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• Yes, We'll Do It! (Dafna Strum, Shahar Kober, Ilana Kurshan) - 2025 Kalaniot Books, Moosic, PA
• Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together - 2025 St. Martin's Press, New York, NY
• The Hedgehog Who Said Who Cares? (Neri Aluma ; illustrated by Amit Trainin ; translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2024 Kalaniot Books, Moosic, PA
• BAIT, Nati. Uri and the King of Darkness: A Hanukkah Story (Nati Bait (Author), Carmel Ben Ami (Illustrator), Ilana Kurshan (Translator)) - 2024 Kalaniot Books, Moosic, PA
• Seven Good Years: A Yiddish Folktale (Shoham Smith ; illustrated by Eitan Eloa ; translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2023 Kalaniot Books, Moosic, PA
• The Sages Volume V: The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel (Rabbi Binyamin Lau, author ; Ilana Kurshan, translator) - 2023 Maggid Books, New Milford, CT
• The Melody (Oded Burla ; illustrated by Assaf Benharroch ; translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2022 Kalaniot Books, Moosic, PA
• A Snake, A Flood, A Hidden Baby: Bible Stories for Children (Meir Shalev ; illustrated by Emanuele Luzzati, translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2021 Kalaniot Books, Moosic, PA
• Penguin Cafe at the Edge of the World (written by Nurit Zarchi ; illustrated by Anat Wrshavsky ; translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2021 Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, WA
• Yearning to Return: Reflections on Yom Kippur (Rabbanit Yemima Mizrachi ; edited by Yikrat Friedman ; translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2019 Maggid Books, New Milford, CT
• A Tale of Two Cats (written by Ayin Hillel ; drawn by Shimrit Elkanati ; [translated by Ilana Kurshan]) - 2019 Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, WA
• Mr. Fibber (Yirmi Pinkus ; translator Ilana Kurshan) - 2019 Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, WA
• The Life of a Coat (story by Kadya Molodowsky ; illustrated by Batia Kolton ; translator: Ilana Kurshan) - 2019 Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, WA
• Eddie Spaghetti (Rutu Modan ; based on the work of Aryeh Navon and Lea Goldberg ; translator, Ilana Kurshan) - 2019 Fantagraphics Books, Seattle, WA
• If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir - 2017 St. Martin's Press, New York, NY
• A Bride for One Night: Talmud Tales (Ruth Calderon ; translated by Ilana Kurshan) - 2014 University of Nebraska Press , Philadelphia, PA
• Why is This Night Different from all Other Nights?: "The Four Questions" around the World (Ilana Kurshan ; introduction by Joseph Telushkin) - 2008 Schocken Books, New York, NY

• Ilana Kurshan website - https://ilanakurshan.com/

  About Ilana Kurshan

  Credit: Sharon Gabbay

  Ilana Kurshan is the author of If All the Seas Were Ink, winner of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish literature. She has worked in literary publishing both in New York and in Jerusalem as a translator and foreign rights agent, and as the books editor of Lilith Magazine. Kurshan is a graduate of Harvard University (BA, summa cum laude, History of Science) and Cambridge University (M.Phil, English literature). She teaches and studies Torah in Jerusalem, where she lives with her husband and five children.

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  Ilana Kurshan

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  From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
  Ilana Kurshan
  אילנה קורשן
  Nationality American Israeli
  Alma mater Harvard University (BA, History of Science, 2000)
  Cambridge University (M.Phil, English literature, 2002)
  Occupation(s) Writer, translator, editor
  Spouse Daniel Feldman[1] (5 children)
  Awards 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature
  Website https://ilanakurshan.com
  Ilana Kurshan (Hebrew: אילנה קורשן) is an American-Israeli author who lives in Jerusalem. She is best known for her memoir of Talmud study amidst life as a single woman, a married woman, and a mother, If All the Seas Were Ink.

  Personal life
  Kurshan was raised on Long Island as the daughter of a Conservative rabbi and an executive at UJA-Federation of New York. She graduated from Huntington High School, Harvard College, and Cambridge University, where she studied the History of Science and English Literature. She worked as an editor and literary agent in New York before moving to Jerusalem with her first husband for his rabbinic studies. Although her first marriage crumbled, Kurshan stayed in Jerusalem, working as a translator and foreign-rights agent. In her memoir, she describes how she found a lifeline in the Daf Yomi, the daily study of the Babylonian Talmud, applying its richness to her life as first a single woman, and then as a remarried wife and mother.[2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9]

  Professional career
  In addition to her own books, Kurshan has translated books by Ruth Calderon and Binyamin Lau from Hebrew to English.[10] She is the Book Review Editor for Lilith magazine,[11] and her writings have appeared in Lilith, The Forward, The World Jewish Digest, Hadassah, Nashim, Zeek, Kveller, and Tablet.[12]

  Selected works
  If All the Seas Were Ink, 2017
  Why is This Night Different from All Other Nights?: The Four Questions Around the World,2008
  Translation: A Snake, A Flood, A Hidden Baby (originally in Hebrew by Meir Shalev), Kalaniot Books, 2021.[13]
  Translation: Yes, We’ll Do It (originally published in Hebrew), Kalaniot Books, 2025.[1][2]

• Deborah Harris Agency - https://www.thedeborahharrisagency.com/authors/ilana-kurshan

  Ilana Kurshan
  Ilana Kurshan is a graduate of Harvard (BA, summa cum laude) and has a Master’s in English literature from Cambridge. She has worked in literary publishing both in New York and in Jerusalem, as a translator and foreign rights agent and as the books editor of Lilith magazine. She has also taught Talmud in both Israel and the U.S. Her writing has appeared in Tablet, Lilith, Hadassah, The Forward, Kveller, The World Jewish Digest, Nashim, and The Jewish Week. She lives in Jerusalem with her husband and four children.

