THE BOOK OF LIFE - Pride Month Special 2025: The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie

1:36AM May 21, 2025

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Adam Gidwitz

Lee Wind

Keywords:

Pride Month

gender diversity

Jewish kidlit

The Gender Binary

classical Judaism

censorship

We Are Stronger Than Censorship

allyship

transgender representation

book challenges

diversity equity inclusion

Eleanor Roosevelt

Banana Menorah

early readers.

[COLD OPEN] The unifying metaphor of the book, it's about a rainbow, and talking about how in the West, we've been taught that a rainbow is ROY G BIV, it's these seven colors. But turns out rainbows have hundreds of thousands of colors in them. It's just our eye has been trained to see a certain number of them. And it's interesting that other cultures have said that there are different numbers of colors in a rainbow, and different ones, and so I think of gender a lot like that, like we've been trained to think that there are only two kinds of people.

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. 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 non fiction book. The Gender Binary is a Big Lie: Infinite Identities Around the World, and chapter two is about the six... count them, six... genders of classical Judaism. I just had to learn more.

In addition to writing great kids books about gender, Judaism, and allyship, Lee is literally a champion against censorship. He received the 2025, Industry Champion Award from the Book Industry Study Group for his project called We Are Stronger Than Censorship. Lee tells us more in the interview. For show notes, a transcript, and links to more about Lee's work, subscribe to my newsletter at BookOfLifePodcast.substack.com or visit the full website at BookOfLifePodcast.com. Happy Pride Month! [END MUSIC]

Lee Wind, welcome back to The Book of Life. You were last on the show in 2021 to talk about your wonderful Hanukkah allyship picture book, Red and Green and Blue and White, but today we're going to talk about a very different aspect of your work.

Yeah, thank you so much. I'm excited to be back.

Yeah! I don't normally interview someone about a single chapter of a book, but your book, The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie, has a really meaty chapter in it about Jewish concepts of gender. So let's start by hearing about what this book is about overall.

Yeah, thank you. I wanted to write something that would feel like nonfiction as empowering chocolate, rather than nonfiction as medicine, and so I have chapters that are pretty in-depth, and then a bunch of sort of interstitial short pieces in between the chapters that are profiles of different communities, how they view gender. When I started doing research on my previous non fiction book, No Way, They Were Gay?, the earlier one in this series for readers age 11 and up, I was really struck by two pieces of information. One was that the frequency of intersex individuals being born is 1.7% which is the same frequency as people who are born with red hair. I was like, well, wow, I don't actually know anybody that I think is intersex, but I actually know a lot of people with red hair. And then I was doing research on We’wha, who was a third gender person of the A:Shiwi people, which we call Zuni, and they were celebrated as an Indian princess back in the 1800s in Washington, DC. And then when it was revealed that they didn't have the female body that everyone expected them to have, there was a huge scandal. And doing that research, I learned that there were hundreds of Native nations in North America that saw gender differently than we do with our sort of colonized western perspective. And that was really the beginning of starting to do the research for The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie. Doing it, I was most surprised, and surprise seems to be my organizing principle for nonfiction... when I was a kid in school, history was really taught like it was names and dates to memorize. It was very dry and boring, and I never felt like I recognized myself in any of it. And so the stuff that excites me about history are the things I didn't know about, and now I'm like, Oh my gosh, that's so cool. The arguments that people make about the gender diversity that we see in our world today, and especially among younger people, research is telling us that one out of eleven young people identifies outside the gender binary, and the response to that has often been, "Well, this is new. This didn't happen in our grandparents time." You know l'dor vador, generations upon generations. And it's like, Wait a minute. Actually, generations upon generations have had this kind of diversity. Doing research, I stumbled upon this thing, the six genders of classical Judaism. And I'm like, What? What are you talking about? Some people say that there's seven. One source said that they were eight. And then I dug into it, and I discovered this amazing resource online called Trans Torah. So we have zachar and nekevah, right? Like male and female. There's androgynos, which today we would call intersex. There's a bit of a variation on androgynous. Tumtum, which would be nonbinary; aylonit, which would be trans or gender non conforming; and saris, which would also be trans or gender nonconforming, and also including eunuchs, that's how they got six or seven. And I'm sure the listeners to this program are familiar with the Midrash and the Talmud and the Gemara and just basically the idea that there's parallel texts that analyze and discuss what's in the Bible. There are over 1600 references to these other genders over a period of 1600 years. There are actually more references to diverse genders than there are years in that span. I mean, you know, you go to Israel, you go to the Western Wall, and it's so binary. You know, women pray here, men pray over here on the left. Like the fact that it's our tradition, it's my tradition, and I didn't know anything about it, felt at once like an incredible revelation and also slightly like an outrage, like, how are we not talking about this? And there's a really beautiful sermon that I quote pretty extensively in the book, all about twilight. And if you'd indulge me, I want to just read a tiny bit from this, because it's so beautiful.

