The following is a transcript of Episode 9 of the Perfect Jewish Parents Podcast. Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Masua: Hello, and welcome to Perfect Jewish Parents, a new podcast from the Shalom Hartman Institute about the joys and oys of raising children Jewishly. I am Masua Sagiv, I’m scholar in residence for the Shalom Hartman Institute, and I have four kids between the ages three and 14. 

Josh: And I’m Joshua Ladon, director of education for the Shalom Hartman Institute. And I have a five year old, an eight year old, and a ten year old.

Masua: Josh, one of my daughter’s favorite books is a story about Noah’s Ark. In the story, the elephants get into the food supply in the Ark, and they won’t budge. So, to fix the problem, Noah tickles the hyena, which creates a chain reaction, ending with the mice scaring the elephants away from the food. This book is surprising to me, because usually when I encounter Jewish children’s books, they are based on an existing story or a text from the tradition. And I didn’t know this one. 

Now, apparently, this is an original creation. We might even call it a new midrash. And I love the continued, creative, interpretive conversation with our tradition through this children’s book. 

Josh: Children’s books seem to let us do the dance that we as parents are trying to do with our kids all the time to both like, give them the tradition, bring them into the tradition, but also get them to take it and play with it and make it their own and recreate it.

When they’re kids, books, songs, games, that seems to allow us to do it, and we feel comfortable doing it with kids. And at some point along the way, we sort of feel like we’re, we have to be inside certain boundaries or boxes. I guess as parents, we do get some opportunity to play a little more. 

Masua: It opens our mind to more creativity that, as adults, maybe we are less, you know, we’re more hesitant to the experience

Josh: Yeah. We’re less inclined. And for our episode today, which is the last episode of our season, we’re hosting our producer, colleague, and friend, David Zvi Kalman. He’s the director of new media and scholar in residence at the Shalom Hartman Institute, and he’s also owner of Print-O-Craft Press. He’s an author and an artist. He’s the great person to have this conversation with.

So we’ve talked with David Zvi about Jewish books, about ritualistic books like Haggadot, and about children’s books and what role they play in cultivating a Jewish home. We also talked about play and Jewish games for children and for parents. And at the end of the episode, we reflect together about the first season of this podcast.

Masua: And we’ll be back together with that conversation in a moment.

Hi David Zvi, it’s great to have you here with us today. 

David Zvi: Thanks for having me on the show.

Masua: What are Jewish books? What is the place of Jewish books? I feel like a lot of the books that are there to educate and like introduce families to holidays and to introduce families to the different traditions that Judaism have, but also maybe it’s cultivating a culture, cultivating a sense of, I don’t know, a sense of belonging. I know that I, well, I’m a sucker for books, but I think that I love two types of books the best. One type is the type that actually resembles to what I do at home, and the other type is the one that is completely different from what I usually do at home.

Now, for me, I love new interpretations and versions of our sacred texts. They always excite me, and I also remember that as a child, we always had a new Pesach Haggadah, every year, but what do you think how many Pesach Haggadahs does one household need?

David Zvi: In terms of how many Haggadahs and Megillahs that people have in their houses, the room that I’m in has a shocking number of both, if I just turn the camera around, you would see shelves upon shelves upon shelves of both of those items. It’s a problem, because like in our household, we have a cap and trade system for our books. Like you can’t get more books without giving away books.

But the exception is the books that are part of my publishing company. So it’s like, yes, we have the system, but on a separate note, in a couple of days, somebody from DHL is going to come and drop off thousands and thousands of books on our front porch. And I hope that’s okay. 

It’s a little bit harder for other Jewish books, and it’s harder for, for a few reasons. The Purim story is a good example of this. So the story of Purim on one level is a story about a salvation from genocide, and it’s a story that takes place through kind of powerless intrigue, political maneuvering, but it’s a story that is not quite for kids. Like, it’s not really for kids at all. And when you, when you interpret it, especially when you interpret it in ways that make it accessible to children, you no longer have that ability to hide the text itself from those children.

