THE BOOK OF LIFE - Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop

10:46PM Feb 1, 2025

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Joshua Levy

A.R. Vishny

Heidi's Husband

Keywords:

Finn and Ezra

time loop

bar mitzvah

Jewish kidlit

Sydney Taylor Award

patience

character evolution

Jewish diversity

economic diversity

Doctor Who

Tikkun Olam

book reviews

Star Wars

time travel

middle grade

[COLD OPEN] Hi. This is Josh Levy. I am the author of Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. I am so happy to be joining you on the Book of Life podcast. I would like to dedicate my episode to you, Heidi, and the other moderators of our Jewish Kidlit Mavens community. Thank you so much for everything you and everybody else do to hold up our little world.

Aw,thank you!

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly. I'm Heidi Rabinowitz. Today's interview is part of the 2025 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour. Winning authors and illustrators are being interviewed on various blogs, podcasts, and Bookstagram accounts from February 10th to 14th, 2025, and of course, the interviews will still be there for you to enjoy at any time. I had the luck to interview my friend Josh Levy about his middle grade Sydney Taylor Honor Book, Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. We had such a fun conversation, and I can't wait for you to hear it! [END MUSIC]

Josh Levy, welcome back to The Book of Life.

Thank you, Heidi. I am really delighted to be here.

I'm delighted to have you. Last time you were here to talk about The Jake Show, and now I've got you here to talk about Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop. So tell us what it's about.

Sure. Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop, in case you couldn't tell from the title, is about two kids named Finn and Ezra. They are reliving their bar mitzvah weekend over and over, Friday through Sunday. They do not know each other, they inhabit different communities, but are having their Sunday bar mitzvah parties in the same New Jersey hotel on the same Sunday. Eventually, they find each other, realize that they are both trapped in a loop, and team up to break out. They have a lot of zany adventures, but I personally think of the book more like fairy tale about the value of time.

What inspired this story?

I suppose I could tell you something overly meaningful, [HEIDI: LAUGHTER] but I think I really do feel so strongly about this book, and I'm so proud of it, and I do think it's meaningful. But the original nugget of the book is probably my great love of time loop stories, and always wanting to try my hand at one. And I had thought about it and thought about it, and eventually I married that love of time loop stories to the idea of setting it in a bar mitzvah. And once I found my way to the characters of Finn and Ezra and understood what I thought their journeys could and should be, put that all together in the pot, and this book came out the other side.

Fair enough. This is your second Sydney Taylor Honor, because you got an honor for The Jake Show in 2024, and your first National Jewish Book Award.

Yeah, I am so over the moon, so grateful. It's really meaningful. I -- no surprise to you, probably, Heidi -- love Jewish books. They live at the center of me, and to be able to write books that are meaningfully Jewish, involve Jewish characters, themes, and to be recognized in that world is the most special thing for me. Really, it's a privilege to be spoken among the ranks of other books that I so admire and love.

A big Mazel Tov.

Thank you.

Why is a bar mitzvah a good time or a bad time to be trapped in a time loop?

It's so perfect for the agonizing nature of just being 12 and 13 and having to relive that over and over, even if this was not a weekend that comes with so much pressure and attention, pressure to perform, pressure to do well, family pressure, friend pressure. You know, I am not trying to underscore that kind of theme out there that sometimes lives in b'nai mitzvah stories, which is, oh, you know, it's this moment to be resented and to be skipped over. What I'm trying to do is the exact opposite, right? To help my characters and my readers appreciate -- it's so hard, it's so tough, but try when you can, to kind of live in that moment. It's amazing that this extraordinary ritual happens at such a critically kind of awful time to be a kid.

There have been a lot of time loops and time travel in Jewish kidlit recently. Why do you think that is?

Okay. Heidi, you can see my face. I know listeners can't. I'm so excited and glad you asked me this question! I have to confess to you, Heidi, that I've already listened to your Sydney Taylor roundup with Aviva, the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, and you and her discussed this. Why are there so many Jewish time stories, time loops, non time loops? And I have been thinking about that question ever since, so I'm really primed to talk to you all about it.

