Download Otter for your meeting notes

THE BOOK OF LIFE - Orthodox Excellence | Otter.ai

THE BOOK OF LIFE - Orthodox Excellence

AJL Holly Zimmerman36min

Leah Scheier

00:00

[COLD OPEN] If you're watching Israeli TV then certainly there are plenty of rom coms, but I don't believe there's any rom com set in the US amongst orthodox couples.

Isaac Blum

00:07

We should make some notes right now and get started right when we get off the podcast!

Leah Scheier

00:11

Absolutely, I'm gonna get on that.

Heidi Rabinowitz

00:15

I love that, I can't wait to read it!

Heidi Rabinowitz

00:17

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Representation of Orthodox Judaism has been virtually non existent in traditionally published young adult fiction, but that is starting to change. Today we'll talk with Leah Sheier, author of The Last Words We Said published by Simon and Schuster, and Isaac Blum, author of The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, published by Philomel Books, an imprint of Penguin Random House. These two books offer layered and insightful portraits of well rounded Orthodox characters.

Heidi Rabinowitz

01:07

Isaac Blum and Leah Sheier, welcome to The Book of Life.

Isaac Blum

01:11

Thank you.

Leah Scheier

01:11

Thank you. It's great to be here.

Heidi Rabinowitz

01:14

I'd like each of you to give us the elevator pitch for your book. And also, please describe the stream of Judaism that best fits your characters. Isaac, why don't you go ahead?

Isaac Blum

01:26

Sure. So The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen is about an Orthodox Jewish teenager who finds himself in the center of some antisemitic violence. And he also finds himself dealing with all the usual things you have to deal with as a 15 year old, which is, you know, first love, sometimes hatred and betrayal, and also figuring out who you are, what you believe, and what you're going to do if those things are not what your family and community expected.

Heidi Rabinowitz

01:54

And Leah?

Leah Scheier

01:55

The Last Words We Said is a YA novel about four Jewish teenagers in Atlanta. They're modern Orthodox, but they have a wide range of relationships with their faith. It tells a story of Ellie and her three friends, and her friend Danny disappears. The story is told in past and present, as they deal with their grief and faith, and how it influences the way they deal with what happens to him.

Heidi Rabinowitz

02:22

Leah, you've written several YA novels, and Isaac, this is your debut. So what inspired each of you to create these particular books?

Isaac Blum

02:33

So I can go first. Between about 2016 and 2020, there was this sharp rise in antisemitic violence all over the United States. A lot of it was centered on people who look Jewish, often Orthodox Jews, because, you know, if you're looking for targets for antisemitic violence, it's much easier if you can identify them by sight. And there was one in particular that really moved me; there was a shooting at a kosher grocery store in December of 2019. That was just really horrific. And I started thinking about the people who'd been involved and whose lives had changed because of it. And I started writing my book just a couple of weeks later, centering a teenager at the middle of that tension and that violence.

Heidi Rabinowitz

03:18

Wow.

Leah Scheier

03:18

For me was a little bit different. I have written three novels before. One of them did feature a Jewish character but Judaism was not a central theme. I wanted to showcase her to bring my community into the popular media, which I've never seen it done before. I've never seen the modern Orthodox Jewish community portrayed in either shows or in books. Generally, when Jews are portrayed, they're either secular, or they're ultra Orthodox. And usually the ultra Orthodox are unfortunately portrayed negatively, I wanted to show a community where their Judaism and their faith is extremely important to them. But they also blend in a bit more, their dress is not as different, for instance, and they tend to embrace popular culture, and they go to university more, and so on, so forth. And so they are often a bit invisible. I just wanted to show Jews just living their lives with their faith, but at the same time, just having the same issues that everyone does.

Heidi Rabinowitz

04:16

There has been so little representation, as you say, of Orthodox Jews or even religious Jews generally in mainstream kidlit, including even in Jewish kidlit. But suddenly, it feels like we're seeing an uptick in that direction. We've seen Like No Other by Una La March, Aviva vs the Dybbuk by Mari Lowe, Honey and Me by Meira Drazen, as well as your books. So how do you account for this change?