And you have to explain to them in some way why the story is so incredibly violent, and why it is that the story ends with Jews taking revenge upon people around them. There’s this kind of double-edged sword where on the one hand, it’s great to have more interpretations. On the other hand, the more interpretations you have, the more you actually have to own the text that you have in your, in your canon, you can’t actually pretend that they don’t exist or pretend that certain parts of them don’t exist.

Masua: It feels like it’s almost, is it a generational thing? Because we read pretty horrifying and dark kids books, like the Grimm Brothers, and we weren’t sheltered by our children’s books. And it feels like today we are much more sheltering our kids.

David Zvi: I remember showing my kids The Lion King for the first time and getting to the part of the movie where Simba is like literally prodding his dead father’s body after being stomped by wildebeasts and thinking like, how in the, like, there’s no possible way that a book like that would be created.

So yeah, it changes and it changes so quickly. And I’m kind of have two minds on it. On the one hand, I think it’s important not to completely shelter kids from difficult things, from difficult topics, and to give them a chance in a safe environment, an environment where you can explain things about the nature of the world.

On the other hand, I think it’s important not to get stuck in a mindset of, the way that I was raised, with all of its warts, are good. And they’re good because I went through them and I turned out okay. That is like a perfect recipe for transmitting intergenerational trauma. And that doesn’t seem like a smart thing to do. So figuring out exactly 

Masua: Though very Jewish. 

David Zvi: It is very, well, for better or for worse, it’s very Jewish. So figuring out exactly what to do is, is very tricky. 

Josh: It strikes me as, in addition to content, there’s something different about the Haggadah, which is, it’s a book that you open up at the table, you do activities with the book. My kids have Haggadot, which, my four year old has a Haggadah, which she doesn’t read, but it’s like, she wants to be like everyone else, which is sitting at the table and having a book and following along. And it’s a book that is both a story and it’s like a transition object for Jewish people.

It’s a, it’s something you hold on to, and it helps you participate in sort of the larger drama of a Seder. That feels different than like these stories, especially Purim, which is like the books we read about Purim are not the book we read on Purim, if you will. 

David Zvi: And I should say, like, the reason that I think about books a lot is just because, separate from my job at Hartman, I run an independent Jewish publishing house that I’ve been running for the last nine years that publishes entirely Jewish books.

The way that I think about it is there’s a difference between a book and a sefer. A sefer is just a Hebrew word for book, but I imagine those as being slightly different in that when you open a book, there’s a kind of instantaneous negotiation that you have with the book itself, where you express your expectations for how you want to use the book, and the book tells you something about how it wants to be used.

And there’s some books that tell you very little. So like if I’m opening, I don’t know, if I’m opening like a magazine or if I’m opening like, you know, a how-to book, the way I use that book is very simple. It’s like, it’s entirely utilitarian. It’s entirely about me. 

There’s certain books, that when you open them, they kind of tell you in all kinds of subtle ways, I am different. I deserve to be treated with respect. I am a little bit more complicated, or you’re not even going to understand me the first time. And when you have a book like that in that split second, there’s a moment where you decide I actually need to give more of myself to this book. It’s not me using it to the extent that I want and closing it when I’m done, but actually. This is worth more of my energy than you would have otherwise.

Getting to that place with a book is both difficult, but that’s what I think of as a sefer. A sefer being a book that you kind of go back to over and over and over again that rewards you each time and gives you a sense of like, infinite depth that you could kind of keep coming back to it and keep finding new things in it, but that’s hard to do.

Josh: It’s hard to do. I also think about the way my kids make the books we read before bed into a sefer in your, in your language, just to say, there are some books that I have no patience for that we read, but many of the books I have patients for, and I really love them. And it’s, it’s been fascinating to see the way they illuminate or open up my kids’ imagination, the types of questions they ask, they get excited about things. I’ll say, David Zvi wrote a book recently with his children that my, my children really love about, I don’t remember the exact title. It’s about bread and it’s a Pesach tragedy. 

David Zvi: I Love Bread: A Pesach tragedy.

