New Products

New parents get overwhelmed, regularly pushed to their limits and confused by contradictory feelings of elation and near-despair.

A recent New York Times article shared parenting advice you really need. One parent contributed this gem: "You're allowed to feel overwhelmed and overjoyed. You can be both. Feeling it all doesn't make you a bad parent. It makes you human." 

This is the premise behind the new book from Alicia Jo Rabins. Humorous, self-reflective, and comforting, Rabin’s musings on both heartening and cringe-worthy biblical examples of parenting can help any caregiver see beyond the detritus of day-today living with young children and recapture a sense of wonder at the process of raising small humans.

Can You See God in a Grapefruit?

by Aliza Abusch-Magder

from Salt & Honey: Jewish Teens on Feminism, Creativity, and Tradition

Thousands of juice packets. Sweet, tangy, sour. Packed so closely together in communities commonly called "pieces," and when you hand me a piece of your grapefruit, you hand me a little collection of individuals held together by a thin, opaque, fibrous skin.

When I passed the grapefruit tree on the way to the bank, I effortlessly plucked the ripe, perfumed, leathered teardrop slowly falling from its tired branch.

I casually held a world in my hand, a real-life Horton Hears a Who! 

Don't you see God in Dr. Seuss? Wasn't it divine?

Moments of profound introspection can start with a simple story.

With a new foreword by the publisher and a reflection by the now bestselling author looking back twenty years at his first book, The Extraordinary Nature of Ordinary Things is back to make us laugh and cry and notice the small things in our lives that are actually remarkable insights.  

“Revisiting these essays is . . . a reminder of who I was, still am, and always will be, and also how I have grown. For as long as I can remember, I have been interested in the ways the most particular and smallest experiences reveal the most universal truths. Much like how identifying the tiniest of particles t

We recently received a letter from “Concerned Citizen,” an anonymous 8^th grader from Boston, who noticed that in the Hebrew series Z’Man L’Tefilah (Time for Prayer) “every single illustration in the book depicts white people,” and urged us to do better than to present “a singular image of Jews.”

The student is right. This series, developed in the 1980s by the publishing company A.R.E., is illustrated with small line drawings that present what could be called an Ashkenazic world view, a view that North American Jews are exclusively descended from the Eastern European Jews who immigrated during the late 1800s and early 1900s as they fled pogroms and other atrocities.

Behrman House took over distribution of this series in the early 2000s, and while we regularly review already published titles, as a small independent publisher we do not often have the budget to go back and

The Menu is Overwhelming

by Emanuelle Sippy

from Salt & Honey: Jewish Teens on Feminism, Creativity, and Tradition

Sometimes age is as muddled as life's unanswerable questions.

Arbitrary, in our cravings for adulthood and infancy. 

Forget deciding--knowing alone is a task so cumbersome

that control is not envied but rather exiled.

When worry overpowers, I order life without

obligation,

nuance,

and choice.

The Essential Seder: A Contemporary Haggadah

By Deborah Gross-Zuchman

This concise haggadah contains the essential elements for a short, authentic seder. Its small trim size, straightforward text, and bright collage art will capture the attention of all seder participants and spark lively conversation about social justice, freedom, and history. Ideal for the host or seder leader who wants to run a short but meaningful seder, bring a modern sensibility and fresh language to the observance, and add beauty to the seder table.

 What we overheard when we showed it at the URJ Biennial in December: “This has all the parts I want and none of the stuff I usually have to skip over!! And the good songs, too!”
40 pages.

"Strong debut . . . this nuanced portrait of the state of American Judaism proffers a cogent vision of how to revitalize the faith." --Publishers Weekly

By Rabbi Joshua Stanton and Rabbi Benjamin Spratt

Foreword by the Rev. Kaji Dousa. Afterword by Dr. Eboo Patel

Find out more, read reviews, see the table of contents here.

AVAILABLE NOW!

By Rabbi Abraham Skorka

Excerpted from Returning to Life After the Storm: Hope and Wisdom from Jewish Sources, Behrman House, 2021 

As you read this, the pandemic began about two years ago. Vaccines have since been created and have been found mostly effective, but too many people have also refused to take them, and too many people in the world have not had easy access to them.