Instead of running a traditional review of Ilana Kurshan’s Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together (St. Martin’s, 2025), I invited four fellow parents to discuss it with me, to have a kind of virtual book club. My fellow book clubbers are Molly Worthen, University of North Carolina professor, Arc contributor, and author of Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History from the Puritans to Donald Trump (Forum, 2025); Ross Douthat, New York Times columnist and author of Believe: Why Everyone Should Be Religious; Cyd Oppenheimer, attorney, editor, and host of the late podcast Book Talk; and Stuart Halpern, rabbi and program officer at the Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought at Yeshiva University.
We took turns writing to the group. I started off, and I took the liberty of having the last word, too.
—Mark Oppenheimer
Editor, Arc
Dear Friends:
Thanks so much for agreeing to join me in a book club to discuss Ilana Kurshan’s new book, Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together. I’ve never met Ilana (I don’t think), but she is a minor celebrity in the minor world of Jewish nonfiction: her last book, If All the Seas Were Ink, about reading through the Talmud, is cited often and approvingly. I was saying to my wife (more from her soon!) that I suspect the three best-selling works of Jewish-themed nonfiction of the past decade are Kurshan’s book, Sarah Hurwitz’s Here All Along, and Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews. I have no way to know if that’s true, but when I lie awake at night counting the books I haven’t sold, it’s those other books that feed the jealous beast.
I never read Kurshan’s last book, and I have not read much of the Talmud; this new book called out to me because I have, in fact, read to children. And that’s what this book is about: it’s a memoir of sorts, in which Kurshan discusses dozens of the books she has read to her five children, while taking detours into the biblical passages that these books remind her of, or somehow are in dialogue with. The central problem of the book is how one keeps up a rich reading life, when being a mother of many children eats up so much time. The answer, it turns out, is read to those children—a lot. So it’s a memoir, a book of days, a reading diary, a parenting journal, at times a COVID reminiscence—what would one call it? From my first skim, I liked that it defied genres; I liked that it seemed to offer a new way to write about parenting (which is the subject of so much bad writing); and I liked that I might learn something about many of the books that my children have read, or had read to them, but about which I knew nothing, because my wife does the lion’s share of the reading-aloud to our children. The book held out a lot of promise.
I enjoyed the book. It’s a brisk read. Kurshan is a companionable guide through children’s literature, and she has a light touch with the biblical allusions. If you didn’t already know your Hebrew Bible (roughly, what Christians call the Old Testament), you’d be able to fake your way through church coffee hour after reading this book. Just to get people oriented to Kurshan’s style, her way of placing children’s books in conversation with Torah, here’s a typical passage, in which she comments on the question of when to comment on, or change words in, problematic texts, and when to let them stand alone:
In his final address to the people of Israel in the book of Deuteronomy, Moses implores the people to follow God’s word, neither adding nor subtracting from it: “You shall not add anything to what I command you or take anything away from it, but keep the commandments of your God that I enjoin upon you” (4:2). I wonder, when I add or change words in the books that I read to my children, whether I am guilty of violating this commandment. What is the relationship between the written Torah—the Five Books of Moses—and the Oral Torah, the countless commentaries and interpretations that have resulted from centuries of engagement with that written text? Where does the text end and the commentary begin?
When reading aloud from [Laura Ingalls Wilder’s] Little House books, I become the storyteller, channeling Wilder’s voice. But when Wilder expresses sentiments that I find troubling, I try to interject my own explanations …
This passage made me realize how different Kurshan and I are, in two ways. First, if we believe her that, when editing or commenting upon Little House on the Prairie, she truly thinks of Moses’ injunction not to edit his commandments, then she is made of very different stuff from me. I go to synagogue every week, and hear the same stories that she hears, but I don’t instinctively put myself in biblical characters’ places the way Kurshan does. I never think, when encountering the story of Jacob, “What must it have been like to be the dad to such a difficult, large brood?”—even though I am myself the father to a large, occasionally difficult brood. But I may be the outlier here; the dominant mode of thinking about Torah today, it often seems, is looking for solidarity with the characters: when suffering infertility, we think of Sarah’s infertility; when in the midst of a sibling rivalry, we think of Jacob and Esau (among others). And so forth. That kind of intimacy with biblical characters is foreign to me.