Josh: I Love Bread: A Pesach Tragedy. And there’s something really fun and interactive. First of all, it’s a very cheeky book. It shows playing with the tradition, which is something that I always find exciting. And also it goes through it and through it around, well, I really love bread and this thing is made out of bread and this thing, my bed is made out of bread and my, you know, all these different parts of my life.

And then there’s this one thing that’s not made out of bread and my kids, love it, the switch and they want to answer it, and they, it’s asked as a question and it’s like a great moment of how books can help cultivate interactions between humans because we’re reading it together. It sparks curiosity and it feels both, it’s both very Jewish, but it’s not sort of didactic in its Judaism. It’s just like we’re playing with culture, where we’re thinking out loud together and it’s really fun. It’s a great example of like the way the book sort of, it invites us in and we have the ability to manipulate our use of the book. 

Masua: Do you often, this is for both of you, by the way, do you often share with your kids enthusiasm from a book or are there books that they adore and you hate?

Because for me, my three-year-old is right now obsessed with a Halloween book that’s like a retelling of a Wheels of a Bus version, Halloween style. And for her, she’s like, read it to me five times a day. And no matter what books I like better and try to push, she’s like, no, no, going back to this one. 

David Zvi: I have a policy of my kids can read whatever they want, which I should say I’ve, I’ve stuck to really, really doggedly, despite the fact that the things my kids want to read is every single Garfield comic ever written, and Garfield is the worst thing that’s ever happened to the world, and I say that not just because I think the jokes aren’t funny, but also because as linear storytelling, it provides very little and because it feels less like a book to me and more like a kind of book version of a TV show, meaning like I feel like it’s coming out of the fact that they are exposed to all kinds of screens and all kinds of online content, and this feels more comfortable to them than, say, chapter books or things like that.

So the thing that I struggle with is less about the content of the book and more about the format. My kids love graphic novels. There’s so many good graphic novels for kids now. And on the one hand, like, that’s great. On the other hand, I worry about, are they gaining the experience to kind of sit with the text for a long time, even if it has no pictures, so that they can use their imagination. It’ll probably turn out okay.

Josh:  I mean, it’s interesting to that question because I, first of all, I love, like, for example, PJ library, which is the service that Jewish community will send young families books to kids. And I, there are people who will offer critiques. It’s not diverse enough. It’s not Jewish enough, meaning on the left, right, observance, non-observance, for me, I’m of the belief that like, Jewish culture happens and Jewish life happens with cultural objects and cultural tools.

And so, having a bunch of Jewish books in the house allows us to play like, oh, we’re preparing for Shavuot because we’re reading all of these different Shavuot books that have come over the years. I mean, I have three children and, you know, we’ve been getting it for years and some of it is really, oh, this is like a really big, deep story.

And some of it’s a name, but it’s like, for me, that’s, that’s fine because like, I want my kids playing with Judaism. I also think that like, there’s cultural norms that are presented by books and we don’t understand everything we read and yes, our visions are shaped by what we read. So books about Blackness in America, it’s like really important for me to like have my kids read some of those books and, and it enables conversations about who they are as Ashkenazi Jews, white Jews in North America.

But all of that, it’s neither a, you get everything or you don’t get everything. You’re constantly sort of mediated by this project and this process, but having the books that use the language and cultural language that we have in our home, it like creates a milieu that’s really exciting to me. And it feels like a tool that my family didn’t have when I was growing up. It wasn’t like we were living with the seasons of Jewish life, which we can do through kids books, which is exciting to me. 

Masua: I hear presence. It doesn’t matter if you agree or disagree with the content, but you have presence and it’s around you.

Josh: We get to like, that’s the job and the challenge of parenting is helping shape the conversations you have around this. In the same way that like, when my kids start to watch movies or TV shows that are even more difficult for me than they are now, where it involves sex or drugs, rock and roll, all that stuff. Oh, I want to be, I have to have those conversations with my kids, the same way that like books, books are actually easier to have those conversations if we’re doing it together.

David Zvi: I think that makes sense, and I appreciate the presence of those books in my life. We have four kids, and we have received an endless number of PJ library books. I think sometimes about what, you know, a medieval rabbi would think about all the books that I’ve received for free in my life, and compare it to the size of their libraries, which were, you know, like dozens of books if they were lucky.