Oh yeah, please do.

This is Rabbi Zellman. "Our rabbis of ancient times knew that humanity did not fit into two boxes. Just as day and night cannot be clearly divided into two, according to some of the most ancient texts, neither can people. The Mishnah goes on to say that people of indeterminate sex and gender were not to be harmed. Their lives were of equal value to any other person's. Twilight cannot be defined. It can only be sanctified and appreciated. People can't always be defined. They can only be seen and respected."

Oh, that's beautiful.

I was very struck by that. And also this idea of, understanding is not necessary to respect. And I feel like a lot of allies fall down on that. They're like, well, I don't understand it. It's not our job to understand it. It's our job to respect other human beings as human beings. I was very just kind of shook to my core, like, how much we don't know about history because it hasn't been convenient for the people in power to share the information with us.

The gender concepts in Judaism that you talked about, you explained that they were around for over a thousand years. Why are these gender ideas no longer a part of the way that Jews tend to think about the world? Where did they, where did they go?

I think that's a great question. I think it's part of colonization, honestly, the westernization of the Jewish Diaspora. I think maybe one of the moments that really stunned me the most was discovering this prayer from the 1300s, a trans prayer, Qalonymos ben Qalonymos was born in 1286 CE in Arles, a city in France that had a very long standing Jewish community, and it goes, beautifully translated by Abby Stein, "Oh, but had the artisan who made me created me instead a fair woman today, I would be wise and insightful. We would weave, my friends and I, and in the moonlight, spin our yarn and tell our stories to one another from dusk till midnight." It goes on. It's really beautiful. And then towards the end of the poem or prayer, there's a bit about appealing to God and saying, "Father in heaven, who did miracles for our ancestors with fire and water, you changed the fire of Chaldees so would not burn hot. You changed Dina in the womb of her mother to a girl. You changed the staff to a snake before a million eyes. You changed Moses's hand to leprous white and the sea to dry land in the desert. You turned rock to water, hard flint to a fountain. Who would then turn me from a man to a woman? Were I only to have merited this being so graced by goodness." Towards the very end of it, there's almost like a resignation. "What shall I say? Why cry or be bitter? If my father in heaven has decreed upon me and has maimed me with an immutable deformity, then I do not wish to remove it. The sorrow of the impossible is a human pain that nothing will cure and for which no comfort can be found, so I will bear and suffer until I die and wither in the ground."

Wow.

It's intense.

It is intense!

The fact that we can hear this voice from the 1300s speaking to us so beautifully and with such eloquence about, about how they wish they had been born in a woman's body. That just feels very empowering for people today that identify as trans and gender non conforming. I feel like that's a little bit of tikkun olam right there. That's a little bit of healing the world just by knowing our history, knowing that you're not alone in history, knowing that, that, that you have a legacy, that's really empowering. That's why I want to get this book into the hands of as many young people as possible, because I want them to know their legacy. I want them to have that generational wealth.

That's beautiful. I love that.

I'm maybe not the perfect person to have written this book, but I also felt like it was the book that demanded to be written. Felt really important, and I had the privilege to do so.

Why are you not the perfect person to write this book?

I felt that it was awkward because I don't identify outside the gender binary. I'm a cis guy. That means that when I close my eyes and I think about myself standing here chatting with you, and then I open my eyes, nothing has changed. My image of myself and my actual body match. CIS is Latin for on the same side of and TRANS is Latin for on the other side of. I mean, the gender binary messed me up in a lot of ways that I think it messes a lot of us up, but I felt like this book would have maybe been better served by somebody that did identify outside the gender binary, and my compromise was being like, I'm just going to load this book with as many primary sources as I can to make it feel like I'm hosting a party of gender diverse people. I can host. I mean, I'm actually really good at hosting. That's why it actually has over 300 primary source quotes in the book.