  Winner of the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

• Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb - https://deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com/2017/09/q-with-ilana-kurshan.html

  Sunday, September 24, 2017
  Q&A with Ilana Kurshan

  Ilana Kurshan, photo by Debbi Cooper
  Ilana Kurshan is the author of the new memoir If All the Seas Were Ink, which recounts her experiences studying the rabbinic teachings found in the Talmud. She also has written the book Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?, and has worked as book review editor of Lilith magazine. Her work has appeared in a variety of publications, including Tablet and Hadassah. She lives in Jerusalem.

  Q: Why did you decide to write this memoir, and what do you hope people take away from it?

  A: I never set out to write a memoir about the Talmud. When I began learning I was in the throes of a painful divorce. I was living in Jerusalem, thousands of miles from my family and closest friends, and I was awfully depressed. I felt like time stretched ahead of me inexorably, and all I had to look forward to was the prospect of growing older with every passing day.

  I had a friend I used to jog with, and one morning, on one of our runs, she mentioned that she had started studying daf yomi, Hebrew for “daily page,” an international program to complete the entire Talmud in seven and a half years at the rate of one page a day.

  Immediately something lit up inside me. I thought about how if every day I learned another page of Talmud, then with each passing day, I would not be just one day older, but one day wiser. I thought about how moving on is about putting one foot in front of the other, or turning page after page. And I told myself that if every day I turned a page, then eventually a new chapter would have to begin.

  And so for a runner like me, daf yomi was like a treadmill, pulling me ahead with each passing day and eventually showing me the way forward.

  What I discovered about the Talmud surprised me. Unlike later works that followed from it, the Talmud is not a law code intended to tell Jews how to behave, but a record of rabbinic legal conversations in which the questions are left open and resolved. It is a text for those who are living the questions, rather than those who have found the answers. I found myself drawn into the rabbinic discussions, following the lines of the rabbis’ arguments and adding my own voice into the conversation.

  In the classic printing of the Talmud, the Talmudic text appears in the center of the page, and it is surrounded by later generations of commentaries. Soon I began adding my own comments in the margins of my volumes of Talmud. When I had more to say than could fit in the margins, I wrote journal entries and blog posts.

  All that writing became the basis for my book. The rabbis teach in tractate Sanhedrin, “Even though one’s ancestors have left us a scroll of the Torah, it is a religious obligation to write one for ourselves.” And so that is what I did – my book is my Torah, my response to seven and a half years of daily Talmud study, and my journal of those years.

  Each chapter in the book corresponds to another tractate of the Talmud, and so essentially I seek in the book to provide readers with a personal guided tour of the Talmud.

  I hope some readers may be inspired to pick up the Talmud for themselves after reading my book, but perhaps more importantly I hope that readers will take away from my book an appreciation for the power of learning to make the world endlessly interesting. There is always more to learn, so there is always a reason to get out of bed in the morning, no matter how bleak it all might seem.

  Q: How did your study of daf yomi change how you think about yourself, and also about religion?

  A: Daf yomi transformed my life from the outset. When I began learning, it was a very solitary pursuit – I would listen to podcasts of the daily page of Talmud alone in my apartment.

  The Talmud teaches that “One who is walking on his way and has no companion should occupy himself with Torah study” (Eruvin 54a). That’s how it was for me in the beginning – daf yomi was my companion during what was otherwise a rather lonely stretch of life.

  But as I soon realized, daf yomi is never really solitary, because it is essentially the world’s largest book club. Tens of thousands of individuals learn daf yomi worldwide, and they are all quite literally on the same page—following a schedule fixed in 1923 in Poland by the founder of daf yomi, Rabbi Meir Shapiro.

  For Rabbi Shapiro, the whole world was a vast Talmud classroom with students connected by a world wide web of conversational threads. Invoking a similar image, the rabbis of the Talmud described the Talmud class as a vineyard, with students seated in rows like an orderly arrangement of vines.

  Daf yomi was a way of inhabiting a virtual classroom, sitting in a seemingly empty row and learning by myself while at the same time sensing the ghostly presences of those in the rows in front who had studied those same passages in previous generations.

  And there were other presences too, because further along in the row where I was sitting were fellow daf yomi learners on the other side of Jerusalem, in Bnei Brak, and in London, Manhattan, Monsey, and wherever in the world there were people of the book.

  When I realized this—that I was essentially inhabiting a virtual classroom—I was inspired to join a real daf yomi class that met at 6am at a local Orthodox shul. I was the only woman in the class, but the rabbi welcomed me with a warm smile and a twinkle in his eye, and soon I became one of the guys. And so slowly my community began to form around daf yomi.

  A year after I started daf yomi, I began dating again – just when I got up to the order known as Nashim (Women), a large section of the Talmud encompassing seven tractates that deal with issues of marriage and personal status. Over the course of Nashim I fell in and out of love several times.

