The Book of Life: Jewish Kidlit (Mostly)

CLICK HERE FOR FULL SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT 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 1 in my 2-p...

CLICK HERE FOR FULL SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT 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 auth...

CLICK HERE FOR FULL SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT 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 Bo...

Click here for full SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT I recently heard a piece on NPR about the little jars that hold yarhzeit 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...

Click here for full SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT Argentine author Ana María Shua has written over 100 books and is super famous in Latin America but The Passover Pet Surprise is her first Jewish children's book. As you'd expect from such an accomplished writer, it's a well told, heartwarming story with a hint of ambiguity, which works well during a holiday where we are commanded both to retell and to i...

Click here for full SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT 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.  SHOW NOTES:  Diana Harmon Asher's website , Ins...

Click here for full SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT If you've ever read books to a baby or toddler, you're familiar with board books, those small sturdy books with stiff cardboard pages that can withstand drool and rough handling. But just because these books are designed for babies doesn't mean they are baby-ish. Suzy Ultman's deceptively simple storytelling in board book format has brought about a histo...

Click here for full SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT Welcome to the 17th annual Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour , taking place February 9-12, 2026. I am participating in the Blog Tour by interviewing Caroline Kusin Pritchard and Selina Alko, author and illustrator of The Keeper of Stories , which was a Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Picture Book category. SHOW NOTES: Here's the schedule for the 2026 Bl...

Click here for full SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT The winners of the 2026 Sydney Taylor Book Awards, recognizing the best Jewish children's and young adult literature of the year, were announced on January 26, 2026 at the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards event. Melanie Koss is the current chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee, and she joined me on the podcast to discuss the 20...

TRANSCRIPT: Hello! This is Heidi Rabinowitz, your host at The Book of Life Podcast, and I have some news to share. A year ago I started a Substack newsletter for The Book of Life Podcast to celebrate the show's 20th anniversary. The free Substack posts include podcast episodes, show notes, transcripts, Jewish kidlit news, and calls to action.  A number of listeners have very kindly pledged to upgr...

SHOW NOTES & TRANSCRIPT:  https://open.substack.com/pub/bookoflifepodcast/p/podcast-20th-anniversary-retrospective?r=16b2w9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true   It's The Book of Life's 20th Anniversary! In celebration, here's a super deluxe retrospective episode, with short clips from every year of the podcast. We'll start with this anniversary year, 2025, and then move back...

SHOW NOTES:  https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/12/a-hanukkah-classic-crossover-with-fuse.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/2QqWmvmeK1xGjP9AmSJelGqNVCg?utm_source=copy_url   Fuse 8 n' Kate is a weekly podcast hosted by School Library Journal, in which super-librarian Betsy Bird and her sister Kate evaluate 20+ year old picture books to decide whether they should be considered classics. Sinc...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/11/november-throwback-jewish-book-month.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/sEuzJ-GYxRIHREm5DRtY94hYkFI?utm_source=copy_url   Continuing the celebration of my 20th year of podcasting, I've got another archival episode for you from 2006, about Jewish Book Month. In the early days of The Book of Life I usually had multiple guests in each episode, a...

SHOW NOTES:  https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/11/jean-meltzer-queen-of-jewish-joy.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/65Uhjlmyb1QYDBa_KvBpl0TCTyU?utm_source=copy_url   Back in July 2025 I did a brief interview with Jean Meltzer, so she could tell you about Jewish Joy Con, an exciting event coming to Fort Lauderdale, Florida in March 2026. But I promised you a longer interview later - and he...

SHOW NOTES:  https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/10/october-throwback-laurel-snyder-redux.html   TRANSCRIPT:  https://otter.ai/u/eP9KxOhurmOFV6jIhbWPC5jYX8Y?utm_source=copy_url   Continuing the celebration of my 20th year of podcasting, I've got a 2013 archival episode for you with author Laurel Snyder, who at that time was best known for her iconoclastic picture book, Baxter The Pig Who Wanted...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/10/one-small-spark-more-than-enough.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/-_ly-iTlaYO1hZfUChOPKsYnXTI?utm_source=copy_url   If you're a regular Book of Life listener, you know I always ask guests for tikkun olam suggestions about ways to repair the world. Well, that's what this entire episode is about. I've got a pair of Jewish activist picture boo...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/09/september-throwback-sweep-story-of-girl.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://open.substack.com/pub/bookoflifepodcast/p/september-throwback-sweep-the-story?r=16b2w9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true   To continue with the themes of golems and fighting for justice that we explored in our most recent episode about Kyle Lukoff's A World...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/09/a-world-worth-saving.html   TRANSCRIPT:  https://otter.ai/u/_6lUDoKCnGpaSn-_alokxvSNtEo?utm_source=copy_url A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff is a queer Jewish fantasy adventure in which a trans boy and an unusual golem must save the world by Yom Kippur! I interviewed Kyle about this new middle grade novel, as well as his seasonally appropriat...

SHOW NOTES: TRANSCRIPT: In honor of my 20th year of podcasting on The Book of Life, I'm bringing you another episode from the archives: Summer Coolness, released in June 2007. The episode featured a now-defunct website called ReaderGirlz, and the website Nextbook that morphed into Tablet Magazine in 2009. There were also many mentions of MySpace. I interviewed Melissa Schorr, author of Goy Crazy,...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/08/the-five-books.html   TRANSCRIPT:  https://otter.ai/u/newZynBRoGzWkdF7PaTnzDLDSP4?utm_source=copy_url   The Five Books is a new literary Jewish podcast hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen in partnership with the Jewish Book Council. I'm very happy to welcome another show to our little corner of the book world, so I invited Tali to do a mutual interv...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/07/announcement-jewish-joy-con.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/K_DNE5hooD1D-ujpoI2gQUXpsZs?utm_source=copy_url   LEARN MORE: Jean Meltzer's website Jewish Joy LLC (the Jewish Joy Book Club and the Jewish Joy Box) Jewish Joy Con , March 13-15, 2026 in Ft. Lauderdale, FL CREDITS: Produced by  Feldman Children's Library  at  Congregation B'nai I...

SHOW NOTES:  https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/07/july-throwback-inquisitors-tale.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/idZDWVCvKcbXcYPMmx4uUuonYQE?utm_source=copy_url   As a follow up to my recent interview with Adam Gidwitz about Max in the Land of Lies, and in honor of my 20th year of podcasting on The Book of Life, I'm bringing you an episode from the archives, from January 2017. I met Ada...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/07/max-in-land-of-lies.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/4wQEsnmUalkzvYUesd-o7pDjudQ?utm_source=copy_url Last July, Adam Gidwitz was on the podcast talking about his middle grade Holocaust historical fantasy novel, Max in the House of Spies, and he told us it was part of a duology. Well, now the second book is out, and I think it's even more po...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/06/pride-month-throwback-new-queer.html   TRANSCRIPT:  https://open.substack.com/pub/bookoflifepodcast/p/pride-month-throwback?r=16b2w9&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true   In celebration of Pride Month and The Book of Life's 20th year of podcasting, I'm re-releasing an archival episode from June, 2021. It's an interview with...

SHOW NOTES: https://jewishbooks.blogspot.com/2025/06/pride-month-special-gender-binary-is.html   TRANSCRIPT: https://otter.ai/u/0xdCC0WUSVL8flI0x3kljyCApps?utm_source=copy_url I don't normally interview an author about a single chapter of a book, but for my friend Lee Wind, I'm making an exception. He's written a fascinating nonfiction book, The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities Arou...