Kids’s books by native Jewish authors educate and delight – J.

When the San Francisco dietician and chef Micah Siva searched final summer season for a Jewish counting ebook for her new niece, she was disillusioned by the alternatives. So Siva, who writes a food column for J., and her husband Josh, who works within the pharmaceutical trade, determined to put in writing and publish one themselves.

“1, 2, 3, Nosh With Me” (30 pages, for children under 5) teaches counting with conventional vacation meals, together with matzah balls, sufganiyot and hamantaschen. (The Sivas’ canine, Buckwheat, additionally makes an look within the ebook, which was illustrated by artist Sviatoslav Franko, who lives in Ukraine.)

“I grew up in an Ashkenazi household, and my husband grew up in a Sephardic household, so the principle resolution we needed to make [for the book] was which delicacies did we wish to lean in direction of,” Micah Siva, 30, instructed J. “We selected Ashkenazi delicacies as a result of that was my private expertise rising up.”

Siva, who hails from Calgary, Canada, mentioned she has been shocked by what number of non-Jewish mother and father have purchased the ebook to diversify their youngsters’s bookshelves. “Some individuals have messaged me on Instagram to ask the way to sound out phrases,” she mentioned. “The extra that we will present Jewish pleasure and pleasure round Judaism nowadays, to each Jews and non-Jews, the higher.” (Siva will learn the ebook on the JCC of San Francisco on Sept. 17, and she’s going to lead a challah baking class at Temple Isaiah in Lafayette on Sept. 18.)

One other new food-related youngsters’s ebook, “Just Try One Bite” (Dial Books, 40 pages, ages 4-8), is a intelligent role-reversal story about unusually health-conscious youngsters who stage an intervention with their junk-food-eating mother and father. The children try and bribe the adults into attempting broccoli, kale, quinoa and different complete meals — “not quick meals however slooow meals.”

Don’t be fooled by the truth that one of many authors is Berkeley resident Adam Mansbach, who’s best known for his profane children’s books which are truly meant for adults. It is a actual kid-friendly ebook, that includes an lovely multiracial household illustrated by Mike Boldt.

Mansbach co-wrote “Simply Strive One Chew” with wholesome consuming advocate Camila Alves McConaughey, who got here up with the function reversal thought. “I used to be introduced in to determine a enjoyable approach to do it, and make the phrases rhyme,” Mansbach wrote in an e mail to J. “I hope children and fogeys will get some laughs — placing the youngsters in cost is type of a humor cheat-code, not less than in my home — and likewise be impressed to maneuver previous the sorts of stalemates all of us have and into extra fruitful (and vegetableful) territory.”

Two phenomenal Jewish ladies in historical past get their due in new nonfiction biographies.

Bonnie Lindauer recounts the lifetime of the founding father of the Nationwide Council of Jewish Ladies in “Hannah G. Solomon Dared to Make a Difference” (Kar-Ben, 32 pages, ages 5-9). Born to German immigrant mother and father in Chicago in 1858, Solomon lived by way of the Nice Chicago Hearth of 1871 — which is dramatically illustrated by Sofia Moore — and arranged occasions for Jewish ladies on the 1893 Chicago World’s Honest.

As the primary president of the NCJW, she labored to enhance the lives of immigrants and youngsters by agitating for safer housing, free nursery faculties and public playgrounds. She additionally pushed for work coaching for girls and was concerned within the ladies’s suffrage motion, alongside her good friend Susan B. Anthony.

“[She did] all of this whereas she was nonetheless a loyal mom and spouse,” Lindauer, a San Francisco resident and member of Congregation Am Tikvah, mentioned throughout a Jewish Neighborhood Library virtual event in December. “Certainly, like some ladies of her time, she helped recast the Jewish mom from a quiet guardian of the home to a lady who might be deeply dedicated to her dwelling life and likewise make vital contributions to society.”

“The Woman Who Split the Atom: The Life of Lise Meitner” (Abrams Books for Young Readers, 264 pages, ages 10-14) is a few Vienna-born physicist who labored with Albert Einstein and found nuclear fission with Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann in 1938 — shortly after she fled the Nazis and settled in Sweden. But solely Hahn was awarded the 1944 Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the invention. It’s an injustice that Marissa Moss of San Francisco highlights on this participating ebook, which incorporates Moss’ personal illustrations originally of every chapter.

A prolific youngsters’s ebook writer who’s greatest identified for the “Amelia’s Pocket book” sequence, Moss instructed J. she realized about Meitner from her son, who’s finding out astrophysics in graduate faculty. “I fell in love together with her,” Moss mentioned. “She was born at a time when ladies in Austria couldn’t even go to highschool, and but she crammed in highschool and went to school when the regulation was modified. She was so decided to review science, which was not one thing ladies did. She simply had a drive of braveness and conviction that I discover inspiring.”

How did Meitner really feel about her inadvertent contribution to the creation of nuclear weapons? “She was very clear that she by no means needed it for use for weapons,” Moss mentioned, noting that Meitner refused to collaborate on the Manhattan Mission. “After the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, she talked about how there was an obligation to ensure this didn’t occur once more.”

Lastly, for younger readers who’re excited by the supernatural, there’s a lot to savor in two Kabbalah-inspired image books.

“Malkah’s Notebook: A Journey into the Mystical Aleph-Bet” (The Collective Book Studio, 312 pages. all ages) follows a younger woman in an historical metropolis as she learns the Hebrew alphabet and explores the key meanings behind the letters — first together with her father’s assist, after which, as she grows older, on her personal. Creator Mira Z. Amiras, an anthropologist who retired from San Jose State College in 2012, attracts on sources as various because the Zohar and archaeological reviews on historical Close to Jap deities.

A San Francisco resident, Amiras instructed J. the daddy character was impressed by her personal father, Seymour Fromer, who based the Magnes Assortment of Jewish Artwork and Life in Berkeley and who gave her her first alef-bet ebook. “I nonetheless have it, and to inform the reality, I feel it formed my complete life,” she mentioned. “I wouldn’t have mentioned it then, however what I realized was that the alef-bet is animistic, that’s, every letter is alive.”

“Malkah’s Pocket book” consists of astoundingly stunning illustrations by the Israel-based sofer and artist Josh Baum. A companion animated movie, “The Day Before Creation,” will be streamed without spending a dime on-line. (Amiras will discuss and read from the book on Aug. 28 at Afikomen Judaica in Berkeley.)

In David Fankushen’s “My Grandpa Has Superpowers” (Fulton Books, 28 pages, ages 5-9), a San Francisco grandfather positive factors mystical powers by way of his examine of Kabbalah. He makes use of these powers to assist his grandchildren overcome challenges of their lives.

He helps one discover his stolen bicycle by casting a spell over the thief, and he helps one other win a basketball sport by fashioning a brand new golem teammate out of the mud at Lake Merced.

“I’ve at all times loved making up tales for my very own grandchildren,” Fankushen, a retired doctor and former board president at Chochmat HaLev in Berkeley, instructed J. “I wrote this ebook as a enjoyable learn for kids who’ve related issues of their lives, and to show a number of facets of Jewish mysticism and kabbalistic historical past.”

All books talked about on this column are available to order from Afikomen Judaica in Berkeley and different on-line retailers.