes through. Sidetracked is about a team, and Upstaged is about a musical production. I love working with a group of characters and how they interact with each other. With Evie, I just decided to go with my own experience as a Jewish American, and I thought it was an important story to tell. It’s published by PJ Publishing, and I know that a lot of Jewish kids will read it, and that makes me ecstatic. And I also hope that kids who are not Jewish read it, because I try to explain every Jewish reference, and I think the country as a whole thinks they know what Jews are, but they don’t necessarily. Evie is a Jewish American, and she’s as American as she is Jewish. Her being Jewish adds to the story, but it’s not the whole story.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:02

That’s a good explanation. And thank you for doing that! I think that is important to convey that to readers from all backgrounds.

Heidi Rabinowitz 13:11

Evie’s best friend Rachel, as you mentioned, is Japanese American, and I believe I read online that you have a personal connection to Japan that may have inspired this character. So can you tell us about that?

Diana Harmon Asher 13:26

Yes, both of my previous books and now Evie will be translated into Japanese. My first two books were selected by the Japanese National Book Council to be part of a national essay contest that they have. It’s all through Japan. Kids get a selection of about four books to read, and then they write book reports, and the best essays, the kids get to come to Tokyo, and they get a certificate and it’s a very formal thing. And for some reason that I will never understand, Sidetracked was chosen as one of these books, and then Upstaged was chosen. So I said to my publishers, is there any way I could get invited to this ceremony? I’d never been to Japan, had no connection with Japan. And they got invitations for my husband and myself. So I’ve become good friends with the translator of my books, who’s just the most lovely person, the agent who sort of put the thing together, the editor who speaks very little English, and yet she’s one of my favorite people. I mean, we’ve, we’ve spent time together... we just sort of look at each other and know we understand each other. It was just one of the thrills of my life to realize that there are kids in Japan who are reading my books, and even in Sidetracked, the main character’s grandpa, he’s always spewing Yiddish. He’s throwing in these little Yiddishisms. And it just surprised me, and amazed me, that somehow the story could translate, you know, literally and figuratively, to this totally different culture. So I decided to make Rachel Japanese American, just sort of to bring in some of that culture, which I’m still learning about and don’t know nearly enough about.

Heidi Rabinowitz 15:13

That’s so interesting. And so as far as you know, the selection of your work for this Japanese reading project was just random? You didn’t submit it to them, or....

Diana Harmon Asher 15:25

I guess the publisher did, and they just liked the story. I think the first year, the theme was sports, and Sidetracked has to do with cross country running. But I think there’s something in the values that we share. Sidetracked is about perseverance and striving, and Joseph is a terrible athlete who joins the cross country team, and it’s about finding a team and believing in yourself. And I guess that struck a chord with them. I got to meet some of the kids who read it and wrote about it, and it was just a fantastic experience.

Heidi Rabinowitz 16:03

That’s awesome. What was the easiest and what was the hardest part of writing this story?

Diana Harmon Asher 16:10

Ooh, I loved Evie and her mother. I loved writing those scenes where her mother sort of turns into the teenager and Evie sort of turns into the mother figure. Like Evie is saying to her mother, what do you mean, you’re going on a date and you’re buying this makeup, like, what’s the matter with you? You know, be careful. And the mother is saying, Well, you know, I just want to have some fun, and I’ve been very sad, and this assistant principal might be someone who could make me happy. And it puts Evie in the position, almost, of the parent. I liked writing their banter.

Diana Harmon Asher 16:45

The hardest part, I guess... at the end, I had to decide if I wanted true antisemitism to enter into this book. And I decided that it sort of had to. Tommy and Joey, they say some things that really come from ignorance more than any kind of hatred, or they just don’t really understand. And Evie makes them understand! And they say things about Rachel too, and her being Japanese, and Evie and Rachel school them a little bit. But then there’s an incident that really is more truly antisemitic, and it was hard to write because I didn’t want it to be an exception to the tone of the book. And yet, it had to be a little bit. It had to touch Evie in a different way, so that was a challenge, but I hope I did it okay.