You know, there are currently quite a number of Jewish time stories, both kidlit and non kidlit. But it's really more than that. It's Russian Doll, which you and Aviva mentioned, but the like canonical biblical Groundhog Day text... I don't necessarily think of it as a Jewish story, but Harold Ramis, who directed it and co-wrote it: Jewish. You know, Palm Springs, which I love, Andy Samberg. Dara Horn's Eternal Life is one of my all time favorite novels. And as is included in Finn and Ezra, Rebbe Akiva, and that crazy story, literally in the Talmud, tells a time travel tale of a kind. So it's everywhere. And the question is, why do we seem to feel compelled to tell these time travel adjacent stories?

And so I'm going to give you my theory, and you'll tell me if you think it holds water, or if it's kind of too much.

Great!

My theory is that whoever you are, whatever corner of the Jewish community you inhabit, whether you're connected to Jewish community and history or not, in the water of who we are, is being the heirs to a very, very long tradition. Right? Like a people with a very long history, and maybe when you like, live with time, like we've lived with time, you wrestle with it and it knocks you down, and you overcome it, right? It becomes a kind of character in the texture of your existence. You know that obvious cliche about how literally the city of New York is sometimes itself like a character in all these books and movies set in New York, probably because, like a lot of writers live and breathe the city themselves, and it just comes out in their work. And maybe for Jewish writers, it's a little bit the same, right? So time isn't just a dimension, but it's a kind of character that can be cruel, and mischievous, and and provide grace. Now I'm not saying that Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop is contending with all that, like Dara Horn's Eternal Life, or even that one short story in the Talmud about Rabbi Akiva is contending with all that. But you know, it's in the water and it comes out. That is my treatise response to your question that I have been burning to talk to you about, and I didn't know you would give me the question, but I'm so happy you did.

I love that. That was like a little TED talk, right there.

Amazing.

[LAUGHTER] That was great.

You can see me, I had to restrain myself from going on even longer. So there you go.

No, I love it. The idea that time is itself a character of a very Jewish nature, that's great. I should have made a list of all of the time travel books. Off the top my head, I know there's one called Time and Time Again that came out last year, a YA book with a time loop in it. Actually, Dara Horn's new book, her graphic novel for kids, One Little Goat is a time travel story.

That's right, a time travel story. And Rachel Lynn Solomon's YA time loop.

Right!

There are Jewish elements there too.

See You Yesterday, I think it's called?

Yes!

Right, that's a time loop as well. And I like that these are time loops where, usually somebody is trapped with somebody else, so that they're not just suffering all alone.

I really like that element.

Yeah.

At first, when I sat down to write a version of what became Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop, the poor kid was alone. Then I watched Palm Springs again and realized that it was so much better, so much funnier and more enjoyable for the protagonist, to have two of them.

This has inspired me to create a list of Jewish time travel books. I'm gonna put a list together and post it along with this episode.

I love that idea, and I really am excited to see it!

What are the technical considerations in writing a time loop story that are different from working out a normal linear plot?

They are many and they are exhausting, and I don't think I quite understood how challenging they would be. You have to loop the characters over and over again in the same place, in the same period, and you have to do it in a way that structurally like loops them, but also doesn't loop them in the sense that the plot has to move linearly. The characters have to evolve in whatever way that they will. It can't be repetitive, even though, intrinsically, that's exactly what it is. And you have to thread that needle. It was very difficult. I'm very proud of the book. I hope, I think I threaded it well. A lot of pieces to move around and the boo changed as it evolved.

Your earlier book, The Jake Show, which we talked about on the podcast in August 2023, also featured Jewish characters who came from very different Jewish backgrounds, as do Finn and Ezra. Why is it important to you to showcase the diversity of Jewish people?

Thank you for the question. I think, for me, there's the big answer and then there's the small answer. The big answer is, I just think it's important. We are diverse, we are dynamic, we're alive in a lot of different ways. And I think it's important for all the folks who live in the different versions of our communities to have an opportunity to see themselves in characters and stories. And I think it's important for folks on the outside to be able to see us for the varied people that we are.