And then I was on a learning journey with it too. There was so much I didn't understand about gender. There were so many metaphors for gender that had never even occurred to me. I think it's pretty standard for people to think it's a spectrum between male and female, but that's actually really just the very beginning of the different metaphors that you can think of. There's a gender queer activist who prefers stars because it's not privileging male and female as like the two things that are correct on the ends, and everything else is sort of in the middle and less important. Stars in the sky, each one is just as beautiful and important as each other one.

There was a beautiful one about time, thinking about gender as a stable process, not a fixed state. So like, imagine a glass of water on a table. If you bump the table, the water sloshes around a bit, but then it settles back to stability. And then if you add water, or you take water away, it'll be disrupted, but then it will sort of go back to a stable state. And that was interesting, thinking about how people identify differently across time, across their lives.

And it's not that men and women don't exist, that male and female don't exist, but you know, our current administration is so mean spiritedly ignorant of science and biology. There's a lot of stuff in the opening chapters explaining about the incredible diversity in nature. As human beings, we are so quick to celebrate diversity in nature. We're like, look at all the different kind of hummingbirds. Like, we get really excited about diversity in nature, and then as soon as there's more than, like, two kinds of human beings were like, Wait a minute. No, not excited.

So it's funny, like, I hardly have to do any work in this interview! I could just let you talk and not even ask you questions, and you'd probably say all the things that I was going to ask you about. You mentioned something that I was planning to ask you about. In an interview on the Lerner Books blog, you said "I was surprised at how much the false gender binary had impacted my own life. The idea that there was only one way to be a man really messed me up." So would you mind sharing a little bit about how it messed you up?

Oh yeah, so going back to when I was closeted and not living my authentic life. I did all this stuff to be more, I'm putting quote marks in the air, to be more masculine, to be more like a guy. I mean, it was very clear to me that a deep voice would be more masculine. So I totally messed my voice up. I strained my voice so much by trying to speak in a register that was a lot lower than what I naturally would speak in, for decades. I started to do some public speaking, and I kept losing my voice, like within 40 minutes of speaking, it would be like I had laryngitis. I went to someone that specializes in public speaking, and she helped me figure out what I was doing wrong, and I was doing everything wrong, but it was all because I had this idea in my mind as a teenager that if I don't want anyone to think that I'm gay, and if I could be tougher and more masculine and have a deeper voice, no one would suspect that I liked other guys.

But I also feel like we gender so many things that make absolutely no sense in our culture. Why is soap gendered?

Yeah!

That is a mystery to me. Why is shampoo gendered? My husband and I, we've been together 28 years, and we've raised a daughter, and she's in her early 20s, and the process of raising a child is fascinating, because there are such boxes that we expect our kiddos to fall into. Let's be open enough to let kids be themselves. Right now, there's so much hate and negativity, the scapegoating of the trans community in particular, and I think as as Jewish people, we should be very sensitive to scapegoating anybody, because we know it never ends with just one community.

Absolutely, that's actually something I wanted to talk about. Cisgender gay and lesbian identity has become much more accepted by our society just over the last few decades. It's actually pretty remarkable. But the new punching bag is transgender identity, and some people seem to feel threatened by it. So I wanted to ask for your opinion. Why are people so threatened? Is it just because they don't understand it, or they're just looking for a scapegoat? Or, why do you think the trans community is so much under attack?

I think that it has a lot to do with divisive politics, and I don't really think people are scared of trans people. I think the motivation is to make public life unsafe for people that are outside the binary, and already trans people face absurd amounts of violence, especially about things like bathrooms. I don't think their issue is with trans people needing to use the bathroom. It's simply because it's like an easy wedge issue, and people are being manipulated. There was a really powerful moment on one of the social media things, Bernie Sanders talking about 20 years ago, he was saying, no one's going to vote for less taxes for the millionaires. No one's going to vote for government to stop helping people. No one's going to vote to privatize all the things that we've come to rely on the government helping with. So what they do is they create these culture war issues to divide up the people that naturally would be allies, the 99% of people that aren't oligarchs and that should be standing in solidarity with each other, and they do it so they can capture the vote and stay in power. But we have to be allies. I really feel like as a gay man, that's what I've learned on my journey, is that as the G of LGBTQIA2+, I need to be an ally to everyone else in our fabulous rainbow soup of a queer community, but also to women and to people of color and disabled people and indigenous people and, you know, being Jewish, I really feel like we have this perspective of knowing how bad it can get, and we can all do better in terms of being allies to each other.

