Podcast: The Five Books
Episode #311
When I started The Book of Life 20 years ago, it may have been the first podcast about Jewish books. Others have started up since then, including my sister AJL podcast Nice Jewish Books, hosted by Sheryl Stahl, with whom I did a joint interview in September 2024. And I’ve swapped interviews with other podcasters over the years:
In 2009 I went to the Podcasters Across Borders conference where I interviewed Mark Blevis, Connie Crosby, Hugh McGuire, and Alexa Clark.
In 2016 I interviewed Sara Ivry, host of Vox Tablet.
In 2017 I interviewed Marc Oppenheimer, Stephanie Butnick, and Liel Leibovitz, hosts of Unorthodox.
In 2017 I interviewed Lisa Newman about the Yiddish Book Center, and we spoke about The Shmooze podcast starting about 11 minutes in.
In 2020 I guested on the Rad Child Podcast.
In 2021 I guested on Star Trek and the Jews.
In 2022 I guested on Everyone Loved It But Me to talk about The Boy in the Striped Pajamas.
In 2023 I interviewed E Train (and he interviewed me in 2025).
In 2025 I guested on The Children’s Book Podcast with Matthew Winner.
A brand-new podcast is The Five Books: Jewish Authors on the Books That Shaped Them, hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, in partnership with the Jewish Book Council. How exciting that there are now multiple podcasts on my favorite topic! It was lots of fun for Tali and me to interview each other on this special joint episode, continuing the traditional supportiveness of the podcasting community.
Love, Heidi
NEWS
In the interview, Tali told me that The Five Books was a weekly podcast. Since that time, the show has moved to an every-other-Tuesday schedule, without season breaks.
CALL TO ACTION
Writers, the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award is open for submissions of unpublished manuscripts of middle grade Jewish fiction. Submissions of completed manuscripts are due by September 1. Complete details HERE.
SHOW NOTES
Highlights of past episodes:
o Yale Strom on The Book of Life
o Gayle Forman on The Five BooksRecommended podcasts:
o Heidi: Nice Jewish Books, Recognizably Jewish, Fuse 8 and Kate
o Tali: Identity/Crisis, Call Me Back, The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, How to Fail
RECOMMENDED TITLES
Book #1: Favorite Picture Books
The House on the Roof by David Adler (Tali)
The Rabbi and the 29 Witches by Marilyn Hirsh (Heidi)
Savta Simcha series by Yaffa Ganz (Tali)
The Passover Parrot by Evelyn Zusman (Tali)
Once Upon a Shabbos by Jacqueline Jules (Heidi)
The Hardest Word by Jacqueline Jules (Tali)
Book #2: Favorite Middle Grade
All-of-a-Kind Family series by Sydney Taylor (Tali)
To Night Owl from Dogfish by Holly Goldberg Sloane and Meg Wolitzer (Heidi)
The Upstairs Room by Johanna Reiss (Heidi)
Not Nothing by Gayle Forman (Tali)
When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman (Tali)
Max in the House of Spies/Max in the Land of Lies by Adam Gidwitz (Heidi)
Book #3: Favorite Young Adult
When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb (Heidi)
Whistle: A New Gotham City Hero by E. Lockhart (Heidi)
Boys of the Beast by Monica Zepeda (Heidi)
Recipe for Disaster by Aimee Lucido (Heidi) - actually Middle Grade but mentioned at this point
Book #4: What books are you excited about right now?
More Than Enough: Inspired by Maimonides’s Golden Ladder of Giving by Richard Michelson (Heidi)
Mendel the Mess-Up by Terry LaBan (Heidi)
Night Owls by A.R. Vishny (Heidi)
Honey and Me by Meira Drazin (Tali)
Book #5: Adult Books
One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World by Michael Frank (Tali)
My Father's Paradise: A Son's Search for His Jewish Past in Kurdish Iraq by Ariel Sabar (Tali)
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom by Ariel Burger (Tali)
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present by Dara Horn (Heidi)
Thistlefoot: A Novel by GennaRose Nethercott (Heidi)
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.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 0:00
[COLD OPEN] My goals for the podcast are really just to promote Jewish books and support Jewish authors, to think about the ways that books continue to impact our identity and how we think about things decades later. What about you?