For me, the interplay between Bible and life, never as strong as for Kurshan, works the other way: when I read a Bible story, I might think of my children, or my work, to help make sense of it. The Bible story is old and weird, and a contemporary analogue helps bring it alive, or bring it down to earth. But never, when I am dealing with an everyday situation of family or work, do I think, “Ah, it’s like in Torah, when … ” For Kurshan, life puts her in mind of the Bible, but for me, the Bible puts me in mind of life. So I guess that means that Kurshan lives closer to the Bible, somehow. Or it lives within her. I’m curious to hear how the rest of you feel about this, how Torah stories slot into your train of thought, or don’t.
My other reaction to the passage above is that I don’t “add or change words” when I read to children—which, it bears saying, I seldom do, once they are over a certain age, as my wife has the patience, interest, and vocal endurance for chapter books and beyond. But when I do read more mature books aloud (I read Tom Sawyer to one daughter), I say the swear words, the racial epithets, etc. But I understand why some other parents do some light editing. Recently, I was lying in bed next to my twelve-year-old daughter, reading Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to myself, silently. My daughter was reading something else, but she had recommended Smith’s book to me, based on my wife’s having read it aloud to her. When I got to the scene in which there’s an attempted rape, I muttered something out loud about it, and my daughter said to me, firmly, that that didn’t happen in the book. It turns out my wife had skipped that part when reading it aloud. Would I have done the same? I don’t think so. I’d have been tempted, but ultimately my fidelity to authorial intent is too strong—or perhaps it’s just my fear that, when my child someday figured out what I had done, she’d be mad at me.
But I am curious what the rest of you made of the book. Molly, what kind of reader-aloud are you? What’s Christian about your reading aloud, if anything? And did you like this book? Tell me what’s on your mind …
Sincerely,
Mark
Dear Mark:
Reading this book made me feel like a practical illiterate. As a professor, I read, write, and talk about books for a living, and I always have something to read with me on the bus. But compared to the almost nonstop consumption of texts that Kurshan describes, I am a pathetically casual reader. As a young woman, she read all the time, sometimes “falling asleep with my glasses on.” When she went into labor with her first child, she was in the middle of a book—and picked it up again right after he was born. Now her kitchen table’s centerpiece is a shtender, a wooden stand usually used to hold the Talmud and other religious books—repurposed to support whatever her family is reading between bites.
Children of the Book is a moving account of how reading can form the existential spine of a family’s life, bonding parents and children and connecting lazy time on the sofa with the most sacred moments in the synagogue. The conceit of the book, the dialogue between children’s books and Jewish scripture, gets across Kurshan’s most essential point: children’s books deserve to be taken seriously, and they can launch lifelong discovery and delight that have a very real spiritual dimension.
In one chapter, she recounts how she and her husband spent a rare date night at a children’s bookstore, thrilled to discover attractive new editions of classics from their own childhood that they could not wait to share at home. I felt that way about reading my daughter The Hobbit, Anne of Green Gables, and other staples of the bedtime shelf. They also take a risk on titles that neither of them has read: an illustrated edition of Robert Frost’s poem “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening;” an account of Eleanor Roosevelt’s childhood. Kurshan writes, “Both books unfold slowly, the narratives driven by horse-drawn carriages,” an antidote to the iPad-ization of her kids’ media diet. “We knew that each story contained a world we wanted them to inhabit.”
In recent years, I have loved discovering books that I did not know as a kid, and marveling as my daughter gains greater mastery of their story-worlds than I have. We learned about the Freddy the Pig series, by Walter Brooks, from a colleague whose children are older. The books—twenty-five in all, published between 1927 and 1958—star a talking, poetry-writing, mystery-solving pig named Freddy and his voluble animal friends, who live on a farm in upstate New York. In the first volume, Freddy Goes to Florida, the animals decide to escape the northern winter by walking south for a holiday. Along the way they charm senators in Washington, escape kidnappers, and find buried gold.