Well, speaking of allyship and bringing it back to books, do you have any tips for responding to the censorship of books with queer content and the attacks on Diversity Equity and Inclusion?

I'm so happy with the question. I'm so happy you said diversity, equity and inclusion, because they've made DEI this sort of like boogeyman, right? Like...

It's so ridiculous!

It's so ridiculous. Pete Buttigieg recently said in an interview, he was like, Okay, so the opposite of diversity is homogeneity, so you want everyone the same, and the opposite of inclusion is exclusion, and the opposite of equity is, things are unfair. How are you arguing for things to be unfair, for people to be excluded and for everyone to be the same? It makes no sense at all. Right, so my previous book in this series, The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie, is Book Two, and Book One in this series is No Way, They Were Gay?, and that book came out in 2021 and has been challenged quite a few times. Because of it being challenged, I got access to these support group meetings for authors who are in the position that I've been in, and I met Dr. Tasslyn Magnusson, and Tasslyn holds all the data on book banning in the US. She and I became friends, and we started talking, and I was sharing that I was very frustrated, because I felt that everything on our side was playing defense, like hiding our heads and hoping they won't call on our book. And also, from my perspective of my day job, I work for a nonprofit called the Independent Book Publishers Association, we were hearing from our publishers that sales to schools and libraries, in some cases, are down 50%. The point of the banning is to create a chilling effect that makes librarians and teachers afraid to bring in any book with diversity, even though they know that it would help the students or the young people in their communities. They're afraid to lose their job, they're afraid to get backlash. They're afraid of the controversy. So that chilling effect is what we're hearing is really impacting independent, mission driven publishers in particular. So I was talking with Tasslyn. I said, Tasslyn, how do we go on the offense? So together, we cooked up this idea. It's called, We Are Stronger Than Censorship. The idea is to use the numbers against the book banners. So for every book challenge, we are trying to raise money to buy and donate two books to offset that challenge. There was a person in Wisconsin who challenged 400 books in an elementary school library, all 400 books were removed from the shelves for four months while they were reviewed. I did air quotes again while they were "reviewed." At the end of four months, almost all the books made it back on the shelves. But if you think about it, all those kids in that school lost access for an entire semester to all of those books. There's a problem with one person having that much power. That was a ban, even though they weren't technically, those books were not available to those children for that very long period of time. If that person knew that, in response to their challenging 400, 800 books would be bought and donated, maybe it would have slowed their roll a little bit.

So we launched in September of 2024. We contacted 20 different independent publishers, each of them have one book in the program, and those are the books that we're buying and donating. We have about nine partners across the US that are helping us distribute the books into the hands of the people for whom it will make a difference. We have another nine or so bookstore partners. We have probably 20 or more industry partners that are helping us get the word out in some way. And we just passed $16,000 in donations, which means that we are now able to buy 2000 books to offset 1000 book challenges. And that was our original goal, because we imagined that in September of 2024, looking at the numbers, there would be about 1000 book challenges. So we've proven the concept, and now the question really is, how far can we take it? How much can people get involved and excited, not just donating money to the program, but there's also T shirts you can wear that say "strong like a reader" or "strong like a librarian." And the logo is really cool. It's the O of strong is a Do Not Enter sign that's opening up to reveal it's a book being read. It's cool because it's like a good news story about book challenges and book banning, and we haven't had a lot of that. Also, I feel like it's a way to take some agency back.

There's so many things people can do, including getting involved on their local level and speaking up. If all of us are working on this from all these different directions, on the legislative side, on the local community side, on the just talking to people. The case that just went up before the Supreme Court was particularly scary. Nine children's books, all with queer representation and for religious reasons.... well, ostensibly; I think bigoted reasons, but they were saying it was religious reasons. They wanted to be able to opt their children out of being exposed to these books being shared in the classroom. It is a horrifying precedent, because it doesn't take too much stretch of the imagination to imagine a book like A Snowy Day by Ezra Jack Keats that stars a black child, for white parents who are bigoted to be like, I don't want my child exposed to that book. And so the teacher wants to share that book; first, they have to excuse the six children whose parents didn't want it shared. What are those children thinking when they're taken out of that room? What are the kids that are left in that room thinking about the kids that just left and about what they're about to experience? It's horribly divisive. And again, you don't have to stretch too far back into time to be like, Oh well, you want to share a book about a Jewish character. I'm sorry. We're going to have to let parents opt their children out of even knowing that Jewish people exist. It's truly a terrifying moment that we are at such a precipice, and we really need to rally with each other and share the fact that these books... I mean, they can call it pornography, but literally, there's nothing pornographic in any of these books. A beautiful book, Everywhere Babies, Marla Frazee illustrated it. It's so sweet and it's so lovely. And there's a crowded street scene where all these different people, they're all dressed, it's a normal street scene, but one guy has his arm around another guy, and because of that, they call it pornography. It's all about changing the language, the level of profound doublespeak. And we can't be taken in by it, and we should not be co opted into using their language.