And, they’re great. PJ Library does a great job, and I like a lot of what they do, and I think they’re generally a good presence in America and the world. There is something that I find missing in a lot of PJ Library books and a lot of Jewish books that are produced generally, which is there is a kind of piety to them that is designed to allow people both who observe and people who do not, who come from all different knowledge backgrounds, to feel a sense of like, oh, like this is the things that people do.

What it doesn’t allow people to do is, is allow for complicated relationships to the rituals. It doesn’t acknowledge the fact that people often struggle, both children and adults struggle quite a bit with Jewish ritual. And that is true, whether they’re struggling because they are not used to it, or because they’re in interfaith households, or because they’ve been doing it their whole lives, but they just don’t like it very much. And one thing that I see in lots of non-Jewish books about non-Jewish subjects is a willingness to engage with children who are really struggling with life circumstances around them. 

I’ll just give you an example of this. I grew up in Canada. One of the most important Canadian children’s book authors is a guy named Robert Munsch. Basically, he told these stories that started out as oral tales, he would like give in front of actual kids and then would turn those into actual books and find illustrators to do them. All of his books are about children doing things they’re not supposed to do. Children who find themselves flying airplanes when they have no training as airplane pilots, children who refuse to put on their snowsuits, then they put on their snowsuits and they immediately have to go to the bathroom and they have to take their snowsuit all the way off. Children who, I’m trying to think of other examples of that, but you get, you get the idea, right? 

Masua: Like Astrid Lindgren’s, and everyone loves her book, right? How do you call it in, in English? What’s the name like of, of her books? Bilbi, in Hebrew it’s Bilbi. 

Josh: Oh, I don’t know them. 

Masua: You don’t know her? 

David Zvi: No. 

Masua: For sure you know her. No way you don’t know her. Let me look.

Josh: That’s so Israeli. Of course you know what I’m talking about. 

Masua: Of course. No, but I am sure that you know her. Okay. You talk, talk away. 

David Zvi: But I worry about there being like this gap, if children are raised on material that suggests that of course you will appreciate the rituals, and of course you will appreciate the prayers, if you are only exposed to them in the right ways, you are doing them a disservice, because that’s not true. Lots of adults, even those who go to synagogue every day, you know, pray three times a day, even those people struggle with these things, and that is also part of what it means to raise children into a Jewish tradition.

Masua:  It’s Pippi Longstocking, by the way. 

Josh: Oh, Pippi Longstocking.

David Zvi: Oh, of course.

Masua: Oh, of course that you know what I’m talking about. 

Josh: Of course. Yes. I think what you’re, you’re illuminating is one of the things that like we do when we’re kids really well is we play and we have a lot of space to play. And one of the things that you’re looking for is some play in Jewish books. And this might be for me a larger question of like how we cultivate and strengthen Jewish creativity in Jewish culture today in the 21st century, but also with our kids is like, how do we create more space where they’re playing? How do I create more spaces of being able to play in the Jewish world or with Jewish cultural artifacts. 

My youngest right now likes to sing a Pharaoh song. It’s, we’re still, you know, like all year round, she’s singing a song about Pharaoh and about frogs on her head. And then frogs end up in the bed. And then even in Pharaoh’s underwear, there were frogs. And it’s like, oh yeah, that sort of this concern of how much sanctity does there have to be in the activity versus like, no, you just play with this and you figure it out. And you, there are, there’s moments for subversive play. How do you create subversive Jewish play?

David Zvi: Can I give you a really good example of that? 

Josh: Yeah, please. 

David Zvi: Something that bothered me for a long time until it finally clicked with me. My kids go to an Orthodox Jewish day school, and one of the things that they teach early on at Orthodox schools is how do you say grace after meals, how do you bench, and that involves all together, singing the grace after meals over and over and over again, and if you’ve been to an Orthodox and also Conservative schools, you will see that kids play around all the time with the text.