Heidi Rabinowitz 0:13
Everything you just said, sounds great to me. Those are my goals as well. [LAUGHTER]
Heidi Rabinowitz 0:17
[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. The Five Books is a new weekly literary Jewish podcast hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. I'm very happy to welcome another show to our little corner of the Jewish book world, so I invited Tali to do a mutual interview. We interviewed each other, and the episode will appear on both our podcast feeds. Check out fivebookspod.org to find all of Tali's episodes of The Five Books. For show notes and a transcript, subscribe to my newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com, where you'll also get bonus content, like Jewish kidlit nws and calls to action, or you can visit my full website at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. [END MUSIC]
Heidi Rabinowitz 1:13
Tali, usually I have authors here with me, but today I've got a fellow podcaster which is really fun. So let's talk a little bit about our two podcasts. We can kind of interview each other, and then we're going to borrow the format of your podcast and use it on The Book of Life.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 1:32
Terrific!
Heidi Rabinowitz 1:33
So first, can you tell us a little bit about your show, The Five Books.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 1:37
The Five Books interviews Jewish authors about five books that are near and dear to them. So the author doesn't have to have written a particularly Jewish book incontent, but I really want to hear from the author which books were meaningful to them. So we talk about a book that was meaningful to their Jewish identity, that they read in childhood. A book that they read as an adult, that really impacted or expresses their Jewish identity. We get to talk about a book that they think changed their worldview, something that they think everyone should read, not necessarily a Jewish book. And then they share what book they're reading now. And then we get to talk about the book that they've just published. So it's really a way of understanding them in the context of how they relate to their Judaism and the impact that books have on a person's life and the way that books shape our identity.
Heidi Rabinowitz 2:24
That's wonderful!
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 2:26
I am a newbie at this. Our first season debuted in December of 2024, and I know you've been doing this a long time, so I'd love for you to just tell us a little bit about your show and what started you on this path.
Heidi Rabinowitz 2:40
In 2005 podcasting was brand new, and I read an article about it in School Library Journal, and the example podcast that they directed you to was not that impressive. I thought, Wow, well, if that's all it is, anybody could do that! I could do that. [LAUGHTER] So I jumped in and taught myself how to do it. And because of going to library conferences, because I am a synagogue librarian, before that, I was a public librarian... from going to these conferences, I knew some authors, and so I started interviewing them, and it was so much fun that I kept on going. I never run out of authors or books that I'm interested in. So I'm still doing it 20 years later.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 3:19
What makes it fun?
Heidi Rabinowitz 3:21
Well, you're a reader, so you know: talking to the people who create the books that you love, they're celebrities for us, rock stars. Getting the backstory is always fascinating. It's a delight to talk to them, and they tend to be very thoughtful and very well spoken, because they're authors.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 3:38
Yeah, and do you have any that are particularly meaningful to you, or that have really stood out over the years? I don't want to ask to pick your favorites, necessarily, but you know something that really resonated with you?
Heidi Rabinowitz 3:50
There are so many! So a lot of the people I interview, I speak to them remotely. It used to be over the phone, then it was over Skype, now it's over Zoom, but when I have the chance I talk to people live, in person. I used to go to Book Expo a lot and interview people on the show floor. And so there was always this buzz of exciting background noise, and it was a "you are there" kind of a feeling to the recording. Once Yale Strom was there. He is a klezmer musician, and also has written some books, including a picture book called The Wedding That Saved a Town, it was about one of those ritual weddings that they take a orphan bride and an orphan groom, and they bring them together in order to, I think it was to end a plague of cholera or something like that. Like they're doing this extra mitzvah of marrying these poor, bereft people to try to win God's favor. And Yale Strom was there playing the violin at Book Expo, and so I got to record some of the music and record him talking about it. And it was just really fun to put all of that together. It was very lively.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 4:57
I'll have to find that episode.
Heidi Rabinowitz 4:58
Yeah, I'll dig it up and put it in the show notes.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 5:00
And for you, I'm curious, you know why, why did you choose to do one about Jewish kidlit specifically, as opposed to just kidlit?
Heidi Rabinowitz 5:09
Well, I work at a synagogue, Congregation B'nai Israel in Boca Raton. Also, I had just finished my term on the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee. When you're on the committee, you read a few hundred books, basically every Jewish children's book, from picture book through middle grade to YA, to young adult, that is coming out in the year. So I didn't necessarily want to have to read every single book once I was off the committee, but I wanted to stay immersed in that atmosphere and have a reason to still be part of that world. This show gave me a way to do that.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 5:43
That's great.