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:46

Yeah, I didn’t feel like it was a shift in tone. I think it all fit together very well. So. good job!

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:52

Thank you. [LAUGHTER]

Heidi Rabinowitz 17:54

It’s Tikkun Olam time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Diana Harmon Asher 18:02

I think food kitchens, food pantries right now are just hurting and in need. I think that’s so important. I read about community college food pantries. Once we got in touch with our local community college, I found out that they have a food pantry. They help kids on a daily basis and emergency basis, and kids come to school hungry, young adults come to school hungry. And that was something where I felt like, rather than supporting our great big universities who have endowments the size of a small country, community colleges really have kids who are struggling, and to help keep them in school, look into your local community college’s food pantry. I think it’s something that people aren’t aware of, and it’s a good cause.

Heidi Rabinowitz 18:53

Thank you. Yeah, that’s something that I wasn’t aware of. I was aware of the concept of food pantries, but not specifically that they would be affiliated with a community college. So thank you for that recommendation.

Diana Harmon Asher 19:04

Sure!

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:04

What are you working on next?

Diana Harmon Asher 19:07

I am going back to my characters from Sidetracked and moving them into the next season of track and field, and trying to work in some local history north of New York City and Westchester County... and it’s hard. I would have thought that going back to characters I already knew would be easy, but it’s a challenge, because you don’t want to repeat the same story. They’re starting at a different place, but I’m working on it, and I hope it will succeed, and I’ll let you know.

Heidi Rabinowitz 19:44

All right, good. Well, that’s something to look forward to. Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Diana Harmon Asher 19:51

I have a website, DianaHarmonAsher.com. I’m on Instagram and Facebook. I don’t tweet or X, or whatever you call it. And if you Google me, you’ll find me.

Heidi Rabinowitz 20:03

Is there anything else you want to talk about that I haven’t thought to ask you?

Diana Harmon Asher 20:08

Well, I am asked sometimes about the writing process, and if you want to become a writer. And I tell people how important it is to get another opinion, to join a writers group or take a class, because it’s so hard to judge what you’re writing when it’s just you. The reader is so important, and another reader can tell you, No, this isn’t coming through the way you intended. And that’s something you can’t do for yourself. So I try to encourage people to accept criticism and don’t give up, because it took me a long, long time to get published. And you know that feedback helped me a lot, and the positive feedback helped me a lot too, to not quit. It really does tie into what I write about in my books, that you need a team, you need a group. You need people who will support you, and you need to stick with it. It’s not always easy, but it’s incredibly rewarding.

Heidi Rabinowitz 21:08

Diana Harmon Asher, thank you so much for speaking with me!

Diana Harmon Asher 21:12

Oh, thank you so much. It’s really been a pleasure.

Ana Maria Shua 21:15

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, I’m Ana Maria Shua. I’m the author of The Passover Pet Surprise. I’m dedicating this interview to my three granddaughters, just as I dedicated my book: Josephine (Josefina), Deborah, and the little one, Jordana. She’s five years old, and I want to dedicate it especially to Jordanita, because I use her name for the character of my book, and she’s very, very angry about it! She didn’t like it at all, because she’s absolutely sure that Jordanita, in my book, was wrong, what she did, she shouldn’t have done. So she didn’t like that girl to be called with her name. So I want to dedicate this podcast to my own Jordanita.

Heidi Rabinowitz 22:22

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. I’d love to hear from you! Subscribe for free to BookOfLifePodcast.Substack.com to get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news and calls to action right in your inbox. If you’d like to receive the bonus Share Your Shelf segments, you can upgrade to a paid subscription. The Book of Life is also on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and our 20-year back catalog is online at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Want to read the books featured on the show? Buy them through bookshop.org/shop/bookoflife to support the podcast and independent bookstores at the same time. The Book of Life is sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. Learn more at JewishLibraries.org. Additional support comes from Congregation B’nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida At CbiBoca.org, AJL also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Stick around past these credits and you might hear a promo for the latest episode of Nice Jewish Books! Our theme music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading! [END MUSIC]

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