So they’ll say like, Baruch Atah Hashem, Hazan et Hakol. And then my son’s like, Super Bowl, which is like, totally has nothing to do with anything. It’s just like sounds kind of similar. And he’s like doing that all the time. And at the beginning, I thought, like, this is completely disrespectful. And why are you doing this? And you shouldn’t be doing this. And he’s doing it together with his whole class, right? Like there’s a, there are traditions at this point about which words you insert next to which Hebrew words sound like those words. 

But I think I came to appreciate it because it is their way of feeling like the text is actually theirs.

Josh: Yes. It’s about making ownership. 

David Zvi: Exactly. Exactly. It’s about making ownership of it. And, and, you know, so I stopped, like, you know, critiquing it. Like that’s, that’s the way that he appreciates the text at his part in life. 

Masua: You know, but what I heard before, Josh, when you asked this question is that a lot of the opportunities for play are just around holidays and, and they almost, they like cling, our kids, cling to the holidays in order to still have opportunities to play because these are the only chances that they have to play with Judaism because their experience of Judaism is all connected to specific times and specific acts, in a sense.

Josh: You’re saying it’s like narrow, it’s ritually based.

Masua: I don’t know, it’s, I mean, I guess it’s a way because we have in the different holidays, we have the different traditions and we have the different plays because we want to include them in our holidays. Then you’ll have the dreidel and Hanukkah and you’ll have in Pesach, in Passover, you’ll have a lot of other games and you have the songs.

What songs do you have in your everyday Jewish life? I don’t really have them. What books do you have in your everyday Jewish life that do not involve Israel? Very little.

Josh: It’s an interesting concern. I was wondering, David Zvi, you, in addition to making books, you’ve created items to play with a little bit. I’m thinking of, even though it’s related to the holiday, like the 20-sided dreidel. And I’m wondering, how is that item similar to sort of your desire for some transgressive Jewish play? 

David Zvi: Yes, I have a love-hate relationship to the 20 sided dreidel because on the one hand, it’s the only thing I’ve ever patented. On the other hand, it is the dumbest thing I’ve ever made, and it’s definitely going to be the first line of my obituary because it has sold incredibly well. It is, it is massively successful.

Josh:  Explain for those that are not familiar with it. Dungeons and Dragons, like, why did you make a 20 sided dreidel, and what does it mean?

David Zvi: So a dreidel is a spinning top with four sides. Traditionally, a game that does not actually function very well that people play around Hanukkah, where, you know, depending on which letter goes face up, you either get stuff or lose stuff. Because 20 is a multiple of four, you can have a 20-sided die. And 20-sided die is, it’s an icosahedron that has 20 sides.

Masua: I would for sure know this word. 

Josh: I like how you asked us, oh, hat’s the word for the 20 sided? Icosahedron.

David Zvi: Yes. Okay. I know this because the title of the patent is icosahedral Hebrew die. You know, if you’re wanting to Google that. So it’s, it’s 20 sided, so you can use the same four letters, which represent different actions as part of the game. Just replicate each of them five times. It is statistically the same as a four sided top, but it rolls instead. It is a silly object. There is no deeper meaning to it. 20 is not, like, the most important number in Judaism. It exists only because it is a way to imagine a Jewish object, which honestly has not been a Jewish object for very long. The four-sided top is only 250, 300 years old. It’s really just a German toy that Jews adopted and everyone else forgot about it. 

But it’s a way of kind of playing with that idea and looking at it in a new light and kind of bringing new interest to something that felt kind of dull, at least in my mind. You know later on people can say like yes, yes, it has accessibility uses, yes, people who have trouble spinning things, like small children can roll a die more easily, but that wasn’t really what it’s about. It was really just because it was kind of funny 

Masua: Your publishing house also published this year a new version of the Megillat Esther, together with a deck of cards, which I purchased as, you know, I thought we could play with our kids. And then I opened the deck of cards. It was so dark. It was so dark. I was like, nope, my kids are not playing with this.

Josh: But your kids are young, meaning like, it could be that when they’re, more of them are teenagers, it might be something that they’re willing to play with. 