That's my big answer, and the small answer is, it's me. Probably when we talked about The Jake Show, I told you that it's my family. My parents are divorced since I was a kid, and I have one side that's very religious, one side that isn't, and I've loved all of them, and it's important to me to be able to show different aspects of that. In The Jake Show, it was one character, but then you saw, at least in some of the folks in his world, particularly the step parents, that they were able to have these relationships with each other, that they were able to kind of cross pollinate in a non adversarial way, that we can get along, we can communicate. And that was a feature of The Jake Show, but not a central one. For Finn and Ezra, they're not exploring what it's like for different characters from different Jewish communities to go on an adventure together, right? They just are, and it's never really a thing. Right? There's a little friction in Finn learning to navigate some of the things that Ezra does and some of the practices that he keeps, but they're both cool with each other. And that's been the experience in my life, it really is possible. When you look at our kidlit world, it really is possible. And I like being able to convey that in a book.

That's great. I think that this is a theme that is fairly new in kidlit. You know, I've been dealing with this genre for a few decades, and I think it's only the last few years that we get books that are exploring the fact that Jews come in a variety of flavors, not just racially diverse, but also diverse in terms of practice. It's a new trend, and it's a very positive one. So I'm happy that you're contributing to that.

Thank you. I'm gonna say one more thing. It's an aspect of the diversity of our communities that is important to me, and you can see it in The Jake Show, you can see it in Finn and Ezra, and it's our economic diversity. Particularly for bar and bat mitzvah stories, b'nai mitzvah stories, I think nearly every bar mitzvah, bat mitzvah I've ever seen on a screen and read about in a book, they are always these, like, very rich giant party people. I'm not a very rich giant party person. My family isn't. I wanted to explore that, in both books in different ways, and particularly if I was gonna tackle a bar mitzvah, it was not going to be some giant blowout, even though, you know, those can be fun stories too.

That's a good point. Thank you.

So I listened to The Children's Book Podcast with Matthew Winner when he had you on, and you talked about the importance of patience. Patience is something you would need a lot of if you were stuck in a time loop. So can you tell me about your relationship with patience, or how patience plays into the story?

Sure. When Matthew and I were chatting, patience came up more as a tool in the writer's tool belt, how to be patient with your stories. But the reality is, I think that Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop, the heart of it is about patience, about learning to slow down and appreciate what's in front of you, what you have, and not be too eager to move on to tomorrow. I'm sitting here in my basement and you can't see what I'm looking at, but what I'm looking at are three posters that I absolutely love, Star Wars posters. And one of the posters is Luke Skywalker, like staring off into the sunset. And there's that line in Empire Strikes Back, where Yoda chastises Luke for always looking to the horizon, never focusing on where he is, the present. And I think, to a degree that is both Finn and Ezra's challenge and the one that they really need to overcome.

I love that you're using Star Wars as kind of a sacred text here.

Oh, Star Wars is very much a sacred text in my house.

So this is reminding me of a movie that I really love. It's called About Time. It's. Bill Nighy is in it. It's a time loop story in which the ability to repeat days and sort of correct them and try to get it right next time, becomes the appreciation of each day and how you should savor every moment of it. So it all kind of fits together, that time loops are maybe frustrating because they're repetitive, and maybe you could find it boring, but on the other hand, it gives you a chance to really drill down into each of those moments.

100%. I absolutely need to see that movie now. And I think I am both very lucky but also unlucky to have never been trapped in a time loop, right, like there's something about it that's a curse, but there's also something about it that's a blessing. I say, as if it's real! [LAUGHTER]

Right! So let's nerd out a little bit more. In your interview with Matthew Winner on The Children's Book Podcast, you talked a bit about Doctor Who, one of my favorite shows.

Sure.

And Matthew said his favorite episode was Vincent and the Doctor in which they meet Vincent van Gogh. They call him Vincent van Gogggghhh in their British manner. So I wanted to ask you now whether you have any particular favorites, or if there were any episodes that you feel were inspirational as you created this book.

You know, I don't know if there's any particular episode or idea that inspired Finn and Ezra's Bar Mitzvah Time Loop, except to the extent that all of Doctor Who has really helped teach me and helped me further understand that science fiction, fantasy can really work so so well as a kind of enormous story, as a vehicle for a tiny fairy tale, like, like, one small thing that you can glean from these very giant, structural, speculative tales.