The plots of later books become progressively more convoluted. By the time you get to Freddy the Politician (1939), you find the animals are starting their own bank and holding an election for president of the First Animal Republic. When an authoritarian woodpecker named John Quincy steals the election, walls himself up in a life-size mechanical boy (invented in an earlier book, Freddy and the Clockwork Twin), and proceeds with a Napoleonic strategy to conquer neighboring farms, the animals’ plan to defeat him requires Freddy to disguise himself as an elderly Irish woman. If all this sounds like a whimsical, non-creepy version of Animal Farm, that may not be an accident. Scholars have speculated that George Orwell drew inspiration from the Freddy books.
My husband and I alternate bedtime duties, but reading every other chapter in such intricate stories has meant that both of us sometimes lose the thread. We have to ask our daughter to catch us up on what we missed and remind us of key developments in earlier books. It has been a delight to watch her develop encyclopedic knowledge of Brooks’s characters, from Mrs. Wiggins, a retiring cow with a booming laugh, to Old Whibley, a cantankerous owl who tells hard truths. She discusses her favorites every few months with fellow readers during a quarterly Zoom book club hosted by the Friends of Freddy. (We also subscribe to the fan club’s newsletter; a recent issue featured articles on topics such as “The Toponomastics of Freddy and Central New York State.”) The most dedicated club members gather for a conference once a year.
Most of the Friends of Freddy are older readers who grew up with these books. I’m grateful to them for showing my daughter what Kurshan makes so clear in her memoir: that the best children’s books do not talk down to children. They offer worlds that readers want to keep returning to even after they are grown. But that doesn’t mean they teleport us to a land of sensory overload and mental shortcuts, the way a video or an app does. Kurshan laments the grip of YouTube on her kids, and she’s not wrong to compare screens to the idols that constantly tempt Israel in the Torah.
Entering the world of a book takes more time and effort. But these “slow pleasures,” as she calls them, are worth it. There is, perhaps, a continuum between the experience of secular literature and religious experience: most religions teach that the point of such experience is to draw us beyond ourselves, to teach us to see beyond our blindspots to a deeper source of sustenance. “At the core of my faith lies the conviction that if we take the time to train ourselves to be sensitive to God’s presence, ultimately our lives will be fuller and more fulfilling,” Kurshan writes.
Ross, I’m passing this chain letter conversation onto you.
All the best,
Molly
Dear Molly:
I’ll pick up Mark’s question about Christianity and reading aloud, because Kurshan’s use of the Torah as an organizing structure made me think a bit about differences between Jews and Christians, or at least Jews and Catholics, in how we encounter our primary religious stories in our liturgies. Specifically, she talks about the way that Jews experience the books of Moses as an annual real-aloud experience, a single drama encountered in the same order, the same seasonally-linked rhythm, year after year after year—much like a parental reader returning again and again to the same beloved book.
Like you, Mark, I do not necessarily leap to a biblical text or character when confronted with a secular experience or story. My Protestant friends might attribute that to Catholicism’s failure to be adequately biblical, but I wonder if it’s also about way I encounter the Bible at the Mass; I wonder if I might be more attuned to biblical stories if I had the recurring Jewish rhythm to my year rather than the Catholic one, which has a much more haphazard and non-linear feel. Catholics certainly read from the Old and New Testaments, but there is only a clear narrative arc in our liturgy for brief periods of the year, in Lent and in Advent, and much of the time the readings feel thematic rather than chronological—and also they’re on a three-year rather than a one-year cycle!
Maybe this makes our religious observance feel a little less like the kind of read-aloud parental storytelling that Kurshan is interested in, and maybe it loses a little power as a consequence. The Catholic calendar is powerful, don’t get me wrong, and there is a seasonal rhythm to the feasts and readings—but as a reader or a listener (a parent or a child?), there is a specific intensity to the Christmas and Easter readings, a sense of narrative momentum, that I experience in those periods of the year but not so much otherwise.
And then, too, there’s the fact that the Five Books of Moses (whatever you may believe about multiple authors and redaction theory) present themselves as one story with one author, whereas the core of the New Testament is told in an explicitly multi-vocal way—four separate gospel authors overlapping and offering different details, the narrative restarting in a different voice and telling the same story, in a new way, four times over, if you read the gospels start to finish.