Well, I'm so happy that your answer to my question about censorship was that you have an actual project that works on this, a whole structure that you've created to defend these books. That's wonderful, and I will definitely link to that in the Show Notes. Thank you. So speaking of books of Jewish content and books of queer content and these books under attack, are there any other Jewish books about gender identity that you would like to recommend?

I'm thinking about Joyful Song that just came out from Lesléa Newman, illustrated by Susan Gal. It's not really about gender so much, but it's, it feels like a very inclusive story.

That's a beautiful book. I actually interviewed both Lesléa and Susan on the podcast about Joyful Song.

I'm really stretching my mind to try to land on examples that encompass both.

I can think of a few. I don't know if you've read them. A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff, which is new.

Oh, yes, I haven't read that yet. It is on my request list at the library.

And Kyle's going to be on The Book of Life.

Oh, I'll listen to that episode especially.

Yeah. A World Worth Saving actually has some High Holidays tie ins, and so that's going to be the September episode. AJ Sass's, Andrew Sass's books frequently have both Jewish and gender identity issues within them. Those are the ones off the top of my head. I know there are others as well. There was a book called A Million Quiet Revolutions by Robin Gow. That's a novel in verse about two trans boys getting involved in American Revolutionary reenactments, especially because they, like you with the history, they found the history of some people who they believed must have been trans, who were dressing as men to become soldiers in the Revolution. And so they were identifying with them, and one of them was Jewish. Oh, and actually a classic one of trans identity, Lily and Dunkin, Donna Gephardt, and that has a Jewish character. Dunkin is actually Jewish. So yeah. So there actually are quite a few.

Okay, I like it. Thank you for helping me build my To Read list.

Yeah! So you have another new book called Like That Eleanor: The Amazing Power of Being an Ally. And I want to hear about it. But first I want to ask you, does Eleanor happen to be Jewish? Because her dark, curly hair reminds me of my hair. So I just wondered.

I don't know if Eleanor is Jewish, the illustrator brings so much of the specifics of the characters. When I wrote the book, it was important for me that Eleanor is a young girl. She has two dads, she is in a diverse school setting with kids that look like her and don't look like her, and that there is a non binary child that she befriends. The fact that she has dark hair, the fact that one parent is black and the other is white or appearing, that was all Kelly Mangan's choices. Kelly shared that Kelly's partner has a cochlear implant. So that was the motivation for putting that representation in the book. And it's always really this incredible moment of delight as an author that you come up with this story... and in this case, it was such a quirky little story about a little girl with two dads, who's named after Eleanor Roosevelt, who sees unfair things happening at her school and wants to make the things more fair and doesn't know how to go about doing that, and then her dads tell her these stories about Eleanor Roosevelt. And Eleanor Roosevelt was this amazing ally. She did so many cool things. So just one example, when she was a new First Lady, FDR had just become president, Eleanor Roosevelt discovered that the weekly press conferences that her husband, the president, gave, they only allowed men reporters. And she didn't think that was fair, so she decided she was going to start her own weekly briefings for the press, but she would only allow women reporters in the room.

Awesome.

And because of that, it forced all these news outlets to hire women reporters, because otherwise they would not have access to the information that Eleanor Roosevelt was going to share. Like that was just such a genius moment. I was so excited by that. So there were a couple of those really cool Eleanor-Roosevelt-being-an-ally stories that I had gathered as part of the research when I was doing No Way, They Were Gay?, because there's actually, one of the in-depth chapters in that book is about Eleanor Roosevelt, who was in love with Lorena Hickok, the first woman reporter to have a byline on the front page of The New York Times, by the way. Yeah, and then I just had this idea, like, what if it was the inspiration for a young child today about being an ally? How do you be an ally across gender? And to also recognize that the gender binary doesn't include everyone. So there's really a direct line through all of my books, right? It's just, it's kind of invisible, but it's there. Eleanor Roosevelt to The Gender Binary Is a Big Lie to Like That Eleanor. I'm so inspired by history, and I'm so inspired by social justice, and I want kids, even little kids, to know that they have power. They can be a friend, they can stand up and not speak for somebody, but speak with somebody.