Isaac Blum

04:45

There's a cynical part of me that would put a lot of it right at our mutual agent Rena Rosner, who's represented just a whole ton of new religious Jewish kidlit. But I think one of the things is... and then Leah alluded to this... was that when religious Jews are centered in mainstream stories, it's often portrayed exclusively in a negative light. You know, I'm thinking of the Netflix show Unorthodox, for example, you know, got me at least thinking about well, there should probably be some other representations of this, there should probably be other voices that aren't exclusively negative, because that's, just, I don't think a fair way to portray anybody's faith. So, you know, at least from the author perspective, there's perhaps a concerted effort to raise those voices more than there was in the past.

Leah Scheier

05:33

Yeah, it seems like every time an Orthodox character is portrayed, they're running away from their Judaism as fast as they can, and that's the only way to achieve happiness. And I wanted to show characters where that's not the case. One of my characters is actually questioning her faith, but she's doing it in a respectful manner and she's still close to her family, she still loves her friends and respects them. So I think it's possible to have debates about faith, while still maintaining a love for it and respect for people who believe differently than you.

Heidi Rabinowitz

05:59

Was it challenging to get your book published because of the Orthodox representation?

Leah Scheier

06:05

The truth is, I don't know. The way it works is your agent likes your book or doesn't like your book, in my case, thank God, she loved my book. And she pitches it to a bunch of different editors. And there's a wide range of reasons it's rejected, whether it was rejected because there were the religious aspect, they don't usually tell you those kinds of details. So all I did know is that Lisa Abrams, who picked it up, who loved it at Simon and Schuster, told me that that was one of the draws for her. So that's as much as I know, if people rejected it because of the religious aspect of it, I'm not sure. But I can say that I know, and Isaac's covered as well as in mine, the publishing company actually went out of their way to put that Orthodox Judaism front and center in a way that actually made me a little nervous for my book. Danny is wearing a kippah on the cover. And my fear was that teenagers looking at this would think of it as a religion book, it has nothing to do with them. And Rena, my agent, our agent, said to me, like you don't understand, I would have died to see a cover like this when I was teenager. So that made me take a step back and realize this is the whole point of why we're doing this.

Isaac Blum

07:13

Yeah, I think we're at a point in kidlit, where there's a push in general just to hear from different voices that haven't been heard from before. And I think in fact, it was the opposite from a sort of chilling effect. I think part of the reason that my book sold was because it was about an Orthodox Jew, because that was a space that had not been explored as much and a voice that publishing might have thought was important to hear. And I think, as an English teacher, maybe there's a little bit of bias in there, but I think that kids are interested in learning about other cultures. And certainly when I was a young Jew, I would have loved to see a wider range of Jewish voices. Often we grow up in Jewish communities where we are fairly insulated, not only from other communities, but even from other types of Jewish communities. You know, if we go to the same shul all our lives, that's the Judaism that we see, and having a wider range of Jewish voices is I think, A. enriching for young Jews and then B. enriching for for just the greater world who might be curious about Orthodox Jews walking down the street, seeing people who dress really differently from them, and wanting to see what that world is like.

Heidi Rabinowitz

08:18

You mentioned, the negative way that Orthodoxy is so often portrayed in popular media as an oppressive system that people want to escape. Why do you think that's the portrayal that we see so much?

Leah Scheier

08:34

It's a story. It's an it's an automatic story arc. I don't want to say that it's antisemitic, I don't, I don't want to believe that. I think it's probably more just, it's the story arc of somebody leaving a system that seems kind of backwards to you. And therefore, once they leave, they're sort of reborn into something you recognize, into someone that embraces what you embrace. So it's a story arc that kind of makes sense to, I think, a large amount of people. Plus, it's also when you portray an extreme of any society, that's clickbait right there. Everything in our media is kind of unfortunately, now pulling at both extremes. So I think that people enjoy those kinds of stories. And again, I don't have a problem with it. My issue is that that colors people's perception of Judaism and Orthodox Judaism, and it makes everything look totally negative even when that's not not the case at all, obviously.

Isaac Blum

09:35

It's a little bit sexy to have some kind of, you know, extreme thing to drive the story. And like she said, it's a natural plot to be running away from something that's chasing you, to be running away from an oppressor. We've been reading liberation stories for hundreds of years, and they'll continue to be stories that we like to read. There's also a piece where any orthodoxy, any very ritualized lifestyle is not going to be for everybody and thhose for whom it does not work may want to write the stories in a way that someone who might have their questions about it, but might still find that it works for them or that they find deep meaning in it, are less likely to be driven to put that story on paper or to reach out to someone to say, I have this really urgent story to tell. I wish that weren't the case. But perhaps for the same reason that we as readers are drawn to extreme stories, those who have the most adverse reactions are often those who feel the most urgency to tell the story. And like Leah said, I don't think that's a story that shouldn't be told, I just think there should be a wider diversity of stories from that perspective.