I wonder if that pattern feeds a Christian impulse toward sub-creations and secondary works that tell Christian-inflected stories in a way that’s closer to the Old Testament approach, where there’s just one voice, one narrative, running start to finish, like the readings of the Jewish year. Certainly I think that for some Christian parents both The Lord of the Rings and the Narnia books have ended up playing a quasi-scriptural role, like fifth gospels that lack the inspiration of the Holy Spirit but compensate by offering a kind of straightforward religious epic. (What does it say about me that on my sister’s birthday, March 25, my mind’s first association isn’t that it’s the Feast of the Annunciation but that it’s the day the One Ring went into the fires of Mount Doom?) And definitely there are characters and moments from these books that do crop up in my mind the way the characters in the Hebrew Bible seem to crop up for Kurshan—though I will say that the list extends beyond Christian fantasists to encompass, for instance, the rabbits of Watership Down. (What Would Bigwig Do?)
Cyd, are there characters from your reading to your kids that leap into your mind the way that biblical characters leap into Kurshan’s?
Very truly yours,
Ross
Dear Ross and friends:
It’s interesting, and perhaps not unexpected, that you all spend some time focusing on (to use Ross’s phrase) “Kurshan’s use of the Torah as an organizing structure,” or (to use Molly’s), “the dialogue between children’s books and Jewish scripture.” Obviously that is a central theme here, and yet it’s not the one that was of greatest interest to me, perhaps because I am less religiously inclined than Kurshan, or probably most of you. (Shh, don’t tell my husband. Oh, wait, too late, he’s reading this.)
I don’t have a broad knowledge of the Old or New Testament and I can say with certainty that I never find myself drawing parallels between the fictional universes I inhabit and biblical stories. But this book spoke to me anyway, as a reader and a mother, I think because of the way it views reading aloud and book-sharing with children as a way to create a closer family and to be a better parent.
There are multiple facets to that. First, I think Kurshan understands how meaningful it can be to share what we love with those we love. I once posted on Facebook (back in the days when I posted on Facebook): “Tonight I started reading The Secret Garden to Daughter #3 and Pride and Prejudice to Daughter #1. BEST. NIGHT. EVER.” Is there anything more rewarding, as a parent, than giving your child a gift that you remember bringing you so much joy back when you discovered it, and knowing that it is going to bring this particular child that much joy too? How much do I long, sometimes, to be able to read Little Women again for the very first time, not yet knowing Beth’s fate? You can never re-capture that first reading of a book, but reading it again to a child, vicariously experiencing their introduction to these characters, this world—it’s about the closest you’ll get. It’s pretty clear to me that Kurshan feels this too.
Then there’s the way that having a shared library allows us to create a common, private language within a very small circle. Kurshan talks about how, one night when there was a knock on the front door, her toddler piped up, “Slowly the knob turned”—a reference to James Marshall’s Miss Nelson books, favorites in our house too. In our house, at any moment, one of us is wont to cry out, “But why am I only worth seven cents?!?!” Visitors might think we’re odd, but we all know what we’re talking about. (I’ll see which amongst you can guess that reference). Not only do our shared books give us a framework in which to understand our own lived experiences, as the Bible does for others, but that framework makes us feel connected to each other. It makes us feel related. It makes us feel understood.
But maybe most important, and most resonant for me in Kurshan’s pages, is the way she sees (and I see) sharing books and reading aloud as a way to understand the individuals within our families as individuals, both in the ways they are like us and in the ways that they are not. Kurshan talks about the period of time in which her twin daughters refused to share books, insisting on having books to which they could lay a personal claim. It was, it seems to me, a way of the twins differentiating themselves, finding ways to shape their own identity beyond that all-too-often and convenient designation of “the twins.”
But, even without twins in our family, I’ve been surprised at the ways this manifests. I think I assumed I would have a literary canon that I would repeat, more or less in order, with each child, but that plan was upended with daughter #2. She didn’t like any of the books I read to daughter #1, so I found myself putting aside my beloved Noel Streatfeilds and reading Just Grace and the Mallory series. At just eighteen months, daughter #3 was eager to hear chapter books, but when I thought perhaps my problem was that I simply hadn’t tried chapter books early enough with daughters #1 and #2, and attempted it at eighteen months with daughter #4, she rudely ripped Ramona the Pest out of my hands, threw it across the room, and thrust Dear Zoo into my face. I tried Little House in the Big Woods with Daughter #1 when she was four; she was immediately terrified of the howling wolves, and we had to wait two years to return to it. On the other hand, I staunchly believed that Harry Potter was far too scary for anyone younger than a third-grader, only to be confronted by Daughter #4, who, at age three and a half, desperate to understand what her sisters were going on and on about, insisted that I read The Sorcerer’s Stone to her right then and there. We made our way through all seven volumes of Harry Potter three times (this is no joke) before she started kindergarten.