So you have a very Jewish book coming out this fall in time for Hanukkah, called Banana Menorah. So that sounds like a lot of fun. Can you tell us about that?

Sure! It sounds like I'm really busy. Yeah, Banana Menorah is a absolute silly, joyful book, also inspired by history, but it's by my history. So when my husband and I just started dating, we went away for the weekend, and it happened to be Hanukkah. Lighting candles for Hanukkah is a really big deal for me. I'm a pretty secular Jew, but that tradition really resonates for me, and I really wanted to light them. So I brought candles, and I didn't bring a menorah. We were in the middle of nowhere, and there was nowhere to get a menorah, but we had brought food for breakfast, and so I improvised. There was a banana, I peeled part of it back and I stuck the shamash and the first night candle in the banana, and we had a banana menorah that night. And then, of course, the banana was disgusting by the next morning, and so we had to throw it out. And then it was like, oh my goodness, what are we going to do? But we still had granola. So we filled a bowl with granola, and we stuck two candles and a shamash in, and we had granola menorah. And then the third night, we didn't have any more granola, but there was an icebox. And so we filled the bowl with ice, and we stuck the candles in. And and then we went home, and I had my normal menorah, but it was fun.

So you didn't have eight different food item menorahs? [LAUGHTER]

No, but it was fun, and it kind of got us started on this family tradition of let's do a creative menorah. And then when our daughter was born, we got very silly with it. We just experimented with it and just found a joyful creative outlet. And I always thought that would make such a fun picture book. And indeed, it has made a very fun picture book. It's coming out from Apples and Honey Press, which is Behrman House, in November, just in time for Hanukkah of 2025, and I'm super excited. It's again, it's a little girl with two dads, because that was my family, and we had very few picture books. I think King and King and Family was the only picture book that had two dads and a little girl when my kid was a kid, now just in time for her to be in her 20s. But it's good. It's like paying it forward. Paying it forward. Banana Menorah is a celebration of creativity in a particularly Jewish way, and very silly and fun.

That'll be a very fun addition to the Hanukkah bookshelf. What are you working on next?

So many things! I have a YA series that is my homage and critique of James Bond movies. First book was called A Different Kind of Brave. It's a gay teen action adventure love story. Then the sequel is the thing I'm working on, and it's called A Different Kind of Enemy, and it is going to be out in 2026, and that's been really fun, because I love the characters, and I get to play in that sandbox a little bit more.

All right, that sounds like a lot of fun. I want to hear about your work as Chief Content Officer for the Independent Book Publishers Association. What does that job entail?

So IBPA is a nonprofit trade association, so we have about 3600 members. Basically, when you walk into a bookstore, four out of every five books you see are from corporate publishers, but 20% of books comes from thousands of different independent publishers, and those are the companies that we represent. I do a lot of the educational programming because books should be judged on the quality of the book and not on who published it or the business model behind it, and we want to help our publishers publish really professionally. It's the rare reader that pages through to the copyright page to see what imprint and who it was that published it. But the industry still cares, and we really want the industry to shift and to really judge books on their quality. I also do a lot of our book marketing. Publishing is expensive, and marketing books and getting the word out about them is hard and can be very expensive. And so we try to aggregate the power of our community to bring down the cost of programs, so our members have access so things like, instead of getting a booth at the big ALA, annual American Library Association Conference, which can cost a crazy amount of money, we have a booth, and then they can just get, like, a shelf to put five of their books on.

I really love what I do as a day job. I feel like it really helps level the playing field. I feel like small presses, like Cardinal Rule Press, like Behrman House, like Lerner, like Levine Querido, that published Red and Green and Blue and White, these are the publishers that are really driving diversity in our ecosystem. Not to say that corporate publishers aren't putting out beautiful books, but independent publishers are doing beautiful, important books that are really speaking to underserved communities and the ability to lift them up. Feels like a good day's work.