Heidi Rabinowitz

10:37

I love both of your answers, because the surface answer is, well, it's antisemitic. But that was such a more deeply layered, thoughtful response, so thank you for that. What particular elements of Orthodox life did you want to expose secular readers to? And what do you think might surprise them?

Leah Scheier

10:59

In my book, being shomer negiah was a big one, shomer negiah being the rules that members of the opposite sex, if they're not related, do not touch before marriage. That was a major plot point in my novel, and a lot of the conflict stems from that, because in the Modern Orthodox community, a lot of teens do choose to be shomer negiah, a lot of teens also choose not to be. And that clash, and that pull in both directions is quite difficult. And it's something that exists in different ways, I think, in secular societies.

Isaac Blum

11:30

For me, there were, were a number. The two that jump out at me, one of them is Talmud, which is such a huge part of a lot of Orthodox life, and really a whole way of communicating amongst Orthodox men in a way of sort of just existing and growing one's intellectualism, as a male in particular, although nowadays more progressively as anybody in an Orthodox space. But in a more secular world, you really aren't exposed to it, or you weren't historically, in the same way. So there was Torah, but this whole other part of the religion that's so important to Torah, Jews, to Orthodox Jews, just, you're not exposed to in the same way. So I wanted to put, some my favorite scenes to write were scenes from talmud discussions in the classroom, that I wanted to show, I mean not only to secular Jews, but also just to the greater world. And then I wanted to show the closeness that could exist in a family where you have certain rituals and traditions and a rhythm to life, that often doesn't exist in a less insular, more secular world, just a family rhythm and closeness and love, that sometimes even a physical closeness, that that might not exist as consistently in a secular household.

Heidi Rabinowitz

12:46

Cool. It's interesting that in both your books, well, rounded adults are an important part of the lives of the teen characters. In so many books, the adults just have to kind of be out of the way, right, in order for the kids to have agency. That's why there's so many orphans in children's literature, you know, or the parents are sort of just cardboard characters. They're there because they have to exist.

Isaac Blum

13:11

Yeah, Roald Dahl kills off all the parents on like the first page.

Heidi Rabinowitz

13:14

Yeah. So for the adults to actually play any kind of roll and not just be there to drive you to the mall, you know, but to actually have a relationship with the children is something that doesn't happen as frequently, I think. And I wondered if, if the Orthodox family dynamic was part of why that occurred here? Or just, you know, I just wondered about that.

Leah Scheier

13:36

Absolutely. I mean, I think that family is such an important driving force and the purpose for a lot of the traditions, and even the conflict that happens, you know, when a teenager who's religious, if she starts to question her faith, parents are right there, that's so much part of the fabric of our lives. But even more importantly, the rituals are all centered around family, as Shabbat, even kashrut, everything is family oriented as things that we do together. So if the parents were ghost-like figures, it wouldn't really be a typical, let's say, Orthodox family.

Isaac Blum

14:08

The parents in my book, the mother is fairly absent and the father is set up kind of as an antagonist. But I think that's for the exactly the reason that Leah is talking about that if you're going to question your faith and have questions about it, you're either going to go to your parents to ask questions about it, or they're certainly going to be involved. I would also put that beyond Orthodoxy. I think even when you read a lot of just Jewish kidlit in general, a family is always or often I would say, at the center of it in a way that perhaps isn't the case in non Jewish books, but it also just could be my pro Jewish bias. So I'm not certain that there's empirical evidence to support that.

Heidi Rabinowitz

14:44

Okay. You couldn't call either of these books a romance novel, but they both have romantic relationships as important drivers of their plots. And they both have covers that show a boy and a girl in a sort of flirty stance. So can you talk about that element of your stories?

