THE BOOK OF LIFE: Change and Continuity: Kar-Ben Publishing

1:04PM Dec 17, 2024

Speakers:

Heidi Rabinowitz

Joni Sussman

Fran Greenman-Schmitz

Keywords:

Joni Sussman

Fran Greenman-Schmitz

Kar-Ben Publishing

Jewish children's books

Sydney Taylor Award

Lerner acquisition

digital illustrators

ethnic diversity

non-political Israel books

transgender picture book

manuscript selection

children's content

Jewish identity

book accessibility

Association of Jewish Libraries

[COLD OPEN] Working with Kar-Ben, I know that I have tremendous shoes to fill. So many people have wonderful relationships with Joni, and I hope that I'm approachable and friendly, and I just would like to be part of this family.

[MUSIC, INTRO] This is The Book of Life, a show about Jewish kidlit, mostly, I'm Heidi Rabinowitz, and 2025 is my 20th year of podcasting! To celebrate that anniversary, I've started a Substack where you can receive podcast show notes, a transcript of each episode, and Jewish kidlit news right in your inbox. Sign up at BookOfLifePodcast.com.

Appropriately, as we kick off this podcast's 20th anniversary year, today, we are going to think about change and continuity. We say goodbye to an old friend, Joni Sussman, who is retiring after 20 years of leading the Jewish children's publishing company Kar-Ben, and will say hello to a new friend, Fran Greenman Schmitz, who will be taking up the reins at Kar-Ben. I've been in this business a long time, so I remember when Joni started at Kar-Ben. This is her fourth live conference interview on the show, and of course, it's Fran's first. Joni is the winner of the Sydney Taylor Body of Work Award for her many contributions to the field of Jewish kidlit.

To give you some context, the oldest publisher of Jewish books in English is the Jewish Publication Society, founded in 1888, but Kar-Ben is the oldest publisher to exclusively focus on Jewish children's books. It was founded 50 years ago in 1974, so happy anniversary to Kar-Ben! Now there are half a dozen presses that exclusively publish Jewish children's books, but Kar-Ben is the Bubbe of them all. I spoke with Joni and Fran at the 2024 Association of Jewish Libraries conference to hear all about this exciting time of transition. [END MUSIC]

So I'm here with Joni Sussman and Fran Greenman-Schmitz at the Association of JewishLibraries conference. And first of all, Mazel Tov to both of you. Mazel Tov, Joni, on retiring from your illustrious career at Kar-Ben, and also for getting the Sydney Taylor Body of work Award. And Fran, Mazel Tov on your new job at Kar-Ben. First, I want to know just a little bit of history about Kar-Ben. Can you fill us in?

Sure, so I have been at Kar-Ben for 20 years. It's hard to believe. When Lerner acquired Kar-Ben from the original founders, they were looking for somebody to run this very special imprint, Jewish children's books. And I knew the Lerner family, and I bumped into Harry Lerner at a Minnesota book conference, and he talked to me about this new imprint, and I was very excited to come and really develop this. And Lerner had the resources to create these beautiful books, full color, and my goal was to have these Jewish children's books be as beautiful and wonderful as any books that they would pick up off the shelf. And that was really special, not just two-color paperbacks, but really full color, beautiful, hard covered, jacketed books that Jewish kids could see themselves in and really be proud of.

Yes, and before Lerner acquired Kar-Ben, it actually already had a history as an independent press. I remember that Judye Groner and Madeline Wikler had come to our conference, and they actually preceded you in getting the Body of Work Award when they retired, as a thank you for all they had done for Jewish children's literature. Can you tell us any of that history?

Yes. And so Madeline and Judye started -- and I'm still in touch with them, by the way, they live in the DC area -- and they started Kar-Ben when their husbands were in law school, and they had young kids at home, and there really weren't Jewish books for kids at all. And so they decided that, just out of their homes, they would create a couple of books. And the first one was My Very Own Haggadah, which is still in print now all these 50 years later. And they started to just create these books because there was a need for them. And they called the company Kar-Ben after their two kids, Karen and Ben. And that's how Kar-Ben came to be. And also, once upon a time, in the olden days, there used to be something called carbon copies...