Heidi Rabinowitz 5:44
For The Five Books, how did you come up with your five book questions?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 5:51
To be honest, I started with the title; it's the five books of Moses. So once I had the five books, I knew I wanted to talk about the book that the author had just published. I knew I wanted to hear about the Jewish books that had impacted them and their identity, and also just getting to talk about a book that really opened up the vista and perspective for an author also seemed interesting. So I got to four pretty quickly, and I wanted to get to a fifth. It needed it to be a quick one, because I wanted to wanted to go in depth on the others. So the "What are you reading now?" question filled it in. And a lot of times, authors will talk about a book that hasn't been published yet, by another author that they know or are friends with, or blurbing or whatever. So that's fun.
Heidi Rabinowitz 6:35
What made you decide to start a podcast?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 6:37
It was not my intention to be a podcaster! For a long time. I was a literary agent and I chaired a book prize committee, Natan Notable Books, which gives a prize to a nonfiction Jewish book. But through that, I got to know the Jewish Book Council who administered the Natan Book Prize. And then last year, post 10/7, just having a bunch of conversations like, what's going on in the publishing world and literary world, and I just wanted to find a way to lift up Jewish voices, Jewish books, support Jewish authors. I came up with this idea, and I thought someone else would do it... and then it was going to be me. And so here I am.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 7:15
It feels surprisingly similar, in many ways, to being a literary agent, I feel like it's another opportunity to champion books that I care about, books that I love. I think what's been remarkable to me, watching the Jewish Book Council, is the way they've used their platform, which has traditionally been just really all about promoting Jewish authors and Jewish books, and they've pivoted to be a voice for inclusion at a time when many Jewish authors have found themselves not included for reasons that have nothing to do with anything that they're writing about, and ensuring that Jewish voices, regardless of their opinions about Israel, should not be excluded because of their Jewishness. They've threaded that needle in a very admirable way, and I've just been delighted to be working with them and learning from them. They've been a wonderful partner for our podcast, and have given me advisory support, promotional support. I'm just in awe of the work that they do.
Heidi Rabinowitz 8:19
That's great.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 8:19
So I know that your podcast is associated with the Association for Jewish libraries, so maybe you could just tell me a little bit about that organization and the partnership that you have with them.
Heidi Rabinowitz 8:30
Sure! The Association of Jewish Libraries is the leading authority on Judaic librarianship. It is the professional association for people who work with or love Jewish collections in libraries, whether it's a completely Jewish library or a collection, for instance, within the Library of Congress or in a university or a public library. But it also is open to non librarians who just are interested in Jewish literacy and librarianship. We have members from all different streams of Judaism, all different kinds of libraries, and all around the world. I've actually been involved with the Association since I became a synagogue librarian in 1998 and I've gone to every conference since 1999. It's a wonderful organization because it's kind of small and intimate, and you get to really know people. People are very supportive. Many of us, especially synagogue librarians like myself, we work alone. We don't have colleagues. So this is a way for us to have colleagues and people who understand what we're doing and can offer moral support and suggestions and expertise. It's a very fulfilling organization to be part of, very friendly and very welcoming.
Heidi Rabinowitz 9:47
How long have you been podcasting now?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 9:50
So our first season debuted December 3rd. We had one season with 12 episodes. Our second season started March 18th, and here I am.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:00
So December 3rd, 2024.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 10:02
Yes.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:02
And March 18th, 2025.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 10:04
Yes.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:05
Okay, so not even a year yet.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 10:07
No, no, I'm brand new! Brand new.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:09
So how do you like it?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 10:11
It's been great! Talking to authors is such a thrill. It's great to talk about their books that they've just published. And it's been really fun to see the books that everybody chooses and see the way that the books that they choose find their way into the books that they're writing, the themes, the big questions that authors are really thinking about, you can often pull that thread all the way through.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:34
Has anything about doing a podcast surprised you?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 10:38
Everything surprised me. [LAUGHTER] I didn't know anything coming in. I've had amazing people to lean on and teach me things. I'm so happy to be talking to you and other people who have been doing this for way longer than I have. It's fun to learn. It's fun to try something new. It's been great.
Heidi Rabinowitz 10:55
So your show comes out weekly during its seasons, right?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 11:00
Yeah, weekly.
