“Lesléa was funny, sarcastic and she seemed to really know how to speak to this generation,” said Hillel at Stanford Rabbi Mychal Copeland, who attended Newman’s talk. As a writer, if I try to please people, then I’m not doing my job,” Newman said via telephone from her Massachusetts home a few days after she spoke at Hillel at Stanford. “If my work offends someone, I can’t really help that. “When I was growing up, there were no Jewish children’s books, we had ‘Dick and Jane’ - and so I knew how important it was to see a family like your own reflected in a children’s book.”Īnd so in 1990, she published her first children’s book, “Heather Has Two Mommies,” which led to a public outcry from conservative parents who worried that the book would corrupt young children. “I took it off the shelves and started to cry in the bookstore, it was such an emotional thing for me to see that book,” Newman said. Moskowitz and the Sabbath Candles,” a picture book that tells the story of how a pair of Shabbat candlesticks made a strange new house feel like home. The seriousness of that situation first hit her in the children’s book section of a Northampton bookstore, when she picked up “Mrs. Yes, she was a lesbian, but she also had once been a child confused over a dearth of books showing traces of her own family’s Jewish observance and culture. Newman understood the gravity of the request.
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