Yes, that's right! It used to be called Kar-Ben Copies, I forgot!

Which was a sort of a pun from C, A, R, B, O, N, carbon copies, right? And they called it Kar-Ben Copies. When Lerner took it over, we just made it Kar-Ben Publishing. But it has a long and lovely history going way, way back to a time when there really weren't Jewish children's books.

Okay! So I want to talk some more about your history with Kar-Ben, but also I want to introduce Fran. So how did you come to find this job, and what made you want this job?

Yeah. So I have a long history in development of kids content, through Mattel and American Girl, through Highlights for Children and the Highlights Foundation, and I had done some work with PJ Library on the audio programming side. I am a Jewish woman, a Jewish mother, you know, and as things have been changing in the world today, all the unfortunate happenings that we're dealing with now, it became more and more important to me to focus more on Jewish content development and finding things around Jewish children. And I got introduced to to Joni... I don't even remember how I actually found you in the first place.

I can't remember, yeah.

Yeah. But we had started talking about, you know, how I might do that, working with Kar-Ben, working with Lerner. And Joni told me that she was planning on retiring and that her job would be available, and thought maybe it would be an interesting thing for me to do. And I thought, Oh, this would really be great. And it sort of marries all of the things that I've done in my career to date, and really spoke to my heart. So...

Wonderful.

...I applied and got the job.

Yay! Awesome. Before you became a part of Kar-Ben, were there Kar-Ben books that you read in your earlier life that you can recall connecting with?

Yes, many. My involvement with PJ Library, my impression had been that ALL of the books were Kar-Ben.

[LAUGHTER] Many of them are.

Initially, and they all were!

You know, when I was younger, I think a lot of them were, and my exposure to it, sort of took me a minute to connect the dots again of how everything fits. But we use the haggadahs at our seders over the years. My children are teenagers now, but all of the content has been around us and in our lives for quite a long time. Exciting.

What has changed about Kar-Ben since you started, Joni? What changes did you purposely make? Or what changes occurred organically?

Well, a number of things have really changed in the 20 years that I've been at Kar-Ben. The first was that when we first published Jewish children's books, it was only knowledgeable Jewish families that were interested, for instance, in a book about Shabbat. And now we have a much broader reach. So all of our books include content in the back matter about a particular holiday. We don't assume everybody knows what Shabbat is or what Lag B'Omer is or what Shavuot is. So that's been a change, and it's made those books much more accessible.

Also, the interest in Jewish books is much broader, and children's books are a wonderful foot in the door for families that may or may not have a lot of Jewish knowledge. It's not intimidating. It's very accessible to read a Jewish children's book to a child, where the parent, whether it's a Jew by choice, whether it's somebody who went to Hebrew school but forgot a lot about it, maybe it's somebody who grew up in a not very Jewish home that wants to do more in their own lives. It's a really great way for a parent to access Jewish content along with their child. So that is something that has really changed.

Another thing that's really changed is technology. When I first started, we would hire an illustrator, and they would have to draw on pieces of paper and send it by FedEx, and so we were thus limited to Americans who could send stuff by FedEx. Today with a digital world, we're able to work with illustrators from all over the world, and that has made a real difference in terms of the kinds of styles and the kinds of things that we can do that we didn't used to be able to do. We also work with many more non Jewish illustrators, because we can give them art direction, although sometimes that comes up with funny things. You know, when you do a Sukkot book and you send an artist a picture, a photo reference of a lulav, and you assume they kind of know how the lulav works. That's not true. Sometimes it comes back in a sketch where it's sitting in a pot or it's hanging from the ceiling. So you have to be very good at art direction. But the world has really been opened to us because it's now a digital world.