Heidi Rabinowitz 11:01
So even though you haven't been doing it very long, you've had a number of interviews already. Any highlights from among those you've already done?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 11:09
So many highlights. You know that I got to interview Gayle Forman about her book Not Nothing. I know you've spoken to her as well. She's so lovely and wonderful. The thrill for me was that it was a book I had read with my youngest daughter, who's nine, and we both fell in love with the book. So I emailed Gayle, like while we were still in the middle of the book, and said, I just love this. Would you be on the show? She wrote back to me like, the night that we finished reading the book, and both of us were in tears, and it was just such a beautiful book. So I got to meet her, and I brought her a card that my daughter had written her saying how much she loved the book, and she wrote a little note back in the book for my daughter, and I got to bring it home, and then I was a hero for bringing her this note. So you know, when you're talking about authors as rock stars, just being able to see her understand authors as someone who has this huge impact on your life, was just a really special moment.
Heidi Rabinowitz 11:58
So that's interesting. I had assumed that The Five Books was a show specifically about books for grown ups, but Not Nothing is a middle grade book. So you're actually flexible on that.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 12:14
Definitely the intent is to focus on adult books, primarily fiction and memoir, some non fiction where it's made sense. This was a book that I just love. I've just been telling all of my adult friends, like, buy it for your kids, but read it with them. So yeah, I did bend a little bit there.
Heidi Rabinowitz 12:14
Yeah. I mean, Not Nothing is definitely a crossover book. You do not need to have a kid in your life to read this and enjoy it immensely.
Heidi Rabinowitz 12:39
So let's borrow the format of The Five Books, and we'll discuss books in five different ways. Since The Book of Life does focus mainly on children's literature, our first question is going to be favorite Jewish picture books that we loved in our own childhoods, or that we love now, and why they're meaningful to us. So Tali, would you like to go ahead and tell us what you think about Jewish picture books?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 13:07
I would! I have four children. My oldest is 20, my youngest is nine, so I feel like I've been reading children's books for a really long time, and there are some that I read as a kid that I was just so excited to be able to read with my own children, and thankfully, many of the ones that I did love, they've loved as well. Not all of them, for sure! But there was a book that I loved as a kid called The House on the Roof, a Sukkot story by David Adler. It's about a man who builds a sukkah on his roof. I think it's in New York City.
Heidi Rabinowitz 13:40
Because it's an apartment building and he doesn't have a yard.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 13:43
Yes, and the neighbors are very upset, and they want him to take it down. And Sukkot, as we know it, lasts eight days. The police come and they say, you know, "You have to take it down within eight days." You know, a little wink and a nod. The kids love being in on the joke of it. The illustrations are wonderful. I loved seeing the familiar sukkah on the pages, which was not the norm when I was a kid.
Heidi Rabinowitz 14:07
In terms of a picture book from my own childhood, I will mention The Rabbi and the 29 Witches by Marilyn Hirsch, which I always liked because it had magic in it and because it was so clever how the rabbi tricked the witches into coming out into the rain so that they would melt like the Wicked Witch of the West. And he did it all through cleverness, and he didn't have to use force. And I always thought that that was particularly Jewish. It's interesting, though, when I mentioned that book to my sister, who's only two years younger than me, she said she didn't like it because it wasn't fair to the witches, and they were just going along doing their witchy thing, and why did anybody want to bother them? So that was interesting. [LAUGHTER]
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 14:49
That's so funny. I think I remember that book. Another one that I loved as a kid, the Savta Simcha series by Yaffa Ganz. I grew up in a Modern Orthodox home, and seeing the traditional Shabbat was not something I really ever saw in books. And I just loved her giant bag, and everything was in that bag, and children flocked to her, and she had such a warm and generous way about her. Yeah, I really loved that one. And then there's a book called The Passover Parrot, about a parrot who hears the child practicing manishtana so many times that then the night of the Seder, I think she flies away with the afikomen, and they all hear the birds singing the manishtana outside in the tree. I'm sure I'm messing it up in many ways, but that was, that was the gist of it. That's what I remember. And it was a really sweet story. What about you? What are some other ones you loved?