  Four years after my divorce I met the man I would go on to marry—who also began studying daf yomi—at a class on the weekly Torah portion, the section of the Torah that would be read in synagogue on the upcoming Shabbat. And so Torah became a companion, but it also brought my companion into my life.

  Daniel and I married just a few months after we met, and by our third anniversary we had three children, a son and twin daughters. When I finished my first daf yomi cycle at age 35, our son was two and a half, and our twins were approaching their first birthday.

  And so the Talmud followed me through the various twists and turn my life took – through divorce, Aliyah officially moving to Israel, dating, marriage, pregnancy and motherhood, all of which unfolded against the backdrop of my daily Talmud study.

  T.S. Eliot famously wrote in The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock— I have measured out my life in coffee spoons. I have measured out my life in Talmudic tractates—I remember various experiences in my 20s and 30s based on what I was learning in daf yomi at the time, and I associate Talmudic passages with what was going on in my life when I learned them.

  Part of what I discovered in my years of daf yomi study is that living a life of Torah is not necessarily about religious observance, but about a way of reading Jewish texts against the backdrop of one’s life experiences, such that one’s life is transformed by the text, and the text is transformed by one’s life.

  Over the course of my years of Talmud study, I engaged in conversation with the ancient rabbis while cooking Shabbat meals, composed sonnets about my favorite Talmudic passages to court the man I eventually married, and sang passages aloud to my children while pushing them in the stroller. I discovered that no two people read the same text in exactly the same way.

  And here it may be useful to invoke the rabbinic analogy between Torah—a general term used to refer to Jewish learning—and water. Just like water, which takes the shape of its container, Torah takes our shape when we learn it. All of us become vessels for what we learn, and our learning takes on our shape. In my book I try to show how we, as readers, give shape to the text, and how the text can shape us into the people we seek to become.

  Q: You combine a discussion of your studies with a discussion of your personal life. What did you see as the right balance between the two?

  A: This was a real tension for me, not because I struggled to find the right balance, but because I was so reluctant to reveal anything about my personal life at all.

  The rabbis of the Talmud speak of the notion of hezek re-iya, the idea that being seen constitutes a real form of damage. For me this has always felt very real. I grew up as a rabbi’s daughter, From an early age my siblings and I learned never to reveal more than we needed about our family, and I’ve always been a private person.

  There are things I was terrified to share in this memoir, and yet I wrote the book initially for myself, never dreaming it would be published, so I guess in the early drafts I was more open and more bold. And then when it came time for publication, these sections had already become so much a part of how I understood the Talmudic text that I could not possibly omit them.

  I shared details in spite of myself, because I felt that either they illuminated the text or made an argument for a way of reading the text in which the text is a commentary on life, and life is a commentary on the text. This way of reading necessarily required a certain degree of exposure.

  There’s a Tamudic story I love about an encounter between a wise sage, Rabbi Joshua, and the daughter of the Roman emperor. Rabbi Joshua was a great Torah scholar but he was also a very ugly rabbi. The daughter of the Roman emperor took one look at him and said, “How can such beautiful wisdom be contained in so ugly a vessel?”

  Rabbi Joshua, the ugly vessel for beautiful Torah, came back at her with a question of his own. “Does your father store his wine in clay vessels?” “Of course,” she said, doesn’t everyone? “But he’s the emperor,” said R. Joshua. “Shouldn’t he store his wine in the finest gold vessels?” She acknowledged that he had a point. So she transferred all her father’s wine to gold vessels – where immediately it spoiled.

  This story speaks to the relationship between who we are and what we learn. All of us are vessels for the Torah we study, and the Torah we study fills us and assumes our shape – much as wine and all liquids take the shape of their containers.

  And there is a chemical reaction that takes place between who we are and what we learn – we are transformed by the Torah we study, and the Torah we study is transformed by our encounter with it. And so that is why my book is as much about myself as it is about the Talmud, and as much about Talmud as it is about myself.

  Q: How was the book's title chosen, and what does it signify for you?

  A: The rabbis teach that even if all the heavens were parchment, and all the forests quills, and all the seas were ink, it would be impossible to record all the glory and majesty of God’s Torah.

  And this brings me to something interesting that I discovered about studying Jewish texts, which is that the more you learn and the more you know, the more you realize how much yet you have to learn and how much more you want to know.

  Our tradition is infinitely dense – between any two lines of Talmud, or any two verses of the Torah, there are an infinite number of commentaries that raise more and more questions and suggest further interpretive possibilities. There is always more to understand, and always more to say.

  My book is, in a sense, my attempt to set my quill to parchment to try and capture some of what I learned each day. But even though my initials are ink—my full name is Ilana Nava Kurshan—and even though I have been immersing myself in the Talmud for over a decade now, I am still haunted by the sentiment expressed by the Talmudic sage Rabbi Eliezer on his deathbed: "I have skimmed only as much knowledge as a dog laps from the sea" (Sanhedrin 68a).

  Perhaps that’s why I draw so much inspiration from the prayer traditionally cited upon completing a volume of Talmud, a prayer commonly known as Hadran. Hadran comes from the word for return, though in modern Hebrew is also the term for encore. This is one way the rabbis use the term, suggesting that the text continues to go on even after we have finished with it, since there is always more to learn.

  According to this understanding, the prayer means “may we return to you, and may you return to us”: May we have the opportunity to study this tractate again (because inevitably we’ll forget some of what we learn), and may it come back to us (because we hope that some of what we learn with stay with us).