Masua: I didn’t intend to discourage anyone from, I mean, it’s a beautiful Megillah. Really, it’s gorgeous, the gorgeous Megillah, and it’s so artistic. But there is something with the connection between, again, like letting our kids play. Should we let them play it? Should we not? Like, what’s the, is this, is your games directed to kids or not only? 

David Zvi: For that particular product, I thought it was directed to kids. I mean, I thought it was directed also to kids. You know what, your kids aren’t interested in playing with a deck of cards where every spade has blood spatter on it? I don’t understand why. 

Josh: My kids actually might want to be doing that.

David Zvi: Some kids are like that. I mean, that was an attempt by that particular artist, Jacqueline Nicholls, who is interested in kind of telling the story of Esther, which is this pretty violent story, as both a story of Jewish liberation and at the same time, a story which famously has quite a bit of quite a bit of violence in it. And the hope was that it was, it was innocuous enough that kids could appreciate it without being freaked out the first time around and then as they grew up would be like, oh, I get it. I get what’s going on here as well. 

Masua: Yeah. I really miss that. You know, I miss having Jewish products, whether it’s Jewish books or Jewish plays for older kids. I miss having, you know, them seeing Jewish values, you know, as teenagers. I really miss that.

Josh: Yeah, there was, it’s, it’s funny you say that, Masua, when I taught at the high school that I taught at before working at Hartman, there’s a tendency like, oh, in some other schools we would have this, like, if you have like six Jewish studies classes, you have to take over your four years or seven Jewish studies classes.

By the senior year, you could have, you could get them done earlier, and then you could have fewer classes later on, is like sort of how some schools approach it, and we were like really committed to like, no, as they get older, we want them to have deeper thinking, and I was thinking about, David Zvi, I would say that, that card game of being like, how do we sort of spiral our Jewish educational experiences for our kids and like, allow them to, to tap into the deep needs that they have of like big ideas and big questions as they get older, not peace out before you actually have the brain capacity to deal with these big abstract thinking.

I also like the idea that you said it felt, it reminds me of like, this thing that David Hartman wrote about, oh, you get introduced to something, but you do it over and over again. And as you get introduced, you, you add layers. He talked about in his book, Heart of Many Rooms, he has this great line, “Only within community, do we hear the commanding word of the living God of Israel, meaning the community so invades one’s identity that it would be correct to claim that one’s primary consciousness is of a we. I’m a we before I’m an I, and an I surfaces only after it’s appropriated fully the sense of we.”

And he says, you don’t start Judaism, like, through an immediate encounter with God. Rather, he says, like, no, you listen to stories from your parents. You first participate in the drama of collectively standing at Sinai. What he means by that is like, oh, right. My kids get PJ library books. My kids have this game. My kids are like hearing about all these things. So one of the ways you cultivate rich Jewish life is like having a set of cultural tools, artifacts in your home, magazines, books, toys. How much is Judaism in your window dressing? In addition to your conversation. It allows for some of this creativity. 

David Zvi: I love that. And I’ll add that there are moments when I feel like I am talking to my kids, not in the present moment, but I’m talking to their future selves. I’m talking to the people who I imagine them being and providing messages that I think will be relevant for those moments, because there’s certain material which you can provide in a given moment.

They’re not going to hate it, hopefully, but they’re only going to really unpack much later on. And there’s kind of these precious years where you can do that, where you can kind of like give a kid a present that like only actually gets unwrapped much later on, which I like because there’s, my very favorite passages in the entire Talmud does exactly the same thing, the passage about how basically God tells Moses explicitly, I’m giving you the Torah, like you’re the one who takes the Torah down from Sinai, but there are pieces of the Torah, which you are not going to understand and are only going to be understood by someone living hundreds and hundreds of years in the future, a guy named Rabbi Akiva. And if you, Moses, would actually go visit Rabbi Akiva in those moments, you would be completely confused. You would feel like the thing that you received right now is actually unrecognizable in the future. 

There’s moments when I feel like that’s kind of the parent’s role as well, is to provide material that gets unpacked much later on, because, you know, there’s things that you can acquire and there’s opportunities in those moments that don’t come again.

Josh: Beautiful. 

Masua: Love that. Thank you so much for being with us today. 