The other thing that's huge is the scope of what we're covering in Jewish children's books today, the ethnic diversity, the racial diversity, the acknowledgement of Sephardic stories, not just shtetl Ashkenazic stories, although there's still, of course, room for that too, but it's a much bigger world in terms of the different kinds of Jewish families that are out there, And we've really tried to develop books that meet those needs in the world as well.

Cool. Fran I know that you haven't hardly even got your feet wet yet, but are there any changes that you're anticipating, either in the general field of publishing Jewish books, or changes that you would like to make?

I mean, certainly, Joni has done an amazing job crafting what Kar-Ben is and will be, and I am learning so much about just the book and publishing world. But really with my background being very much in digital audio books, interactive books and apps, children's entertainment, television, film, I would love to see the incredible resource of the intellectual property that Kar-Ben holds become content that children can access in all sorts of ways. And hopefully it brings them back to the book, brings the, you know, brings the book to life in new ways. So that's probably where I think I will be the most different from what Joni has done, although I hope to carry on her wonderful legacy in choosing just amazing books that kids will resonate with and remember and that will really, you know, expand on their Jewish identity.

Okay, that's an exciting answer. What are you proudest of accomplishing in your time at Kar-Ben?

You know, when I first started, we did very traditional Jewish books, a book about Hanukkah, a book about Sukkot, a book about Shabbat. And we've greatly expanded the kinds of books that Kar-Ben is doing. For instance, recently we did a book called Zhen Yu and the Snake, which is a Rabbi Akiva story that's retold in ancient China by Erica Lyons, who lives in China. And we just set the story in a different world and used different sorts of illustrations. And I think to just expand the way children look at some of these traditional Jewish stories and put them in different settings, has been really interesting and fun and a good way to expand our reach into the larger community, because books like that have done well even outside the Jewish community. And that is something else that I would mention, that we used to assume that all our readers were Jews and that we were Jewish publishers, and that's what we did. But now there's a great interest in diversity, even outside the Jewish community, and Jewish books are included in public libraries, in school libraries. And that's that's really a change from when I started 20 years ago.

A good change.

A good change. Yeah, a very good change. Yeah.

It's an opportunity as well, because I think what we're seeing in the world today is just a lack of knowledge, education and experience around "what is a Jew? What does it mean to be a Jew? What is Israel all about?" And I think bringing this content into a place where kids of all types can learn will help us in the future too.

Yes, absolutely.

The challenge of children's books about Israel -- that is, I think, going to be a big challenge in the next couple of years, partly depending on how all of this plays out. We publish many books about Israel, and we encourage authors to send us non political manuscripts about Israel. You know, Mary Leshem-Pelly's A Feather, a Pebble a Shell, was a great example and beautiful. It's even doing well in the non Jewish world, because it's not political. But I think one of the challenges going forward, for the next couple of years will be grappling with Israel's stories and getting them out into the world. That's going to be an interesting time for Fran.

Yeah, I'm actually really excited about that. I think there is an opportunity, because I think there are many people who really are realizing that they just don't know the history of Israel, the relationship of Israel and the Jewish people. And I think starting with children, both Jewish children and non Jewish children, and helping expose them to all of this content will be amazing. And I hope that authors don't shy away from the subject and really take to heart, "How do I tell this story for very young children so they can learn?"

What advice Joni, do you want to give Fran as she gets started?

I think the biggest trick in being a children's book publisher is picking the books. We get over 1000 manuscripts a year. I read them all personally, and Fran will too. With picture books, after a while, you know, you can tell from the beginning whether it's an absolute yes or an absolute no, and then there's all the maybes in between. So I think learning how to pick the books, getting a sense for what the market wants and what we want. And sometimes... for instance we're going to be doing our very first serious transgender picture book about a Jewish child, and we're not going to sell a million copies of that, but it's really important to get a book like that out into the world. And our very popular Hanukkah books and Sammy Spider books are maybe going to cover the fact that this transgender book may not sell a million copies. But it's going to be out there making a difference for some kids. So I think for Fran to get used to: how do we pick our books? How do we put a season together? If we're publishing 10 books in a season, how do we pick which 10 we're going to do? I think that's really the biggest challenge of being a publisher. The rest of the things, there's editorial, there's art direction, there's a million other things that we do, sales and marketing and Fran's gonna have that nailed. She comes from that world. The book picking, I think, is the biggest challenge and the biggest win.

