In this episode, celebrated children’s book author, poet and memoirist Judith Viorst brings her irrepressible wit, humor, and insight to every age and stage of life. We talk about growing up, raising children, and living well - including the story of how her family gave up Christmas. She reflects on her lifelong love of “messy” characters, from Max in Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are to her own Lulu.  Her wisdom is especially meaningful as we take stock of the year and set our intentions for the year ahead.

“No Jewish thinker has had a greater impact on the American Jewish Community in the last two decades than Irving (Yitz) Greenberg.” - Professor Steven T. Katz

Rabbi Greenberg has had a long and notable career in the service of the Jewish people.  He received his smicha, ordination, in 1953 and has a masters and PhD in American History from Harvard. He has served in numerous rabbinic and academic positions. Together with Elie Wiesel, he founded CLAL: The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. He also served as founding president of Jewish Life Network/Steinhardt Foundation which created such programs as Birthright Israel and the Partnership for Excellence in Jewish Education. When Elie Wiesel served as chairman of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, Rabbi Greenberg served as its (Executive) Director. He is a leading Jewish thinker, the author of five books, and has written extensively on post-Holocaust Jewish religious thought, Jewish-Christian relations, pluralism, and the ethics of Jewish power. He is married to the Orthodox Jewish feminist pioneer and writer, Blu Greenberg.

Ahead of Thanksgiving, we’re doing something a little different: we’re talking with Jake Cohen about the foods that impacted his identity. Jake Cohen is the New York Times bestselling author of the cookbooks Jew-ish and I Could Nosh, and star of A&E’s Jake Makes It Easy. Jake’s latest cookbook, Dinner Party Animal, is a “self help cookbook” all about throwing a great dinner party and finding community.  In this episode, we’ll hear about how Jake reconnected with Judaism in his 20s and how learning to make kubbeh opened a door to the wide world of Jewish food. Of course he’ll have plenty of recommendations for making Thanksgiving dinner special (and pain-free!)

Sam Sussman’s autobiographical novel Boy From North Country begins with the quest to determine whether Bob Dylan is in fact his father, but gives way to the deeper story of his love for his mother in her final days. In many ways it’s a testament to her having accomplished in its truest form what I think mothers all hope for, which is that their love travels forward and in some way inoculates their children against future pain.

Angela Buchdahl was born in Seoul, the daughter of a Korean Buddhist mother and Jewish American father. One of America’s most prominent rabbis, Rabbi Angela discusses her memoir Heart of a Stranger and the importance of finding yourself in a story. She shares how she discovered belonging within the Jewish narrative itself - seeing in Abraham and Sarah’s journey of boundary crossing a reflection of her own. In Jewish folktales, she recognized her own longing to reach deeper truths, and in Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste, she saw her experience of feeling outside the Jewish community reflected back to her. Stories, she explains, are the quickest way to build empathy. In sharing her own, she invites us all to see how our sense of otherness can become a profound source of Jewish belonging.

At Vassar College, Kitty Zeldis confronted what she calls a “WASP tsunami,” sparking lifelong questions about what it means to be Jewish in a wider, often unwelcoming world. In our conversation, she reflects on how that tension shaped her new novel One of Them, and shares the moments and stories that shaped her Jewish identity: from a German-Jewish poet who challenged her assumptions about culture and belonging, to her parents’ formative years in Israel, to the haunting family memory of a murdered great-grandfather in Russia.

As we approach Simchat Torah, when we roll the scroll back to the beginning and start reading again, Ilana Kurshan’s Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together reminds us of another sacred cycle: the books we read to our children again and again. Just like the Torah, those familiar stories shape us through their repetition, imprinting meaning with every return.

Toby Lloyd discusses Fervor, his haunting debut novel inspired by a rereading of the Bible. Struck by the richness, ambiguity, and moments of horror in Genesis and Exodus, Toby explores how these ancient stories can speak to modern readers. We talk about his aim to write for a broad audience, the place of British Jews in the heart of English literature, and why Marcel Proust’s portrayal of Jewish identity feels as urgent today as it did a century ago.

Sharon Kurtzman shares how an interview with her mother became a defining moment of connection. She was haunted by her mother’s description of just how much danger still lingered after surviving the Holocaust and that revelation became central to her writing of The Lost Baker of Vienna, set in the years after WWII between liberation and immigration.

On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews sets sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board have dreamed, but to Texas. The man who persuades the passengers to go is David Jochelmann, Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather.

The Cohen sisters are at a crossroads. And not just because the obedient middle sister, Fortune, has secretly started to question her engagement and impending wedding.

A kaleidoscopic portrait of one family’s displacement across four countries, Kantika―“song” in Ladino―follows the joys and losses of Rebecca Cohen, feisty daughter of the Sephardic elite of early 20th-century Istanbul. When the Cohens lose their wealth and are forced to move to Barcelona and start anew, Rebecca fashions a life and self from what comes her way―a failed marriage, the need to earn a living, but also passion, pleasure and motherhood.