  The prayer gives voice to my fervent belief in the power of learning to make the world endlessly interesting – there is always more to learn, which means that yes, even in life’s most difficult moments, there is always a reason to get out of bed in the morning. But in classic Talmudic wordplay, Hadran, from the word Hadar, also means “beauty and glory.”

  So the prayer can also mean: “Our beauty is from you, and your beauty is from us,” which conveys the notion that we, with our own individual life experiences and our own unique perspectives, can beautify the study of Talmud; and Talmud can beautify us. I hope I succeed, in my book, in sharing some of that beauty.

  Q: What are you working on now?

  A: I work as a translator of books from Hebrew to English. At present I’m translating a novel set during Talmudic times, a project that combines my love of literature with my passion for Talmud.

  My next translation project will be another book in a series of biographies of the sages of the Talmud – I’ve been translating the books in this series for several years.

  All along, though, I continue to study daf yomi—I’m now into my second cycle, which keeps giving me flashbacks to where I was when I first learned these pages. Recently my husband and I celebrated our daf yomi anniversary – we came to the page we’d studied on our wedding day seven and a half years ago.

  We’ve been through a lot together – four children, 2,700 pages of Talmud, and now a house full of preschoolers. So that keeps me busy, too, but it also continues to furnish me with inspiration for my writing.

  I’m not writing a new book, but I keep writing about Talmud as I learn it, so I suppose I’m writing the same book all over again. It’s a book I can’t imagine ever stopping to write, just like I can’t imagine life without learning. It just keeps returning to me, and I keep returning to it, which is what the Hadran prayer is all about.

  Q: Anything else we should know?

  A: What has it been like to study Talmud as a woman? As a modern woman reader of Talmud, it has been very exciting to encounter a text that for 1,500 years has been regarded primarily as the province of men – not to mention men who considered themselves experts in women’s physiology and psychology.

  I am fascinated by the rabbis' assumptions about women’s attitudes toward marriage and children, and I wonder how many of these assumptions still ring true in an era in which women can live independently, support themselves, and have children out of wedlock without undue social sanction.

  To give just one example – the rabbis said it was so important for a woman to be married that she would do so even if her husband were the size of an ant, because that way she will not lack for lentils in her pot. It seems that the Talmud could not imagine a woman who could be both happy and single.

  When I encountered that line for the first time, I was single, and I wondered to what extent this was still true. Is there a sense that a woman would do anything to be married?

  Around that time a friend bought me a vase and told me that the next time I had a boyfriend and he brought me flowers, I could put them in the vase. I said to myself, no, I think I'll use it for lentils, because I buy lentils by the kilo.

  For me that was very empowering. I copied out that line from the Talmud onto a piece of masking tape and stuck it on the vase: She doesn't lack for lentils if she has a man.

  I’m intrigued to see how modern women respond to statements like these-- these texts have been ploughed through by generations of scholars, but for Jewish women they remain fertile ground for gleaning new insights.

  --Interview with Deborah Kalb

• Tablet - https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/kurshan-bringing-daf-yomi-to-life

  Bringing ‘Daf Yomi’ to Life. And Vice Versa.
  In her new memoir ‘If All the Seas Were Ink,’ Ilana Kurshan recounts her time in Israel—one page of Talmud at a time
  by
  Beth Kissileff
  September 05, 2017
  Illustration: Tablet Magazine
  Illustration: Tablet Magazine
  “I don’t drive,” author Ilana Kurshan told me in a recent phone interview, “because I pretty much try to avoid anything that can’t be done while reading a book.” (“Swimming is an exception,” she admitted, “but I memorize poetry while I swim.”)

  And what, exactly, does the Jerusalem-based Kurshan read while she’s riding the bus, or walking, instead of driving? Novels and rabbinical literature, sometimes. But as she recounts in her new memoir If All the Seas Were Ink, the Talmud has been her most frequent text of choice for many years. The book is a record of her beginning the vast task that is reading daf yomi—all 2,711 pages of the Babylonian Talmud, one page every day for seven-and-a-half years—and the life she led while doing so. “Life and text constantly inform each other,” she told me. She said that she tries to live with the Talmud embedded “into the fabric of my life,” and calls the Talmud her soundtrack, which “my life unfolds against.”

  For instance, Kurshan writes about her trips during her first year of marriage to her second husband: “In the Tower of London we studied Sanhedrin’s laws about how a person is hanged, and at the Palais de Justice we reviewed the procedure for interrogating a witness.” Even the food she describes has Talmudic connections: She describes making a dish she dubs “Reish LaQuiche,” a quiche named for Talmudic sage Reish Lakish, or referring to a dessert containing a cup of pomegranate seeds as “Rabbi Yohanan” since, as she explains in the book, “Rabbi Yohanan’s beauty is compared to a glass of pomegranate seeds in the sunlight.”

  If All the Seas Were Ink started as a series of blog posts that Kurshan wrote about her studies, beginning with limericks on the text of the day. Kurshan has always learned by writing poems; in high school, she wrote poetry about math that was published in magazines for math teachers. “Things resonate in an uncanny way, in light of the Gemara,” she told me. For her, the pages of the Talmud “mark milestones in my kids’ lives,” she said. The first birthday of her twin daughters fell at the time she began writing the book, for instance. When one of her twins got teeth before her sister and would bite her repeatedly, Kurshan said, “I was in the midst of the Talmud’s discussion of the shor muad, the ox which is known to have gored at least three times, and which the rabbis of the Talmud invoke to refer to one of four general categories of damages.” This understated sense of humor, comparing a 1-year-old biter with a goring ox, is typical of Kurshan’s oeuvre.