I don't know if you listened to my episode when I interviewed Emi Watanabe Cohen, but she's also a Doctor Who fan. And so I left a little bit of it in the episode, and then I took the rest and I put it at the end, for any nerds who wanted to stick around and hear the rest of the discussion. So I'll probably do that again. [LAUGHTER]

I love it. You have to collect all the Doctor Who fans over the course of Book of Life episodes, and then we have to have, like, one giant ...

...have a panel discussion or something!

Yeah, a panel discussion about Doctor Who and Jewish kidlit.

That would be great. All right, I guess we should move on. It's Tikkun Olam Time. What action would you like to call listeners to take to help heal the world?

Okay. I know that there are so many things that we can and should be doing to heal the world. My answer is going to be very tiny and kind of selfish and mostly bookish, because I think Jewish kidlit, we need exposure and recognition. And here's my confession. I Josh, middle grade author that I am, I have reviewed shamefully few books online. It is truly embarrassing. I've just done a bad job. Goodreads, Amazon, like all the places. And I'm gonna be cheeky for a second and say that the reason I haven't is because I don't have a lot of time. That's true: writing, day job, kids. But it's more than that.

I know my instinct has been this, like perfect as the enemy of the good. I've had for a long time, this counterproductive instinct to do more than just review a book online. I've, like, felt the need to say something novel and insightful, to do a Heidi/ Josh Book of Life podcast on like, someone's Amazon page. And I think that that's been the totally wrong approach. My epiphany and tikkun olam prompt is to review the books you care about. And so I am releasing myself from the burden of feeling like I need to be Siskel and Ebert on Goodreads. [LAUGHTER] And so should all of you. Just find a book you love, rate it and write "this is great," or "I love that," and then do another one. And I am really committing myself to you, Heidi, and you can hold me accountable to trying to do exactly that.

I love that. It's so practical, and it's very good advice about book reviewing and about everything, really. Like, that perfect is the enemy of the good. It's good enough! If you just want to give it stars, that's good too, right?

Yeah. And so, like, it could take me 10 seconds. I've agonized over the essay I think I have to write, and then I just don't do anything. That's no use to anyone.

Right. Much better to just say, "Hey, I loved it" and leave some stars.

Loved it. Leave some stars.

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

Here are interview questions that have nothing to do with the subject, that I would love to be asked. Things like, can you put in order of your favorites, all the Star Wars movies? What are my top 50 favorite Bob Dylan songs?

I love books. I love thinking about Jewish books. If you asked me, what is my favorite Jewish book, like, what is the one that means the most to me? The answer to that is As a Driven Leaf: early mid-ish 20th century novel that fictionalizes the lives of the second century Talmudic rabbis. It means a lot to me. A little bit of my love for that book and my gratitude to that book helping me through a lot of the things I wrestled with, particularly in the character of Akiva, who is present in As a Driven Leaf. I feel like I've had the opportunity to give back a smidge by having my chapter in Finn and Ezra revolve around that little tale of time travel into Akiva's classroom. Thank you for asking me the question of what question I want to be asked, and you know, I'm just grateful all around.

I'm glad I asked it. That was an interesting answer.

This interview is part of the 2025 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour, which showcases the winners and Honor Books and Notable Books that got Sydney Taylor recognition this year, with author interviews on many different blogs. So I'm wondering which interviews are you excited to read?

It's cheating to say all of them. [HEIDI: LAUGHTER] I'm going to say one very specific thing, which is, I've not read it or seen the illustrations of The Girl Who Sang. I don't know that it was meaningfully on my radar, frankly, before it won the middle grade award, and I'm so delighted that it did. I was listening to Aviva when she presented the award, and also on your podcast, and I bought the book, and I'm really looking forward to engaging with it. You know, I have a 10 year old daughter. She is really only kind of beginning, on the margins, to approach the subject of the Holocaust. And... sorry, I'm feeling like a little emotional even, even talking about it, but the notion of a book that is contemporary in the way that this book is, being out in the world as a really good entry point for a kid who is interested in the subject and who might be able to engage, is something that I'm really looking forward to. And I will certainly devour whatever interviews that you all work up in the blog tour, and look forward to just reading it and sharing it with my daughter and kids.