Heidi Rabinowitz 15:42
Well, one that I love now, that works particularly well for story time, because I do story time as part of my job, is Once Upon a Shabbos by Jacqueline Jules. It could stand to be re illustrated, honestly, the illustrations are a little old fashioned now, but it's just got really solid folkloric storytelling, with a lot of repetition and a lot of places for the kids to chime in. And it teaches a little bit of Yiddish in a way that sort of builds, so that by the time they end the book, they've got some vocabulary. It's just a really fun story. It's based on the folktale Sody Sallyraytus, but it's a Jewish version. Did you have any other picture books that you wanted to talk about?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 15:42
The other one that I really love, that I've read with my kids, is The Hardest Word about Yom Kippur. This creature is tasked with finding the hardest word to say, and he comes up with words like spaghetti, and then realizes that sorry is the hardest word. It's a phrase we continue to use. It's such a powerful message and a beautifully told story.
Heidi Rabinowitz 16:44
All right, wonderful. Let's do book number two, let's talk about our middle grade favorites.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 16:51
I mean, definitely All-of-a-Kind Family. I loved those books. Who didn't love those books? They defined a whole generation of us, I think. I was thrilled to talk to Tova Mirvis about her new book We Would Never, and she chose the All-of-a-Kind Family books, and she said something about the dearness of them, and I thought that was just such a perfect word for them. Those characters really became part of our families.
Heidi Rabinowitz 17:15
A middle grade book that I have enjoyed in adulthood, and this is kind of a casual Jewish representation, is To Night Owl from Dogfish, which is co authored by Holly Goldberg Sloan and Meg Wolitzer. And it's an epistolary, you know, letters back and forth, emails, letters, postcards, whatever. It's funny, the characters feel like friends, and it's got a really good growth arc. It's a story about these two girls whose fathers are both gay and they're dating. They're going to bring the daughters together, because the guys think it's maybe serious. The girls discover this, and they're both aghast at this, because they want their father all to themselves. At first, they want to undermine the relationship, but it goes through a whole series of hijinks and their evolving opinions on the situation. It's very heartwarming and very funny.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 18:10
I love that.
Heidi Rabinowitz 18:11
Well, just trying to think back to a Jewish book that I read in childhood, I guess sort of older middle grade, young YA is The Upstairs Room by Joanna Reiss, like Anne Frank, a story of Jews being hidden and having to watch the world go by from their upstairs space. She survived, which makes it a little bit more pleasant than reading The Diary of Anne Frank. But I think that was like my main introduction to the Holocaust.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 18:41
You know, we talked about Not Nothing by Gayle Forman. That's one that I've really loved recently, and also, I think, for my daughter, this was the first book that she's read that touched on the Holocaust. And, you know, she wants more. I'm excited to read When We Flew Away by Alice Hoffman with her, I fell in love with Alice Hoffman reading Turtle Moon back when I was probably a teenager. She's written beautiful books that relate to Jewish history over the last several years.
Heidi Rabinowitz 19:07
Speaking of really good Holocaust books, one other I would want to recommend is the duology by Adam Gidwitz, Max In the House of Spies and Max In the Land of Lies. He is an amazing writer. He is such a terrific wordsmith. He is so insightful about how humans work. His two books about Max that take place during the Holocaust probably do the best job I've ever seen of explaining how good people fall for the Big Lie. I would definitely recommend those.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 19:41
I haven't read a lot of Jewish YA, and I feel like when I was a kid, YA wasn't the category that it is now. So tell me a little bit about the world of Jewish YA these days.
Heidi Rabinowitz 19:54
Book Three, YA! You are right thatYA was not such a thing when we were younger. It has definitely grown in scope, and in the respect that it gets. Most of the books that are written as YA are very readable by adult readers as well. One of my favorites, that is certainly enjoyable by adults, is When the Angels Left the Old Country by Sacha Lamb, which won the Sydney Taylor Book Award a few years ago. It is basically Good Omens but Jewish, with a demon and an angel who are Torah study partners. It's a fantasy, but it's also a historical novel. It's excellent. I also really liked Whistle by E Lockhart, which is a graphic novel that introduces a Jewish superhero to Gotham City, named Whistle, who has the strength of dogs, the speed of dogs, the sense of smell, and also can communicate with dogs and call dogs to help her... and she's Jewish. A really unusual YA book that I enjoyed a few years ago was Boys of the Beast by Monica Zepeda. It's about these cousins. One of the cousins is Jewish, one of the cousins is actually like evangelical Christian, and one is not really anything. But, you know, families can have this mix, and it's unusual to see that portrayed in literature. What I especially liked about it was it seems really irreverent, you know, these kids basically steal the grandmother's car and go off on a road trip. They party, they smoke pot. But what really comes through is that they are so respectful of each other as people. They are not judgmental. They care about each other. Their hearts are absolutely in the right place, and even though they're so different, they really are interested in communicating with each other and understanding each other. I just found it to be a really unusual and beautiful book.