Isaac Blum

15:02

There's an expectation if you're writing a young adult novel... and this is not universal and there are plenty of young adult novels, I think more recently that focus on platonic relationships... but there is a natural expectation that there will be some kind of romance or romantic interest. A. because I think it's an expectation of the genre and then B. that's something on many of their minds. So I think teenage readers want to see characters reflect their thoughts and their experiences. For me, I thought, you know, if I'm creating a story about a young man from a very insular world, encountering a completely different world, through his choice and through just the circumstances he's in, setting up a forbidden romance is a really, really good way to get the plot going on there, you know, and in a natural way that also includes that kind of crush first love element. So just from like a plot standpoint, if you're trying to set up something to sort of drive the plot, it's a useful tool, in addition to I think it being a realistic reflection of the teenage experience. I mean, you know, as Leah was saying, about, you know, this debate in the Modern or any Modern Orthodox teenager's mind about whether to be shomer negiah or not. It's, even if you're in an ultra Orthodox community, those thoughts are not ones that are going to go away, even if you do your best to put them aside in favor of your religion.

Heidi Rabinowitz

16:23

And I wanted to ask you, Isaac, to describe a little bit more because the romantic relationship is this worlds colliding thing within your story. Describe a little bit more what happens.

Isaac Blum

16:36

Yeah, so Hoodie -- Yehudah -- Hoodie Rosen sees a girl outside the window dancing, she's making like a TikTok video. He strikes up a conversation with her and they begin what is a friendship, they erase some antisemitic graffiti that they find in the cemetery of their town, and they build a friendship, that Hoodie would really like to be something more, and they have some miscommunication about what their relationship is, I think because they come from such different places.

Heidi Rabinowitz

17:07

Right, and she's not only not Orthodox, she's not even Jewish.

Isaac Blum

17:10

Right, kind of like Americana teenager that you're picturing in your mind that all-American kid, I tried to set her up as a foil to Hoodie's very religious, very insular space that perhaps a non Orthodox reader would see themselves in that character, maybe to see Hoodie through her eyes.

Heidi Rabinowitz

17:26

Okay, thanks. And then Leah, what were you going to say?

Leah Scheier

17:28

What I was going to say is that there's nothing to me as a YA writer, that's as interesting and as exciting as a first love. This is my fourth novel. And I would say, this is the fourth time that I've portrayed a first love. So to me, that just seems like a natural thing to drive a YA novel, all four of mine so far.

Isaac Blum

17:50

It's like Leah said, you only get to have the first love once. So maybe we just want to relive, you know, create another iteration of it for ourselves as we write our young adult novels

Leah Scheier

17:58

And even idealize it a little.

Isaac Blum

18:00

Yeah, exactly.

Heidi Rabinowitz

18:02

Is there such a thing as an Orthodox rom com?

Leah Scheier

18:04

Does it exist outside of our novels? Is that what...?

Heidi Rabinowitz

18:07

Yeah!

Leah Scheier

18:07

I don't think so.

Isaac Blum

18:09

It should!

Heidi Rabinowitz

18:10

If there was an Orthodox rom com, how would it be different from a secular rom com?

Isaac Blum

18:15

You know, certainly when I watched the show Shtisel, there are moments of it, whether they're intended to be funny or not, I certainly watched them as though they are rom com. For example, there's a time where one of the characters goes to meet a potential match at a hotel, and her name is Shira. And he successfully has a wonderful date, but with the wrong Shira, the joke of course, being that there are probably lots and lots of eligible young ladies named Shira in Jerusalem. And so he just happens to meet the wrong one. And he, he really wants her to be the match, but he has no way to contact her because the matchmaker doesn't have her number, he has the other Shira's number. It creates what I would describe as hilarity. You know, so to your point about parents being more involved, that's one way that an Orthodox rom com could definitely differ from a secular one where in this case, in addition to there being miscommunications amongst the people in the relationship, both of their parents are also involved as well as a matchmaker. It really leads to some fun stuff.

Leah Scheier

19:12

If you're watching Israeli TV, then certainly there are plenty of rom coms, but I don't believe there's any rom com set in the US amongst Orthodox couples.

Isaac Blum

19:20

We should make some notes right now and get started right when we get off the podcast.

Leah Scheier

19:24

Absolutely! I'm gonna get on that.

Heidi Rabinowitz

19:29

I love that. I can't wait to read it.

Heidi Rabinowitz

19:32

Isaac on the Teen Librarian Toolbox blog, you wrote a guest post about how a blurb for your book by author Vesper Stamper changed the way you saw your own book. She wrote that your novel "gives the common but often dismissed spiritual journey of many teens the respect it deserves." So can you talk about that?