My point is: children are different. Reading to them is one way you find that out. One way you find out who they are.
And I think that this difference in what kids read, how they read, when they read, speaks to the ways that they are different from us, and that is just a microcosm of parenting at large: how to navigate raising a child who is not, it turns out, your clone. In some ways I have taken the most pleasure, as a mom, from the ways that my kids are different from me: daughter #1’s ability to kick a soccer goal; daughter #2’s skill at doing a back handspring on the balance beam or painting a landscape; daughter #3’s musical ear, her ability to teach herself guitar and play any Taylor Swift song after hearing it once. I look at them and think, “Wow. I made that. Me! That’s so cool. How is that possible??”
That said, parenting a kid who is different from you is also the hardest thing as a parent. I appreciated Kurshan’s honesty about her parenting struggles, so many of which I could relate to. Kurshan says of her eldest child, Matan: “I always try to get my work done immediately and I can’t understand why my son isn’t more like me.” Oh boy, Ilana, have I been there. I am there. They don’t always like the books I like. They sometimes watch YouTube shorts so insipid that I want to say, “She’s her father’s child.” While Kurshan spent a few paragraphs on the battle with screen time, I could have stood to hear more about that, and the other pastimes that her children enjoy but to which she can’t relate. I am sure that’s a rich seam to mine.
Kurshan is lucky, I think, in that all of her children, even Matan, are readers, and so when she is feeling the most different from them, the most distant, books can bring them back together. I wonder how she would react—how she would feel, what she would think, how she would parent—if one or more of her children decide, upon reaching adolescence, that he or she no longer identifies as a reader anymore (as so many teens seem to do).
Stuart, tossing it to you. Eager for your thoughts!
Warmly,
Cyd
Dear Cyd, et al.:
So much of Ilana’s book resonated with me, both as a parent of twins (a boy and a girl who are eight, and have a twelve-year-old older brother and a baby sister), and as an American-turned-Israeli who identifies with the Religious Zionist community. My kids have spent half of our four years living in Israel in a state of war, one that is both connected to the biblical promise of God to give the land to the Jews, and that has felt like some of the biblical battles.
I can’t imagine as they grow older my kids, or Ilana’s for that matter, will forget the sounds of sirens on October 7, 2023, sirens that shattered the festive celebrations of Simchat Torah, the holiday in which we celebrate the weekly completion of the Torah reading cycle, as we ran out of our synagogue to the nearby bomb shelter.
Since then, we’ve had more school days, synagogue services, car rides, and excursions to the local park interrupted by rockets than I care to count. Just this past summer, there was the sheltering in place, and the attendant cancellation of school and work, during the twelve days of war with Iran, as hundreds of ballistic missiles were shot down overhead. One friend quipped it was like COVID and October 7 had had a baby. Just last week, after returning from a much-needed summer breather in New Jersey, our school’s Meet the Teachers Night, kicking off the new Israeli school year, was cancelled early due to another attack by the Houthis (as in one of my twins’ favorite books, these pirates definitely weren’t polite).
Reflecting on the Binding of Isaac, Ilana writes, “I can identify with what it must have been like for Abraham to be both present and elsewhere, his eyes looking off into the distance to see the place from afar instead of gazing into the eyes of the child standing by his side.” These past couple of years have felt like that snapshot: anxiously awaiting what comes next, as my wife and I try to keep our children safe from what might be heading our way. From siren to siren, I’ve felt like the characters in another Halpern family bedtime staple, Worse and Worse on Noah’s Ark. “The weather in Noah’s neighborhood was terrible. It rained and rained and rained. It looked like it would never stop! Noah and his family crowded on board the ark. The animals got seasick. The skunks made a stink. Could things get any worse? … Things got WORSE!”
