The Book of Life

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     |    READ THE TRANSCRIPT     🕮    The winners of the 2025 Sydney Taylor Book Awards, recognizing the best Jewish children's and young adult literature of the year, were announced on January 27, 2025 at the American Library Association's Youth Media Awards event. Aviva Rosenberg is the current chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee, and she joined us to discuss the 2025 winners of the award. LEARN  MORE: Sydney Taylor Book Awards ALA's YouTube channel , where you can watch a recording of the announcement Heidi's unofficial 2025 Sydney Taylor shortlist Get more Jewish kidlit news & calls to action in The Book of Life Substack newsletter 2025 SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARDS Scroll down to see all the winning titles listed, with links to any past podcast appearances by the authors on The Book of Life. FYI, the Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour will take place in early Feb...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     |    READ THE TRANSCRIPT    |    CHECK OUT "NICE JEWISH BOOKS" PODCAST     🕮    At the Association of Jewish Libraries 2024 annual conference in San Diego, CA, I met up with Sheryl Stahl, host of our sister podcast, Nice Jewish Books. Inspired by the cartoon above, Sheryl and I interviewed our friends and colleagues about their Jewish "emotional support books" and the results turned into this podcast episode (cross-posted on Nice Jewish Books). We got a very wide variety responses, listed below in case you'd like to read any of the books that are so meaningful to your fellow Jewish book-lovers. ENTER THE DRAWING Need a tote bag to carry around your emotional support books? Enter our drawing! Post a review of The Book of Life or Nice Jewish Books, or BOTH, on social media or on any podcast player such as Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or wherever you listen to podcas...

In 2020, I received the Groner-Wikler Award , sponsored by Kar-Ben Publishing and conferred by the Association of Jewish Libraries , for my advocacy for Jewish children's literature. The award includes a scholarship for conference attendance, and because of the pandemic, I was unable to use it until 2022. At #AJLcon22 , I gave a brief speech during the membership meeting, the text of which can be seen below, and will eventually appear in the AJL Conference Proceedings . I hope my speech and the accompanying handout above will inspire you to help me take action to change the world. Heidi Rabinowitz & Sean Boyle Acceptance Speech, Kar-Ben Publishing Groner-Wikler Scholarship Association of Jewish Libraries Conference, Philadelphia, PA June 28, 2022 When I got the email from Emily Bergman telling me I’d been awarded the Kar-Ben Publishing Groner-Wikler Scholarship, she explained that the committee was pleased to see all my work “not only on behalf of children's literature in ...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     |    READ THE TRANSCRIPT     🕮    Rebecca Levitan is the chair of the Sydney Taylor Book Award committee of the Association of Jewish Libraries. She joined us to discuss the 2020 winners of the award, which annually recognizes the best Jewish literature for children and teens. This is the second year that the Sydney Taylor Book Awards will be announced at the ALA Youth Media Awards press conference, being held this year in Philadelphia, PA during the ALA Midwinter Meeting on January 27, 2020 at 8am ET. For the first time, the Sydney Taylor Honor Books are also included in the announcement. The Association of Jewish Libraries is an ALA Affiliate. Watch a live webcast of the press conference. Here's the official 2020 Sydney Taylor Book Award press release and the full list of winners, honors, and notable books . The Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour will take place February 9-13, 2020. De...

A guest post by Sylvie Shaffer Breaking News: One of the world’s largest Persian Jewish congregations, Nessah synagogue in Beverly Hills, was attacked last night. Two sefer Torahs were damaged. We stand in solidarity with LA’s Jewish community. https://t.co/9wQipFzyLp pic.twitter.com/qA5AaYQ3ZT — American Jewish Committee (@AJCGlobal) December 15, 2019 Just before Chanukah, I wrote this poem as response to the Nessah Synagogue desecration. At the time, I was finishing my second year of reading for the Sydney Taylor Book Award Committee, which I have been so incredibly honored to do. The award has been given annually since 1968 by the Association of Jewish Libraries to the best books featuring Jewish content published for children and young adults. While I have enjoyed reading and critically considering some wonderful books with joyful expressions of Jewish life, most of my committee reading has centered the Holocaust, and to be completely honest, it's been brutal...