Isaac Blum

19:53

Sure. When I was writing the book, I really set out to write about antisemitism and a particular brand of it that I was seeing around 2019, 2020, where you had established Orthodox communities who for different reasons had to move into places where they weren't welcomed by the usually non Jewish folk who are already in that place, and this tension that it created and the antisemitism that that kind of tension, if not handled properly, can lead to. And when I set up Hoodie as a character, I thought of his journey more as a cultural one: was he going to move more into more mixed diverse world? And I hadn't thought as much consciously anyway, about the spiritual journey he was on. That blurb, that quote got me thinking, I actually literally went back to read the book again, with that in mind. It got me thinking quite a bit about the difference between culture and religion. There's ways in which culture is immutable and there's nothing that you can do about it whatsoever. Like, I can't forget the Yiddish words that I know, I mean I could change my name, but like, my birth certificate and the certificate I have from my bris have English and Hebrew names on them that I'm not going to erase, you know, I'll still be Isaac Blum to somebody. Whereas belief, which is entirely internal, I can pray, but only I know if I mean it, or if I actually believe in what I'm saying. In some ways, is just as interesting, if not more, so a journey worth following.

Leah Scheier

21:19

Yeah. Speaking to what Isaac said, I think it's so important... we don't see very many teens that are considering their faith in teen literature, which I think is odd being that the majority of at least the American public say they believe in some faith, a majority of American public believes in God. And those questions start to be really important in those years. And yet, that's never really addressed in most YA, I feel like, so that should be reflected in YA novels.

Isaac Blum

21:45

I did Google it and I brought up a bunch of polls that show that about half of Americans say that religion is, quote, very important to them, end quote, and about half of them officially belong to a religious congregation. So there should probably be more reflection of the natural grappling that the teen is going to do, regardless of what direction they end up going with it, if they're thinking about it, and it's a part of their lives, and they have to figure out what they believe. I would love to see more of those stories.

Heidi Rabinowitz

22:11

Okay. Leah, you've written a number of YA novels but this is the first one portraying your own Jewish community. What made you decide to cover this topic now? And also, why was it important to you to create so much diversity of observance among your characters within the Modern Orthodox community?

Leah Scheier

22:31

So when I first started writing, I never had any intention... People in my own community asked me this all the time: Are you ever going to write about Jewish characters? And as I said, Your Voice Is All I Hear, my second novel did have Jewish characters and had a Jewish theme in it. But it was still in the background, it was not a major theme. And the reason for that is, I believe it's really important to be objective when you write, and I wasn't sure I could be objective about my own community. What I really dislike is when I read a book, and it's really obvious to me what the author's political or religious agenda is, I don't want it to be obvious from what the characters say, and the way things turn out for them. Because to me, that's preachy. It's that's not what I wanted. I wanted to know that I could portray my community without any bias showing. When I started to think about the plot for The Last Words We Said, the original idea was a teen girl dealing with the fact that her boyfriend, her first love, went missing and that she feels guilty but she can't tell anyone why. I realized that the voices that were speaking to me, her and her friends, and Danny the boy who goes missing, that they were all Jewish characters. And as I developed the story, all of these different voices had very different relationships with their faith. And most importantly, each character's relationship with their family was so vastly different. There's one teenager who's becoming much more religious. Ellie, who's the narrator, she's comfortable with her faith, although she wrestles with it a little bit here and there. And there's Rae who's rejecting it outright, while still trying to maintain a healthy relationship with her family and her friends. I found that I loved each and every one of them. And I never felt like one was wrong, or one was right. That's when I realized, yes, I can actually write about my own community in an unbiased way, with love and respect, but also recognizing the fact that within my own community, there are people who approach their faith very, very differently.

Heidi Rabinowitz

24:24

It's so important to let readers see that. I think that is maybe the first time we've seen such a thing, you know, that much difference within one community.

Heidi Rabinowitz

24:36

Isaac, the title of your interview on Bookpage, is "How Isaac Blum Created the Funniest YA Narrator of the Year," and yet this story is not a comedy. So can you talk about the role of humor in your book?