  Kurshan started learning Talmud after a painful divorce from her first husband; as the memoir unfolds, Kurshan adapts slowly to life as a single woman again, falls in love with someone who also studies daf yomi, has four children, and keeps studying throughout her lived milestones. So for Kurshan, studying Talmud is more than a religious exercise. “A lot is very personal,” she said, “a way of marking time.” She writes: “It took me a while—quite a few tractates—before I found my stride. And yes, like T.S. Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, who measured out his life in coffee spoons, I have come to measure out mine in tractates, referring to periods in my life by what I was up to in the Talmud.”

  ***

  Kurshan grew up on Long Island as the daughter of a Conservative rabbi and an executive at the New York Jewish Federation, and attended Jewish day school through eighth grade. She grew up in “a home filled with Jewish books,” but did not see anyone learning Talmud regularly. In college at Harvard, she majored in the history of science and then went to Cambridge to study literature before moving to New York to work in publishing. Only when she came to Israel in 2004 did she take what she calls a “very introductory level” Talmud class at Jerusalem’s Conservative Yeshiva that she considers her “first introduction to rigorous Talmud study.” She is now a teacher at that school. Rabbi Daniel Goldfarb of the Conservative Yeshiva said of Kurshan’s teaching that “she presents text well, either because she knows it or learns it well, text and context.”

  “I do not think of myself as a teacher,” Kurshan explains in her book. “I tend to prefer to work in quiet solitude, alone in the library with a book I am reading, translating, or editing. But the Talmudic sages extol the value of teaching, asserting that one who learns but does not teach resembles a fragrant myrtle tree in the deserted wilderness (Rosh Hashanah 23a)—perhaps the rabbinic equivalent of the Buddhist koan about the tree falling in the forest with no one around.”

  Kurshan also works at a Jerusalem literary agency as a professional translator of books by Ruth Calderon (whose first speech teaching Talmud in the Knesset went viral) and Rabbi Benny Lau (whose classes she also takes at Jerusalem’s Ramban synagogue), as well as fiction by Dalia Betolin-Sherman, the first Ethiopian woman to publish fiction in Hebrew. Her boss (and agent for this book), Deborah Harris—whose clients include David Grossman, Yuval Noah Harari, Dorit Rabinyan, Sayed Kashua, Meir Shalev, and Evan Fallenberg—said that Kurshan “is truly brilliant, funny, and knows thousands of poems by heart, which she can quote at any given opportunity.”

  Kurshan is part of a new group of women scholars and teachers in Israel and America at universities and women’s learning institutions who are reading Talmud in a different way. Rabbi Gail Labovitz, professor of rabbinic literature at the Ziegler School of American Jewish University, told me: “Women always read at one degree of remove because we are not the intended audience” for the text.

  “When a learned and sensitive and wise woman like Ilana reads [Torah], new sides of the learning itself are revealed,” said Calderon. “Ilana meets the Torah in an extremely meaningful fashion and also in a fashion that is personal and free.”

  Today online, one can find different approaches to Daf Yomi: Adam Kirsch’s in Tablet; Jeremy Brown’s Talmudology, which discusses scientific issues on the page of the day; haiku daf yomi; or artist Jacquelline Nichols’ Draw Yomi blog. What makes Kurshan’s memoir unique is her explication of the text and the ways she relates it to her personal life. One learns much about the vastness of the text; as Kurshan writes in her introduction about her first journaling and writing limericks on the day’s learning that she “was doing just what the sages of the Talmud had done—I was trying to make my learning so much a part of me that I, like Rabbi Eliezer, might someday be able to refer to ‘my two arms, like two wrapped Torah scrolls’ (Sanhedrin 68a)—as if I, too, could inscribe Torah on my heart.” When Kurshan begins the story she is divorced and alone; by the end, she is happily married and a mother of four children. What accompanied her in the transition is the text, as she writes: “The Talmud surprised me at nearly every turn, and while there were topics I found less interesting than others, there was something that caught my eye on almost every page—a folk remedy employed to heal an ailing sage, a rude insult leveled at one rabbi by another, a sudden interjection from a rabbi’s angry wife.”

  Jeffrey Rubenstein, Skirball Professor of Jewish Thought and Literature at New York University, praised Kurshan’s memoir: “I know of no other book that brings the Talmud to life by making its traditions so relevant to modern times.”

  If one knows a bit about the Talmud, one will learn more from this book; if one knows nothing, this is an introduction by someone who is trying to live both with and in the text. Readers will be exposed to a huge variety of literary allusions and poetry as well as some of the pleasures and difficulties of living as an Anglo immigrant in Israel.

  One frustration in reading a memoir about life in Israel is a total absence of a mention of Arabs and others who live there. Nonetheless, part of the liveliness of Kurshan’s memoir comes from her life in the country where she has lived for a decade, a place where “billboards are ads for shiurim [classes],” she told me, because “Jerusalem is the capital of Jewish learning.”

  “I live close to where the beit hamikdash once stood, the place of the rabbis’ greatest love and longing,” said Kurshan. She then recounted a section of the Talmud that discusses a rabbi who comes from Babylonia to Israel and discovers that the very air of Israel makes a person wiser. “I never wrote creatively in America,” she said, noting that her learning in Israel has given her “so much to say.”