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

I'd like listeners to read a book that challenges their preconceptions. So if you want to understand more about trans people in sports, read He/She/They by Schuyler Bailar. If you want to understand more about black history, read something like Unspeakable: the TulsaRrace Massacre by Carol Boston Weatherford, illustrated by Floyd Cooper. It can be a children's book, but I think that allyship is the way that we heal the world, and the first route to that is empathy. And books, I think, are empathy machines. So this podcast, Heidi, you're so good at celebrating books and especially letting people in, like inviting people into learning about these amazing books, and when we do that, when we have that empathetic experience, I think we walk through the world differently with an eye to like "how can I help?"

I like it. I like any answer... well, I like all the answers, every tikkun olam answer that anybody has ever given me is great. But, you know, I can't help but be extra excited about the ones that involve more reading. So thank you for that. Is there anything else you want to talk about that I haven't thought to ask you?

If I had a time machine, I'd send my books back to myself as an 11 year old. I had just shut the closet door so firmly to hide my true self, what a difference that would have made in my life. Any inkling of any of this would have maybe let me know that I was going to be okay. I'm very happy to pay it forward, and I also have to acknowledge the healing that I am experiencing by populating the landscape for my inner child with this knowledge. I'll just share the dedication of Like That Eleanor, because I feel like it sums it up pretty great. "For all the kids who were told you don't fit in, you do."

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

I'm curious, if you will allow me to ask you, you have done this podcast for years. I'm sure you see trends and I'm sure you see patterns. But I'm curious, is there a category of book that you feel like, Gosh, I wish someone would put this kind of book out there, because maybe the listeners are authors like me and will be inspired. So I'm curious what, what are the holes in the shelf that Heidi would love to see fabulous books to put there?

Well, thank you for asking that question. Yeah, this is actually the 20th year of the podcast, so I've literally been doing this for two decades.

Congratulations! That's incredible.

Oh yeah, thank you.

My dream is to have some kind of Jewish version of Elephant and Piggie, something that is that well crafted, that funny, that engaging for kids. Or something like the Lucy Cousins books about Maisy the Mouse. You know, I work in a preschool, and those books are perfect for very, very young kids. They are short and simple and gentle. They do have a slight arc of action, where for one moment there's tension. "Where did I put that teddy bear? Oh, there it is." And everything is fine again, but it creates that same structure of a story, just at a preschool level, or a baby level even, and it's just so well done. So I would like to see more Jewish books for very young kids that are as well crafted as that.

We don't get that many books for younger kids. You know, as I look at the books every year that are coming out, we get a lot of picture books, but the majority of them are not actually preschool friendly. They're good for elementary school. We do get a handful of board books. Now we're starting to grow the board book market for Jewish books, but there's sort of a gap between the baby books and the elementary school books. We need something for like those two to four year olds.

I'm thinking about Elephant and Piggie and how it's a read aloud. It's like a learn to read book, but it's so cleverly done that it doesn't feel like that.

That's right. And those actually work really well, those early readers, because they're simple and repetitive and often use humor to draw the kids in and keep them working at learning to decode the letters. They tend to be actually very good read alouds for young kids.

Mmm.

So I would expand it to say not just books aimed at those preschoolers, but books aimed at those early readers, because they often end up being good for the preschoolers as read alouds as well.

That's nice, yeah. And I think a lot about the difference between, like a picture book is more an adult sitting with a child in their lap and reading to the child the book, and then, like an easy reader is one that's more designed for, like the kid to start figuring out how to read it themselves. And then the pictures usually mirror the text in a way, to give them hints as to what the words are. Whereas a picture book, it can be the opposite.

That's true. In a picture book, the art doesn't have to support the text so directly.

Right, and sometimes you have humor because the art and the text are in conflict. And that's actually what makes it funny. Well, cool.

Yeah, so that's a gap that I would like to see filled.

Authors that are listening and illustrators, let's put on our creative wish hats and come up with something.

Yeah, please do. Thanks for that question.

Thank you for this opportunity to talk about all the books and all the things as always, it's just wonderful to spend time with you.

I love it. It's so much fun to talk with you. Lee Wind, thank you so much for speaking with me.

It's been totally My pleasure. Thank you, Heidi.

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] This is Adam Gidwitz, author of Max in the Land of Lies. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to the Hand in Hand school network in Israel, where they are doing the incredibly hard, vanishingly rare work of bringing Jewish and non Jewish Israelis together, and where I learned the concept of resilient listening. We need much more resilient listening in our world, rather than shouting down or deporting those with whom we disagree.

[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.