Isaac Blum

24:50

Yes, I can. To be honest, when I write, the first question I ask myself is, is this funny? When I pick up a book that doesn't make me laugh I tend to like knock off a star on like a five star scale. I think my outlook on the world is a fairly negative one. There's just so many awful things in the world. And when I pick up something to escape or even to reflect the world back at me, I want there to be some levity in it, even if it's not like a laugh out loud humor, because otherwise, it's too much. So one of my initial goals was for it to be amusing. And the first scenes that came into my head were ones that I thought were silly and fun, and then I built the tragic stuff in around that. It's not that there was some like very clear, conscious decision, okay, well I should balance humor with all this heavy stuff because otherwise it might be too much, it was more like, let's set out to write a funny book but I have these other things to say about antisemitism and violence that I'm gonna stick in there anyway. And hopefully, that balances out in a way that doesn't jar the reader too much. I think the humor is a good way to deal with the awful stuff in the world, there's nothing that you can do about it. I don't think it's a lack of reverence. I think it's like a healthy way to help yourself deal with tragedy and awful things happening around you. And so those were things that I think should always be allowed to exist together, and I'm going to continue to put together.

Heidi Rabinowitz

26:05

The two of you had been accepted to do a presentation at the Association of Jewish Libraries conference this year, but then you weren't able to attend. So is there anything beyond what we've already talked about, that you would have shared in that presentation?

Isaac Blum

26:22

We've touched on the main points that I really wanted to discuss, which was diversity in Orthodox representation, and just seeing more books centering religious Jews. Opening that a little more widely to the idea of just following that spiritual journey of teens more closely in literature-- and not just teens, there's no reason for middle grade books not to do the same thing, or even picture books. The other thing that I would have gone a little bit more in depth on in a presentation was just looking at other examples that did exist beyond our two novels, looking at books that look at that spiritual journey, but through different religions and looking at what can we learn as writers, as readers, you know, and how can we sort of take a look forward at the future of children's literature through that lens, and through the examples that we already have?

Heidi Rabinowitz

27:11

Well, do you want to share the examples?

Isaac Blum

27:13

One of the books that I was going to talk about is Erin Hahn's Never Saw You Coming, as she puts it, a book for and about church kids. And as a Jew, I don't actually exactly know what the connotation of church kids is, until I read that book. And I see a journey of faith. And in fact, some of the same questions that I saw in his book about certain expectations of what a teenage relationship should be and shouldn't be, what physicality is allowed, what is not, so a world that I wasn't familiar with, but talking about some of those exact same questions and following the same journey, just think about that window. It was a window for me into a completely different world. And at the same time, very similar to the Jewish world also very, very different.

Heidi Rabinowitz

27:54

All right, Leah, was there anything else that you would have said in that conference presentation that we haven't already talked about?

Leah Scheier

28:03

What concerns me is that religiosity in general is portrayed by the media is something negative, not just ultra Orthodox Judaism, but most faiths, typically lumped together with ultra right wing thought and political beliefs that are seen as very backwards, etc. That's not the truth. As there is in my novel, there is a wide range of belief within a religious community, a wide range of political affiliations within a religious community. Just because one is religious doesn't necessarily mean they support a particular candidate et cetera, et cetera. But you won't see that if you go on Twitter, if you read the news, to be honest with you. So I think that it's really important to show teenagers, don't make assumptions. Just because we're religious, we have many different viewpoints on the same topics that you have many different viewpoints.

Heidi Rabinowitz

28:59

Okay! It's Tikkun Olam Time. So I want to invite each of you to describe what action you would like to call listeners to take to help heal the world.

Isaac Blum

29:11

So I thought about this in relation to my novel, and also in relation to the teenagers that I teach every day, who are I think, much more open to the world around them and to people who are different from them than the older people. And so what I ask people to do is, next time you encounter somebody who is really different from you, so long as it is appropriate, reach out to them and be open to learning from them in a way that you might otherwise not have been willing to do in the past. Just think about their perspective, where they come from, and try to learn something from the differences that you have.

Leah Scheier

29:50

I wanted to highlight an organization that I think is an amazing, one based here in Israel. It's called Save a Child's Heart. It's a charity that will bring children, babies up through teenagers, from countries where life saving heart operations for congenital heart disease are not available. They bring them to Israel and perform those operations here. They watch over them, they take care of them while they recover, then eventually when they're well enough, they fly back to their home country. It's a wonderful organization. And if you're looking for someplace to donate: Save a Child's Heart, you can't find a better cause.

Isaac Blum

30:24

And I would encourage listeners to repair the world Leah's way. Heart transplant is, I would say should take precedence over intercultural understanding.

Leah Scheier

30:33

I think they're both very important.

Isaac Blum

30:35

Sure.

Heidi Rabinowitz

30:36

They go together very nicely.