David Zvi: Thanks for having me.

Josh: Thanks everybody for joining. We’ll be right back after these messages.

As we wrap up our first season, I’m wondering how have these conversations shaped your own thinking about what it means to be a Jewish parent? 

David Zvi: One of the things that I kept thinking about across a number of episodes was this kind of persistent problem of how do you talk to your kids about difficult things?

And it’s easy to frame that problem as basically a pedagogical issue. It’s like, well, of course I know the answer, but I just need to figure out a way to tell it to my kids. One of the things that kept getting revealed in those conversations is that it’s often not true. Often like the line between a pedagogical problem and an actual problem is quite thin.

And I find that so fascinating. I think that’s not always true. There are actual questions where you have to figure out how to teach it and the material itself is clear. But one thing that keeps coming up in these parenting conversations is the fact that the questions your children ask you expose the things that you actually don’t know yourself. So I just found that very fascinating. 

Josh: And just to underline what you’re saying, it’s the ideas matter too, the ideas and the way of saying it. 

Masua: And as opposed to when we are talking among ourselves as adults, our kids add an additional layer to the content itself, to the question itself. 

Josh: There are a couple of guests when, I’m thinking about people who have said things that are really powerful that I think underline that point, right?

So when Sivan Zakai says, who was our guest for How Do We Talk About Israel, says, take kids seriously. Don’t be afraid. And then also mentioned a couple of different ways we need to think about being a North American Jew related to Israel. I thought that was, actually not dissimilar from when Ilana Horwitz said, when I give a public lecture, I bring my kids there because I want them to see me. I want them to see their possible world that actually both of those are about taking kids seriously and also giving them a possibility of a place to go. And that those are not just form, but it’s form and content. I really, I’ve been thinking a lot about form and content of parenting since we started this journey together.

Masua: For me, it was also, this journey brought me to reflect on a lot of the things that were just part of routine or part of inertion parenting, specifically if I, if I’m thinking about, I think one of the most powerful experiences for me was the navigating, talking about the Holocaust episode, because it, for me, it exposed how, for years, I have not talked with my kids about this subject.

It brought me to think of why and how to do it differently, which I really appreciated, but even more generally, I think reflecting on things that we just do and we don’t have the time to pause and think, hold on, why am I answering this? How should I answer this? You know, in the midst of getting them back from school and making dinner and taking to play dates. It was an important pause.

David Zvi: That moment struck me as well, and that episode in particular, because just the range of ways that parents can talk to their children about something like the Holocaust is so vast. And it kind of like was a reminder for me, the range of what it means to be Jewish parents in America is so incredibly large.

There’s something like we think a lot about when we’re talking about how to put this show together, that you can’t actually, possibly capture the experience of all the Jewish parents in America because it is so diverse and there is ways in which like what looks like Jewish parenting to one person is totally unrecognizable to somebody else.  So, I think that captured it. I think that episode captured it well.

Josh: I think it’s great to be able to say like, this was a slice of a slice of Jewish parenting. We hope that we’ll be able to bring more people in and more people on and expose an even broader sense. It’s been lovely. We’ve laughed, we’ve cried, we’ve gotten to say something and learn something. 

I want to thank everyone here, all of you listening at home. Masua, David Zvi, our producer Jan, Ben, and Louis, thank you so much. 

Masua: Thanks everyone. Take care.

Thanks for listening to our show. 

Josh: Perfect Jewish Parents is a production of the Shalem Hartman Institute, where we tackle pressing issues facing Jewish communities so we can think better and do better. You can check out our world-renowned faculty, free live classes, and events at shalomhartman.org. 

Masua: Our producers are Jan Lauren Greenfield and David Zvi Kalman. This episode was edited by Ben Azevedo, and our theme music is by Luke Allen. Our production manager is M Louis Gordon, and Maital Friedman is our Vice President of Communications and Creative. 

Josh: This is a new podcast, so help us get the word out. Hit subscribe and also rate the show. 

Masua: If you have ideas for an episode, parenting questions, or if your kids asked you a question you want us to answer, send an email to [email protected]

Josh: Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.