• Jewish Women's Archive - https://jwa.org/blog/bookclub/interview-ilana-kurshan-about-if-all-seas-were-ink

  An Interview with Ilana Kurshan about "If All The Seas Were Ink"
  April 15, 2019
  Dina Adelsky
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  If All The Seas Were Ink book cover and Ilana Kurshan headshot
  Ilana Kurshan with the book cover for If All The Seas Were Ink.

  JWA sat down with author Ilana Kurshan to discuss her award-winning memoir, If All The Seas Were Ink, one of our 2018-2019 Book List picks. If All The Seas Were Ink takes her readers on a guided tour of the Talmud while detailing her personal stories of love, loss, marriage, and motherhood.

  In If All The Seas Were Ink, you beautifully weave your personal experiences with fertility, labor, and parenting into this memoir, and explain how you have adapted prayers to include your lived experience. Can you share with us how you navigate altering traditional observances to allow for a more progressive, feminist perspective?

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  I grew up in an observant Jewish home, and I continue to find much meaning and inspiration in the liturgy and rituals of Jewish tradition. I have been reciting the same prayers since I first learned how to read, but as I grow and change, those prayers take on new meaning. For instance, there is a blessing in the silent Amidah prayer in which we ask God to endow us with knowledge, discernment, and wisdom. When I was in elementary school, I used to recite that blessing and add a silent prayer for God to help me do well on my spelling test the next day. Years later, when I started dating seriously, I began adding to that blessing an earnest plea to God to help me discern the man who was right for me. And now, as a mother, I often insert into this blessing a fervent prayer for God to help me figure out how to respond appropriately to my children, and how to help them grow and learn about the world.

  Jewish rituals, too, have taken on new meaning for me as I have progressed through various life stages. I learned to read from the Torah even before my bat mitzvah. As a teenager, I was always very excited to chant from the Torah, because I got to stand up on the bimah next to my father, who was the rabbi of the synagogue. Now as a mother, I always bring one of my daughters with me to shul when I read from the Torah. The gabbai pulls over a chair for her and she stands next to me as I read, sometimes holding an extra yad (Torah pointer) in her hand and pretending to follow along. It is important to me that my daughters grow up thinking that it is perfectly natural for women and men to take part in all aspects of Jewish life. This is not just about feminism—it’s about ensuring that all the members of the Jewish community have access to Torah.

  These days I rarely get to synagogue in time to hear the morning benedictions, but not long ago, I was at minyan early on a Thursday morning for my nephew’s bar mitzvah. It was an Orthodox shul and I stood behind the mechitza with my daughters, who were happily amusing themselves with a keychain while I davened. I heard the prayer leader say the blessing thanking God “for not making me a woman.” I had not heard that blessing in a long time. In my own prayers, I always substitute it with a prayer thanking God for making me in His image. And so when I heard that blessing recited that morning, I was taken aback. Thank God for not making me a woman? How could anyone say such a blessing? I wanted to holler out: “She-asani isha!” Thank God for making me a woman! My religious life has been so deeply enriched by roles that I would not have been able to take on had I been a man. My most spiritual experiences were pregnancy and childbirth. In carrying human life inside me and bringing a child into the world, I felt closest to God as creator. I davened with the most fervor when I was pregnant, conscious of how much was beyond my control even as it was taking place just millimeters beneath the surface of my skin. The experience of bringing life into the world has been my Holy of Holies—it has been my most profound experience of intimacy with God, and I am so grateful to God for having had this privilege.

  You write about the “rich literary heritage” you grew up with in America and your intentionality in exposing your children to these books. What are some of the stories you have passed onto your children that still have a place on your bookshelf?

  Each week I try to share with my children at least some aspect of the weekly Torah portion. This is easy during Genesis and the early parts of Exodus, where we read aloud each week from an illustrated book of Bible stories and discuss why Cain resented Abel, and whether it was right of Jacob to trick Esau, and when Moses figured out that he was Jewish. (I will say, though, that it was difficult to find a parsha book that included pictures of women—in Israel, most books about Torah are still published by ultra-Orthodox publishing houses, and the women are either invisible or lacking facial features. Now, thankfully, we have Emily Amrousi’s Ha-Parasha series, which has vivid illustrations, gives biblical heroines their due, and even largely distinguishes between the text of the Torah and the later midrashic commentaries.)

  It gets more difficult to teach parsha starting in early spring, when we get to detailed accounts of the building of the mishkan, the portable sanctuary that the Israelites carried around through the desert, and the laws of purity and impurity. But each week I find some way to make the parsha relevant. I love to bake with my kids, so often we make a parsha-themed dessert. Every year on parshat Vayetze, for instance, we make a Jacob’s ladder cake with marshmallow angels ascending and descending a licorice stairway. I want my children to develop, even from a very young age, a feel for how the Jewish calendar bends to the arc of the Torah reading cycle. Moses describes Torah as a morasha, an inheritance passed down through the generations. My children don’t know how to read yet, but whenever we learn together, I pass out copies of the text to each of them. I want them to feel like they are receiving Torah, that it is becoming theirs.