The Association of Jewish Libraries (AJL) is horrified by the recent spate of antisemitic attacks, especially those that took place during the holiday of Hanukkah. The shooting at a kosher market in New Jersey and the stabbing at a Hanukkah party in New York made national news; at the same time, there has been a tidal wave of verbal abuse, physical violence, and widespread vandalism of Jewish spaces. We mourn the tragic loss of life, offer prayers of recovery for victims, and urge all to stand in solidarity with the Jewish community in the face of intimidation. As an international organization of librarians, archivists, researchers, writers, teachers, and lovers of literature, AJL seeks to educate the public and provide resources to fight this scourge of ignorance and hate. After the 2018 attack on the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, AJL published the Love Your Neighbor series of youth booklists. These recommended titles demystify the Jewish experience for readers, with the a...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST      |    READ THE TRANSCRIPT     |    BUY IRVING / MARTIN     🕮    We are in a golden age of picture book biographies, and one prolific biographer is Nancy Churnin . She's got half a dozen bios out and more on the way, and each one is inspiring in its own way. Nancy attended the 2019 Association of Jewish Libraries conference to take part in the author luncheon, where she represented her Jewish interest books, Irving Berlin: The Immigrant Boy Who Made America Sing , and Martin & Anne: The Kindred Spirits of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Anne Frank . I was happy to snag this live interview with her during the conference. Be sure to explore Nancy's website for the teacher guides and projects she describes in our interview, as well as her blog The Kids Are All Write . When asked for Tikkun Olam recommendations, Nancy suggested supporting Room to Read , a ...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     🕮    In May 2019 I posted an interview with Jonathan Auxier , the author of Sweep: The Story of a Girl and Her Monster . In our interview we talked about the book, of course, but we also talked about our favorite board games. I met Jonathan at the 2019 Association of Jewish Libraries conference where he'd come to accept his Sydney Taylor Book Award, and we got to play one of those games together along with a roomful of other authors, illustrators, and librarians. Here's your chance to listen in as we play a round of Superfight: A Game of Absurd Arguments . First we'll hear the description of the game from Jonathan's May 2019 appearance on The Book of Life podcast. Then we'll hear a clip of me versus Jonathan Auxier in actual gameplay. Just so you know, the game was ultimately won by illustrator Paul O. Zelinsky , who was at the conference to receive the Sydney Taylor Book Award for All-of-a-Kind Family Hanukkah . His Su...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST     🕮     Meira Drazin is the author of Honey and Me , a forthcoming middle grade novel from Scholastic. Even before she got that book deal, she won the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award for the unpublished work. She was at the 2016 Association of Jewish Libraries conference in Charleston, SC to receive her award. We sat down with a few members of the award committee for a quick chat. INVITATION :  As you hear in th is podcast episode, you are invited to participate in How Is This Book Different? , a joint project of the Association of Jewish Libr aries , the Jewish Book Council , and Call Me Ish mael . Between March 27-April 4, 2017, call 774-325-0503 with a story about your a Jewish book that matters to your life ! CREDITS: Produced by: Feldman Children's Library at Congregation B'nai Israel   Supported in part by: Association of Jewish Libraries   Theme music: The Freilachmakers Klezmer String Band   Face...

Here are all the final links to the posts created during the 2017 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour. So many wonderful interviews for you to enjoy!  2017 SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD BLOG TOUR Gavriel Savit, author of Anna and the Swallow Man  Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Teen Readers category  At Book Q&A's with Deborah Kalb  Andrea Davis Pinkney (author), Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (illustrators) of A Poem for Peter  Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Older Readers category  At The Book of Life  Debbie Levy and Elizabeth Baddeley, author and illustrator of I Dissent Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Younger Readers category  At Ima On and Off the Bima  Joel Ben Izzy, author of Dreidels on the Brain  Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Older Readers category  At Bildungsroman Adam Gidwitz and Hatem Aly, author and illustrator of The Inquisitor's Tale  Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the O...

BUY THE BOOK     🕮    A Poem for Peter by Andrea Davis Pinkney, illustrated by Lou Fancher and Steve Johnson, is both a biography of Ezra Jack Keats and a love poem to the famous 1962 picture book he created, The Snowy Day . It was named a 2017 Sydney Taylor Honor Book by the Association of Jewish Libraries. ANDREA DAVIS PINKNEY Andrea, please talk about what The Snowy Day means to you personally. Did it affect your path to becoming an author yourself? I was born in the inner-city in 1963, the same year Ezra Jack Keats's The Snowy Day won the Caldecott medal. My parents had very limited financial resources, but they purchased that book for their young daughter. I often joke that I slept with The Snowy Day , that I cuddled with it. That's how much comfort that book brought me. It was as special as any pillow. Looking back, I now see that the book's magic -- and its personal appeal to me -- was in its main character Peter, the first African-Ame...

LISTEN TO THE PODCAST      |    BUY THE BOOK     |    VISIT MCBD WEBSITE     🕮    Today, January 27, 2017, is Multicultural Children's Book Day, a celebration of diversity in kidlit. Check out multiculturalchildrensbookday.com to find diversity booklists for kids , a kindness kit for teachers, and giveaways of diverse books. And be sure to search for the hashtag #ReadYourWorld to find links to multicultural children's book reviews and reading suggestions. In the spirit of the Day's hashtag, #ReadYourWorld , I'm posting a recording of Leslie Kimmelman 's talk at the 2016 Association of Jewish Libraries conference in Charleston, SC. Leslie spoke about her picture book, Everybody Says Shalom , which was a 2016 Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Younger Readers category. This charming book showcases friendly diversity in an Israeli setting. Enjoy , and shalom! CREDITS: Produced by: Feldma...

VISIT THE SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD WEBSITE     🕮    The Sydney Taylor Book Award will be showcasing its 2017 gold and silver medalists with a Blog Tour, February 6-10, 2017! Interviews with winning authors and illustrators will appear on a variety of Jewish and kidlit blogs. Interviews will appear on the dates below, and will remain available to read at your own convenience. Below is the schedule for the 2017 Sydney Taylor Book Award Blog Tour. Please follow the links to visit the hosting blogs on or after their tour dates, and be sure to leave them plenty of comments! 2017 SYDNEY TAYLOR BOOK AWARD BLOG TOUR MONDAY, FEBRUARY 6, 2017 Gavriel Savit , author of Anna and the Swallow Man Sydney Taylor Book Award winner in the Teen Readers category At Book Q&A's with Deborah Kalb  Andrea Davis Pinkney (author), Steve Johnson and Lou Fancher (illustrators) of A Poem for Peter Sydney Taylor Honor Book in the Older Readers category At ...