Heidi Rabinowitz 21:51
So in terms of YA as a genre, I would say that Jewish YA is doing some really interesting things. It's exploring Jewish identity itself. Middle Grade is doing this too, like the consciousness of being Jewish and what it means. So it's not just stories that happen to take place during a Jewish life cycle event or a Jewish holiday, and it's not just stories that take place during a time that was important to Jewish history, which tend to be negative times like the Holocaust or the Inquisition. They are now really getting into all different facets of Jewish identity, from the casual all the way up to people really struggling with well, how do I want to express my Jewish identity? This one was actually middle grade, but there was a book Recipe for Disaster by Aimee Lucido, about a girl whose family had turned away from Judaism because of some interpersonal problems in the family, but she really wanted a bat mitzvah, and so she had to figure out how to do it in secret. This is the opposite from all of those stories where the kid has to study for their bar or bat mitzvah and it's such a drag. So just as an example of somebody really grappling with that identity. So young adult books, the whole genre, not just Jewish, the whole genre, is really flourishing. And so that's certainly true within Jewish YA as well.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 23:17
You want to tell us our fourth category, of what you're excited about now, or what you want to recommend right now?
Heidi Rabinowitz 23:23
Books that I'm excited about now, some new books that I really want to share. I'll do a picture book a middle grade on a YA. So for picture books, I would like to promote More Than Enough, Inspired by Maimonides' s Golden Ladder of Giving, by Richard Michaelson and illustrated by Joe Cepeda. It encompasses that idea that it's always good to give, but there are levels of giving. So you could give less than you should, or you could give reluctantly, and that's okay, it's better than nothing, but it's even better if you give wholeheartedly, and it's even better if it's anonymous, because then there's no shame involved. And it's even better if, rather than just giving somebody a handout, you help them find some kind of sustainable work. So just all of those levels on the golden ladder that historically was created by Maimonides is illustrated through the action of this picture book.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 24:20
Oh, I love that. Didn't know that there was a Rambam picture book, but that's great.
Heidi Rabinowitz 24:24
Yeah. For middle grade, I will mention Mendel the Mess-Up by Terry LaBan. It's a graphic novel, shtetl setting, in which this kid believes that he's cursed, so he's a mess up, because the curse is that he could just never do anything right. But when the Cossacks invade his shtetl, he figures out a way to use that against them. It's very funny. It's very exciting. It's got real tension when the Cossacks invade. It's actually quite scary, but at the same time, it's got a lot of human emotion and thoughtfulness. And I also really like how studying and learning becomes a plot point that helps save the day, actually, and that is so Jewish, and again, something that is unusual. For YA, I'll mention Night Owls by A.R. Vishny. This is a YA fantasy paranormal romance, adventure, quest type of story. It's about two sisters who are estries, creatures from Jewish folklore, female vampires who turn into owls, and they can eat bread and salt, as well as the blood that they drink from humans. These two estries run an art house cinema in the Village in New York, and they get into all of these hijinks with the demon underworld and ghosts. It's just, it's so much fun.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 25:43
It sounds fun!
Heidi Rabinowitz 25:52
Those are three books that I am excited about right now. What Jewish books are you excited about right now?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 25:58
I loved the book, Honey and Me by Meira Drazin. She is a friend, but I thought this book was so masterfully written. It's about two girls the year before their bat mitzvah. They've been best friends, but they've never gone to the same school, and suddenly they're in the same school, and all of those kind of friendship dynamics that every person who's been through middle school knows all about play out between the two of them. They both are from observant Jewish households, and that's just sort of an incidental part of the story. I think the friendship aspect of it is so incredibly relatable to all kids, but especially with the Jewish piece of it, to kids going through that bar and bat mitzvah process.
Heidi Rabinowitz 26:42
Yeah, Honey and Me won the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award before it was even published.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 26:45
Yes, yes, yes, you are correct.