  Since my kids are growing up in Israel, it is especially important for me to share with them the American books that were such an important part of my childhood. Right now I’m reading them the Little House on the Prairie series—my three daughters have already started fighting over who gets to be the vivacious Laura and who has to be goody-two-shoes Mary and boring baby Carrie when they act out the various scenes. We’ve already torn through most of the “Kind Family” books, as my kids refer to the Sydney Taylor series. And my son and I have read through most of Roald Dahl and E.B. White, laughing together at the BFG and rooting for Stuart Little.

  Part of what I love most about being a parent is the license it grants me to reread the favorite books of my childhood, experiencing them afresh through the eyes of my children. The kids are forever begging me to read one more page, but all too often I just want to stop on the page we are on and savor that moment. The other series my kids love, Cam Jansen, is about a girl who has a photographic memory; when she closes her eyes and says “click,” she can store a perfect image of whatever she has just seen. One of my daughters likes to imitate Cam, and every so often she will close her eyes, say click, and ask me to quiz her on what she has just seen and stored in her memory. I get it. When all of us are piled up on her trundle bed to read in pajamas, the toddler in my lap, the twins on each of my sides, and my son climbing over his sisters, I sometimes wish I could stop for a moment to close my eyes and say click.

  In discussing the divinity of the Torah and the role midrash (creative commentary) has to make the Bible relevant today, which modern scholars do you turn to? Are there any female scholars whose teachings resonate with you?

  I teach at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem, where I try to incorporate both ancient and modern midrashim into my classes. I teach a course entitled Romantic Rabbis, about stories of love and romance in the Talmud, and in nearly every class we read an excerpt from one of Ruth Calderon’s books. Calderon, an Israeli educator and politician, retells Talmudic stories from the perspective of one of the more marginalized characters, often a woman, thereby giving voice to those who are otherwise voiceless. I also draw heavily on the work of Avivah Zornberg, whose brilliant analyses of many of my favorite midrashim have irrevocably transformed the way I read various Biblical passages. And finally, Tamar Biale’s Dirshuni, an anthology of new midrashim written by contemporary Israeli women, has reminded me of the power of midrash to render the text relevant and resonant in every generation.

Kurshan, Ilana CHILDREN OF THE BOOK St. Martin's (NonFiction None) $28.00 8, 26 ISBN: 9781250288264

Reading and redemption.

Reading to the young builds character. It establishes a unique intimacy between parent and child. It can be the space of the imagination, a world of dreaming before bedtime. Books are adventures. They are places of escape. For American Israeli writer Kurshan, books are sites of personal growth. And the first book, the five books of Moses in the Old Testament, becomes a model for the birth, growth, departure, and return that shape a parent's and a child's heroic adventure. In a series of brief, evocative chapters, Kurshan tells stories of the books that mattered to her and her children. She selects books that are designed to "expand my children's range of associations and broaden their imaginations" but also ones that "make it easier to parent." She creates a personal canon of such books, and at this memoir's end, she catalogs her recommendations, from Eric Carle'sThe Very Hungry Caterpillar to Louisa May Alcott'sLittle Women, from William Steig to Laura Ingalls Wilder. Behind it all, however, is the sacred book of the Torah. Using the sequence of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, Kurshan tells a progressive story of reading together, moving from the simplest beginnings to the most complex, symbolic tales. "From paradise to the promised land, the story of my family's reading life has unfolded against the backdrop of the Bible's narratives. It is a story about beginnings--the first books we read as parents, the books that create our world. It is a story about an exodus and a journey to freedom that our kids undertake when they learn to read on their own." Through this powerful conceit--parenting as holy journey--Kurshan takes us, with her family, into a place of reading freedom, a true release through word and picture. In the end, we are all children of the book.

An exquisitely written account of mother and children reading together, framed as a tale of biblical redemption.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Kurshan, Ilana: CHILDREN OF THE BOOK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325687/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa9d8eda. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

Aluma, Neri THE HEDGEHOG WHO SAID, WHO CARES? Kalaniot Books (Children's None) $19.99 3, 12 ISBN: 9798986396576

While digging a burrow, Mr. Hedgehog flings dirt onto the path shared by other animals.

When Rabbit sees the dirt blocking the way, he and his friend Mouse confront Hedgehog. "Who cares?" Hedgehog retorts. "This path isn't mine. / I only care about my burrow-- / warm and snug and fine." Hedgehog threatens to prick them with his quills. Nevertheless, Rabbit and Mouse come to Hedgehog's rescue when he nearly drowns during a fierce thunderstorm. Ashamed of his bad behavior, Hedgehog has learned a valuable lesson: "This path is not just mine-- / it's all of ours to share." Translated from Hebrew, quatrains with an ABCB rhyme scheme read aloud easily, almost like nursery rhymes, but it's the flat, colorful, naïve illustrations that stand out. The three animal characters are outlined in black or red, with scratchlike markings depicting their quills or furry skin. Intense blue skies, richly hued flowers, and deep-green grass have the vitality of tempera paint. The animals' homes are cozy; boxes are marked for moving-in in Hedgehog's new abode, and at Rabbit's home, Hedgehog is offered tea and tissues. In the backmatter, Aluma notes that she was inspired by a Talmudic story, but the message is a universal one that will especially resonate in a world crying out for friendship and caring.