So I’m itching for a sequel. I would be curious to know how Ilana, with her natural affinity for biblical illusions, reflected with her children on the war with her kids. Did she debate whether Israel’s political leaders are David or Ahab? It’s journalists Jeremiah or Jonah? Are the IDF’s regiments Joshua’s troops fighting Amalek? Should they be? Did her kids seek solace in biblical tales, or did they prefer escapist reading like mine have, the twelve-year-old pillowing his bed with Archie comics and the twins delving into Dog Man graphic novels?
For some stability and regular routine these past few weeks, I recently got the older three kids to participate in Project 929 with me. It’s an international initiative to learn one chapter a day of the Hebrew Bible (between the Pentateuch, the Prophets, and the Writings, there are 929 chapters). It just launched its latest cycle. Living through these tough times together, and approaching the Jewish New Year, I’m thinking of Ilana’s reflection that it “all comes back to the beginning. The Torah is the source of the stories that Jews have been telling for millennia: Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy. We read our stories—the developments in our lives, and the books we share—against the backdrop of the Torah’s narrative, in the hope that our children will continue this story.” Here’s hoping the next chapter is a calm and comforting one.
Mark, punting the ball back to you as someone who has his finger on the pulse on the American religious scene. Could you see a comparable book emerging from another religious community, which has produced someone like Ilana who, as you wrote, “lives closer to the Bible, somehow. Or it lives within her”?
Best,
Stu
Dear Molly, Ross, Cyd, and Stu:
I’ll begin my final salvo by taking on Stu’s question: can I see another religious community producing a book like this? The simple answer is “Sure, why not?”—but it is more complicated than that. Ilana Kurshan, like Stu himself, is part of a wing of Judaism that is rigorously observant (keeps kosher, keeps the Sabbath, etc.) but is also open to secular art and culture. From what we know in the book, Kurshan is not an adherent to Stu’s Religious Nationalism, which roughly maps onto Modern Orthodoxy here in the U.S., but her “traditional egal” Judaism, which gives equal roles to men and women but also puts a strong emphasis on the mitzvot, or commandments, is similar in twinning religiosity and openness to the modern world. In other words, Stu and Kurshan both find themselves, broadly speaking, in the wing of observant Judaism that is not haredi, or what is sometimes called ultra-Orthodox; that wing, while being internally diverse, is more resistant to secular culture. Bedtime stories would feature Jewish characters, Jewish themes, a Jewish world—not ducks on the Boston Common, not frogs and toads, definitely not young wizards at boarding school.
The question, then, is to what extent other religions contain sub-groups with that level of religious knowledge and engagement and that ease with the secular world. Clearly, Molly’s Southern Baptist evaneglicalism fits the bill, although biblical literacy varies widely in that world, as it does in Ross’s Catholic world; plenty of Southern Baptists and Catholics have religious knowledge on a par with, say, your average Reform Jew, rathan than Ilana Kurshan or Stu. But I certainly know American Muslims who fast during Ramadan, know the Quran, more or less, and are comfortable reading Charlotte’s Web to their children.
The more interesting question, for me, is not whether there are plenty of religious people who are open to secular children’s lit—in every community, there are—but whether they actually read secular children’s lit. I chose you all as discussants, Molly and Ross and Cyd and Stu, because you are serious readers who, I know, want to pass that joy along to your children. But I also know religious Jews, as well as conservative Catholics and evangelical Protestants, who would have no objection, in principle, to reading Madeleine L’Engle or Sydney Taylor or J.K. Rowling to their children, but they don’t, because once the children are old enough to read by themselves, once they are out of picture books, reading is not the shared activity the family cultivates. They don’t read to their children for the same reason they don’t read to themselves: they aren’t readers.
The question I’d love to have answered is whether believing in holy religious texts—believing that Torah or Quran or Christian Scripture are true, or uniquely valuable guides to living—disposes one toward reading more in general. Molly might be poised to answer this, having recently moved into a Scripture-rich community when she was baptized as a Southern Baptist. I wonder if, among the people she meets at her megachurch, she recognizes any way in which their love of the New Testament moves them toward a love of reading, a practice that Americans of all faiths (and no faith) are abandoning? I suspect the answer is “no,” and that people like you—Molly and Ross, Cyd and Stu—will remain exceptional, keeping alive this love of books, sacred and profane alike.
Time to turn out the light and pull up the covers.
Til next time,
Mark