Heidi Rabinowitz 26:49
Yeah, awesome.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 26:50
I love that one.
Heidi Rabinowitz 26:51
Okay, so that's four books down, one to go. Do we want to talk about adult books? We hadn't even thought about that, but that's something that you know you focus on. So...
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 27:02
Yeah, but then I have to choose a favorite. Yeah, I could talk, we could talk about adult books. Sure. So some books that I've read recently that have not been on the podcast, but I've loved the first one, it is a book that won the Natan Notable Book Award, was One Hundred Saturdays written by Michael Frank, based on the life of Stella Levi. It tells a story of her childhood in Rhodes and also her Holocaust experience. I'm fascinated by these lost worlds before the terrible things happen. You know, she talks about like the way the women would call across to each other, across the courtyards as they were cleaning and cooking all day, and call and response kind of songs, it was just such a beautiful thing, like, you know, a relic of a time that we just don't know anything about. And along those lines, I loved the book My Father's Paradise, A Son's Search for His Family's Past by Ariel Sabar about his family's life in Kurdish Iraq. Also relics of an ancient world. The other book that I really loved was Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom by Ariel Burger. Many of us have read Elie Wiesel, have admired him. This book just brought new levels of thoughtfulness and nuance to that conversation. I got so much out of that book. It's a book I think everyone should read. Tell me about you.
Heidi Rabinowitz 28:26
Well, I don't read adult books as often as children's books, partly just because there aren't enough hours in the day, and partly because I get bored hearing about people's midlife crisis. And I like books where there's hope and there's not cynicism, the way there often is in adult books. But I will say that I thought People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn was completely brilliant, not fun, but brilliant. But there is an adult book that I've been meaning to read. I don't remember if it won the Jewish Fiction Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, or maybe it was an honor book, and that is called Thistlefoot by GennaRose Nethercott, about the descendants of Baba Yaga who live in a house with chicken feet but in the modern world, just that hook sounds like enough to get me interested. And also, I saw her at an Association of Jewish Libraries conference, and found out that she is a puppeteer and just a really funky, interesting person. And so I'm sure her book is just as interesting as she is. So it's on my to be read list.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 29:32
There are not enough hours in the day to read all of the books we want to read, for sure.
Heidi Rabinowitz 29:37
Right!
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 29:38
I'm curious; you obviously have always loved books. Did you always want to be a librarian? Or how did you come to that as a career?
Heidi Rabinowitz 29:46
Basically, yes, I always wanted to be a librarian. I actually did have a play library. My mom and some friends of hers set up a day camp at a local synagogue when I was a child, and in the space that they gave us to have the summer camp, there was a shelf full of books, and so I actually went through and cataloged them so that they could be a lending library. I don't know if anybody but me borrowed them [LAUGHTER], but I was having fun playing library with them. So I guess it was destiny,
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 30:19
The way other kids play school.
Heidi Rabinowitz 30:21
Right.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 30:21
Right? You were playing library, right? Very sweet. Well, I just spoke to Allegra Goodman about her new book Isola, and I was asking her about a book that impacted her in childhood, and she grew up in Honolulu, and she talked about a book that she found in her synagogue's library, which was a book that she, you know, said she wouldn't have found otherwise. So it's a good reminder of the role that synagogue librarians play and impact they have.
Heidi Rabinowitz 30:48
So we both do Jewish podcasts, but also I listen to your podcast. You listen to my podcast. Are there any other Jewish podcasts or literary podcasts that you're a fan of?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 31:01
Yeah, I'm a fan of Identity/Crisis with Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute, a nuanced and thought provoking approach to whatever is currently going on in the world. Dan Senor's Call Me Back similarly, always has just the person you want to hear from right at that moment. I always love listening to The New Yorker Fiction Podcast, where they have an author reading a piece of fiction that they love. What about you?
Heidi Rabinowitz 31:30
There's another podcast sponsored by the Association of Jewish Libraries called Nice Jewish Books, run by my friend Sheryl Stahl, and that one is actually about books for grown ups. Another Jewish podcast that I've discovered recently is called Recognizably Jewish. The host is basically giving a little TED talk on various recognizably Jewish things like bagels or the Star of David or the Borscht Belt. I'm really impressed by how much work he puts into it. In terms of a literary podcast. It's not a Jewish one, but Fuse 8 and Kate, hosted by very well known book reviewer, Betsy Bird and her sister, they have this humorous podcast where they decide if picture books that are older than 20 years old, if they are classics or not classics, that's a lot of fun.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 32:22
That sounds like a lot of fun. I also am a huge fan of Elizabeth Day, How to Fail. She has famous people, successful people, talk about three failures in their life. And I think that sort of format was what got me thinking in the direction of a five question format. It's a fun way to get to know people.