Great. And the blog tour is taking place February 10th through 14th, 2025. The schedule is at jewishlibraries.org/blog, and of course, the interviews will still be there after the 14th, so you can read them as they come out or at your leisure.

Where can listeners learn more about your work?

Social media places @JoshuaSLevy. I have a website, JoshuaSimonLevy.com.

Josh Levy, thank you so much for speaking with me and Mazel Tov again on the many awards your book has won.

Thank you, Heidi.

[MUSIC, ANNOUNCEMENT] If you want to hear the rest of Josh's and my conversation about Doctor Who, Be sure to listen all the way to the end, after the credits. In the meantime, here's a dedication from my next guest, A.R. Vishny, who will be joining the podcast soon to talk about Night Owls, which just won Sydney Taylor gold.

[MUSIC, DEDICATION] Hi. This is A.R. Vishny, and I'm the author of Night Owls. I'll be joining you soon on The Book of Life podcast. I'd like to dedicate my episode to Jewish Bookstagram. I am so grateful for the support from online Jewish communities at large, and particularly these accounts over there on Instagram have done such a wonderful job at creating a fun and welcoming space for Jewish readers and writers online.

[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. [END MUSIC]

[EXTENDED DOCTOR WHO CONVERSATION] What are my favorite Doctor Who episodes? Now I'm just gonna be a giant nerd. The episodes that mean the most to me are somewhere in the David Tennant, Matt Smith run. Really love The Doctor's Daughter episode. I also have a very soft spot in my heart for Amy and Rory's whole journey, particularly when Rory waits as like, what, like a Centurion for some number of generations. I also really, really love toward the very end of their run -- no spoilers for Doctor Who episodes that are years in the past -- when they end up together. It's an ending that gives them many years. I don't know that I have any one favorite episode, but those runs mean a lot to me, and I think I was evolving as a person, particularly when I was watching those seasons. And I really still love them, and I'll continue to watch basically every season of Doctor Who that ever comes out.

What are your favorite episodes of Doctor Who?

So I started watching in the classic era, so I've got a classic and a new favorite. I thought about this because I knew I was going to be talking to you about this topic. From the classic era, my favorite is The Pyramids of Mars, which now, because it plays into a recent episode with Ncuti Gatwa, it's sort of got renewed popularity. But it's been my favorite for years. And then from the modern era, a pretty recent one, Wild Blue Yonder, which is from that little interim where David Tennant came back with Catherine Tate for just a few episodes.

Such a special little run. Yeah.

So amazing. And the reason I think that I love both of those so much is because of the relationships, because of the friendship that you see between the Doctor and the companion, and how you can really feel that it's a true friendship. Both of those episodes really showcase that. I love the time travel, but I'm also really there for the relationships.

Yes, and I totally agree with that. Finn and Ezra, similarly, I love the timey-wimey-ness of it, but it's about the, it's about the characters and how they grow together.

Now, you have to tell me a little bit about that classic favorite episode of yours. I've not really dabbled too much in the classic era.

Oh, okay! The Pyramids of Mars is Tom Baker, the fourth Doctor, and the companion is Sarah Jane Smith. She's from the 70s slash 80s, and they're back in sort of Victorian times. It's got a whole Egyptology thing going on.

[FROM A DISTANCE] It's Mick Jagger's house.

Oh, yeah, and my husband is reminding me the place that's filmed is Mick Jagger's mansion.

I love that! Also, I would be absolutely game for an episode of The Book of Life with Heidi and her husband.

[LAUGHTER] Okay, that's something to think about.

Just saying.

So in this episode, there's Sutekh, who, you know, we think of as an Egyptian god. Turns out he was an alien, and the other gods trapped him and imprisoned him because he was so evil, and now he's trying to get loose. That's basically the story in a nutshell.

And then old Sutekh gets loose again last year or whatever.

Right, and then recently, they revived him. And what was also amazing about that was, the same guy voiced the character, and he's like 90 something now!

That's cool.

And he sounded exactly the same, and he has that same chilling voice. That was really great.

Love it. Sign me up also for Heidi's Book of Doctor Who podcast as well. Now I'm just pitching you different podcast ideas. [LAUGHTER]