Leah Scheier

30:38

I mean, what's the point of a beating heart if you're closed minded, right?

Isaac Blum

30:40

Right, alright, that's fair. I was gonna say you can't open your mind if you, if you don't have the life saving transplant first, so...

Leah Scheier

30:48

That's true, I guess. The merging of the physical and the spiritual, absolutely.

Heidi Rabinowitz

30:54

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

Isaac Blum

31:01

I'm toying around in the next book of having Hoodie do a series of Daf Yomi videos essentially, like talmud explainer videos, but in his irreverent way, probably with some swear words, so as to make them like, really edgy. So he's still engaging with space, but in a more openly edgy way,

Heidi Rabinowitz

31:20

I'm excited to hear you're working on a sequel!

Isaac Blum

31:23

It's not a sequel, I was working on another book about-- another Jewish book. In this one, I've got an Orthodox character sort of grappling with the non Jewish world. And one of the things that was interesting to me, and I'd like to see more of, are Jews from different religious backgrounds, encountering each other and thinking about what it means to be Jewish, and how much of that is practicing their religion, and how much of that is cultural? And where is the line between a Torah Jew and non Torah Jew? And does that line need to exist? So I'm writing another young adult novel that focuses on Jews and Judaism, but in a slightly different lens. And so he is not really a character in the book as of now, but he exists in the background because the narration is from a character in the same general community.

Heidi Rabinowitz

32:07

Excellent. I'm so glad to hear that.

Heidi Rabinowitz

32:09

Isaac Blum, Leah Scheier, thank you so much for speaking with me today.

Leah Scheier

32:14

Thank you. I really enjoy talking about our books and about the subject in general.

Isaac Blum

32:18

Thank you so much for having us. This was great.

Bridget Hodder

32:20

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi, I'm Bridget Hodder, author of The Button Box and the forthcoming book, The Promise, and I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. And I'd like to dedicate this episode of the podcast to my beloved grandmother, Rachel Vessi de Sidelio, the model for Granny Buena in The Button Box, and also to my co-author of The Button Box, Fawzia Gilani-Williams. I love you both. I'm grateful for you both. Kaminos de leche i miel.

Sarah Aroeste

32:59

Hi I'm Sarah Aroeste, author of Buen Shabat Shabbat Shalom and the forthcoming Mazel Bueno. And I'd like to dedicate the next episode of The Book of Life podcast to my cousin, Rachel Nahmias, who is the last person in my family to be born speaking Ladino as her first language, and she just turned the ripe young age of 105 years old last week, so I want to wish her a happy birthday and to dedicate this episode to her.

Bridget Hodder

33:32

Que viva!

Heidi Rabinowitz

33:33

[MUSIC, OUTRO] Say hi to Heidi at 561-206-2473 or bookoflifepodcast@gmail.com Check out our Book of Life podcast Facebook page, or our Facebook discussion group Jewish Kidlit Mavens. We are occasionally on Twitter too @bookoflifepod. 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. Additional support comes from the Association of Jewish Libraries, which also sponsors our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books, a show about Jewish fiction for adults. You'll find links for all of that and more at BookofLifepodcast.com Our background music is provided by the Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band. Thanks for listening and happy reading!

Sheryl Stahl

34:47

[MUSIC, PROMO] It is an exciting month over at Nice Jewish Books. In honor of the new year and my first anniversary as a podcaster, I will be posting two episodes in October. The first is a contemporary mystery set in England. Journalist Shanna Regan was researching historical plaques for the town news magazine when she encounters fake plaques. Instead of heaping praise on a former resident, the plaques told of a person's malicious actions and a statement that if they don't repent, they will never rest in peace. With a stalker, a murky family history, and new plaques appearing, will Shanna to be able to sort everything out before another person is murdered? Listen to my conversation with Victoria Goldman about The Redeemer. Then later in October, join me for my discussion with Shaunna Edwards and Alyson Richmond about their book The Thread Collectors. In this historical novel based on both their familes' histories, we follow two couples. Jacob and Lily are a Jewish couple living in New York, while Stella and William are both slaves in New Orleans. Both men are fighting for the Union, and they meet and bond over their love of music. Both women are use their sewing skills to help the war effort and their men while they're fighting. But while their lives should have run parallel to each other, they often diverge in some shocking Ways. Find these and other conversations at www.JewishLibraries.org/NiceJewishBooks.

00:0000:00