Heidi Rabinowitz 32:40
Cool.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 32:41
Yeah.
Heidi Rabinowitz 32:42
So as you continue your first year of podcasting, do you have any particular hopes? What are your goals for the podcast?
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 32:51
My goals for the podcast are really just to promote Jewish books and support Jewish authors and hopefully to have people think about all the different variations of Jewish identity, all the nuances, and also just the importance of books, Jewish books, to think about the ways that books continue to impact our identity and how we think about things decades later. What about you?
Heidi Rabinowitz 33:17
Everything you just said, sounds great to me. [LAUGHTER] Those are my goals as well. This is my 20th year of podcasting. So you know, I thought about, Do I need to do some special schtick? Should I throw a party? Should I have a special theme throughout the year? But I got distracted because I just kept thinking, "there's another book that I want to talk about. This one sounds interesting." And so I just got distracted and just kept doing what I'm doing for the most part. So I guess my goal is to continue to do this for as long as I possibly can, because it's just really fun. You know, the greater goal of promoting the Jewish books and the personal goal of getting to talk to authors, I think it's a great combination. Luckily, what I'm doing to entertain myself is hopefully entertaining other people and educating and informing other people as well. I do have the goal, I really want non Jewish listeners to pay attention to these books as well, and hopefully the podcast is a good finding aid for them, because I think these books are great windows as well as mirrors. They're really good bridge builders, and they're just terrific books. So they just deserve to be read as widely as possible.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 34:28
When I think about antisemitism right now, I think the only way to combat it is to hopefully have people understand the nuances of Judaism and Jewish civilization and Jewish life. And that's what Jewish books do.
Heidi Rabinowitz 34:40
Exactly. And the younger you read these, the more impact they have on you. Jewish books for children are especially important because they're formative.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 34:49
Definitely.
Heidi Rabinowitz 34:51
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen, thank you so much for joining me.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 34:54
Thank you so much. And I I'm so impressed that you've been doing this all this time. It's remarkable. I just love listening to your podcasts and hearing the way you interact with your guests. It's been really fun.
Heidi Rabinowitz 35:05
Oh, thank you very much. Well, I'm enjoying yours as well. I really like the format of the five questions. I like the little musical stings where you announce what the next book is going to be. And I think you're really drawing out your guests, and they're saying some very interesting things, so it's nice the way you get them to share.
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen 35:23
Thank you.
Kyle Lukoff 35:28
[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi. This is Kyle Lukoff. I'm the author of A World Worth Saving. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast, and I'd like to dedicate my episode, a little controversially, to trans minors who have already had some kind of gender affirming medical care. [END DEDICATION]
Heidi Rabinowitz 35:56
[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473, or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com. Subscribe to my newsletter on Substack to join me in growing Jewish joy and shrinking antisemitic hate. Get show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news, and occasional calls to action right in your inbox. Sign up for the newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com. You can also find The Book of Life on Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube. 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. You can also help us out by becoming a monthly supporter through Patreon or making a one time donation to our home library, the Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel of Boca Raton, Florida. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, the leading authority on Judaic librarianship, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. Learn more about AJL at JewishLibraries.org. Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading.
Sheryl Stahl 37:21
[MUSIC, PROMO] Mishel may not be the big man on campus, but he definitely rules his second grade classroom in Tehran, and all is well in his world. That is until his family decides to uproot him and his brother Saeed and move the family to Los Angeles. Newly minted as Mike, he struggles to navigate a new language, new customs, new foods, and, most importantly, new hierarchies on the playground. Suddenly, he's being classed with the other outcasts and misfits. Will he be able to climb his way back to the top and to find a place for himself? Join me for a conversation with Michael Shokrian about his new book, American Playground. Find us at jewishlibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks.
Heidi, I too had a card catalog for my childhood library and other kids actually checked out books. I don’t know if the idea was originally mine or that of my mother z”l, who had always wanted to be a librarian.
P.S. I was already listening to The Five Books podcast😊📚📗📘