And probably the most fun?

Definitely, the most fun.

I would say that, the world that I come from, we're usually commissioning stories, or saying we want a story about this. So being able to have that freedom of, here's a selection of hundreds of options, and choose the ones that you think will resonate the most, will bring the most good into the world, that's very exciting and kind of feels like an awesome responsibility.

Joni, we talked about, what you're proud of. Is there anything you wish you could have a do over, or that the stars had aligned differently?

There's a couple of books that I actually missed out on. One of them is The Miracle Seed. That graphic novel came to me. It's expensive to produce graphic novels because they're full color and many pages. And I had read the story, and I thought, Oh, I thought, Oh, I don't know if this is going to do well. And then, of course, in the end, it's a lovely book. The other one is, I got a book, right when the Ukrainian war started with Russia, I got a picture book biography of Volodymyr Zelensky. And, you know, Jewish guy, interesting. He was a comedian, he became a politician. And then I thought, it takes me two years to do a book. Two years from now, nobody's going to remember Zelensky. I was totally wrong, and somebody else picked that up. So that's one, you know, that I regret having having missed out on.

Fran, do you have a message for the librarians and the authors and the readers who have this long relationship with Kar-Ben? At this time of transition, what would you like to say to everyone?

Oh, my goodness, you know, I know that I have tremendous shoes to fill, and so many people have wonderful relationships with Joni, and I hope that I will, over time, be able to build some of those relationships as well. I encourage people to reach out to me. I will do my best to respond, even if it's just a few words of "Nice to meet you," and I hope to be more visible in this space. This is my first conference, and I'm excited for that. I'm open to suggestion, positive and constructive criticism, certainly. I hope that I'm approachable and friendly, and I just would like to be part of this family.

We would encourage authors to please continue to send your books to Kar-Ben, editorial@karben.com. Fran will look at all of them, and we really do want to maintain our relationships with all of our authors, who are wonderful. This is where we get our content. So it's a very special and important time. Please do continue to send Kar-Ben manuscripts. It's business as usual in that way. Different person sitting in the chair, but really, the same publishing house, the same concerns, the same interests, the same aims and goals as all of you have as authors.

Okay. Joni and Fran, thank you so much for finding a minute at this busy conference to sit down and talk to me.

And thank you so much for inviting us, Heidi, to speak. I do want to give a shout out to the Association of Jewish Libraries. You guys are wonderful people. You are the ones who get Jewish books out into the world. It's one thing for Fran and me to produce them. It's a different thing for you to introduce them to children and to families. And I have wonderful things to say about AJL, and I appreciate everything that you've given to me over the last 20 years. It's a wonderful organization.

Thank you!

Growing up a Jewish child, in the synagogue ruled spending lots of time in the library and being involved in Jewish causes; my children are in Jewish schools and Jewish camps, and my daughter's in Israel right now. She left yesterday morning. You know, I have been impacted by the work that you all do, and I hope that you know if there's anything that I can do as part of this role, or in any role, I hope to be able to add, to be additive, I guess better way to say that.

Thank you.

[MUSIC, TEASER] Don't forget to sign up for my Substack at BookOfLifePodcast.com so you can get podcast show notes, transcripts and Jewish kidlit news delivered directly to your inbox. And tune in next time as we kick off Sydney Taylor Book Award season with an interview about One of a Kind, the new picture book biography about Sydney Taylor herself.

[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!