A charming read-aloud and a much-needed reminder that we all share the same path. (Picture book. 3-6)

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Aluma, Neri: THE HEDGEHOG WHO SAID, WHO CARES?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A779191124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=18184f1e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

The Folktale/Fairytale Shelf

Seven Good Years: A Yiddish Folktale

Shoham Smith, author

Eitan Eloa, illustrator

Ilana Kurshan, translator

Kalaniot Books

https://kalaniotbooks.com

9798986396521, $19.99, HC, 32pp

https://www.amazon.com/Seven-Good-Years-Yiddish-Folktale/dp/B0B92HPJS8

Synopsis: When a magician offers a poor man and his family seven years of good luck, he is surprised that they have no use for a life of wealth. These refreshingly down-to-earth characters are happy with their simple life together. Based on the Yiddish tale by I. L. Peretz, and translated into English by Ilana Kurshan, "Seven Good Years" is picture story that will charm young readers. Bright and colorful illustrations by artist Eitan Eloa pair beautifully in this witty retelling by Shoham Smith. A note explains the context of the story and the history of the Yiddish storyteller, I. L. Peretz.

Critique: A cheerful and fun story for young readers ages 4-8, "Seven Good Years: A Yiddish Folktale" is especially and unreservedly recommended for family, daycare center, preschool, elementary school, and community library Folklore/Folktale children's picture book collections.

Editorial Note #1: Shoham Smith studied industrial design at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design at Tel Aviv University. She is the author of collections of short stories and children's books. Smith received the Prime Minister's Prize and is a two-time winner of the ACUM Award for Furthering the Publication of Children's Books. Smith has also won the Devorah Omer Prize and the Lea Goldberg Prize. Smith lives with her partner and three children.

Editorial Note #2: Eitan Eloa graduated with excellence from the Department of Visual Communication at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design at Tel Aviv University and continues to teach illustration classes there. Eloa Illustrates children's books, graphic novels, editorial illustrations, and illustrated branding. His works have won the Israel Museum Award for Children's Book Illustration, a silver Medal from the American Society of Illustrators, and The Israeli Design Award among others.

Editorial Note #3: Ilana Kurshan is an American-Israeli author. She is the author of Why Is This Night Different from All Other Nights?: The Four Questions Around the World and If All the Seas Were Ink. The latter won the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature in 2018.

Please Note: Illustration(s) are not available due to copyright restrictions.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 Midwest Book Review
http://www.midwestbookreview.com/cbw/index.htm
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"The Folktale/Fairytale Shelf." Children's Bookwatch, Jan. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783034139/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ccaa9b13. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

* BAIT, Nati. Uri and the King of Darkness: A Hanukkah Story, tr. from Hebrew by Ilana Kurshan. illus. by Carmel Ben Ami. 32p. Kalaniot. Oct. 2024. Tr $19.99. ISBN 9781962011983.

PreS-Gr 2--It's the first night of Hanukkah, and Uri and his sister Shir are awaiting their father's arrival so they can light the Hanukkah candles. But Dad is late! Uri worries about all the things that could happen. With the Hanukkah story of enemy armies on his mind, he imagines such an army invading his town. Uri and his mom look out the window at a rainstorm, which adds to the ominous tone. The illustrations throughout are delightfully complex. The people in the streets use umbrellas to shield them from the rain; Shir uses an umbrella as a war shield against the invaders. The enemy king is a dark blue, cape-wearing monster that depicts evil in a way that children can process. Uri imagines his father fighting the enemy with a flashlight, effecting the symbolism of Hanukkah. The story is concise and told in rhyme, and the artwork is a visual smorgasbord. Words and illustrations are tightly integrated--each is better with the other. The book ends happily. Back matter includes the Hanukkah prayers, information about the holiday, and an illustration of the enemy king eating one of the jelly doughnuts that Uri's dad brought home. VERDICT A first purchase for collections.--Jennifer Sontag

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2024 A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
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Sontag, Jennifer. "BAIT, Nati. Uri and the King of Darkness: A Hanukkah Story." School Library Journal, vol. 70, no. 9, Sept. 2024, p. 80. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836878985/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fde7ab2a. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

The Sages Volume V: The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel

Rabbi Binyamin Lau, author

Ilana Kurshan, translator

Maggid Books

c/o Koren Publishers Jerusalem Ltd.

PO Box 8531, New Milford, CT 06776-8531

www.korenpub.com

9781592644025, $24.95, HC, 302pp

https://www.amazon.com/Sages-Yeshivot-Babylonia-Israel/dp/1592644023

Synopsis: 'The Sages: Character, Context & Creativity' is a series by Rabbi Binyamin Lau that brings the world of the Talmud to life by revealing the stories of the people behind its pages. This is fascinating multi-volume series which explores the lives and times of the great Jewish sages (Hazal): their teachers and disciples, their families and professions, the values they cherished and ideologies they opposed, the historical challenges they faced, and the creative wisdom with which they faced them. Highly original and profoundly engaging, The Sages draws readers closer to the world of Hazal while deepening their understanding of our own. "The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel" is Volume 5 of The Sages series.

Critique: With the focus on the impact of the Babylonian era on the development of the Israelite Talmud culture, "The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel" is a fascinating, informative, thoughtful and thought-provoking study organized into three major sections (Southern Babylonia; Northern Babylonia; The Land of Israel). As with the first four volumes of this simply outstanding series, "The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel" is unreservedly recommended for personal, professional, community, synagogue, college, and university library Judaic Studies and Talmudic Studies collections. It should be noted for personal reading lists that "The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel" is also available in a digital book format (Kindle, $8.99).

Editorial Note: Rabbi Binyamin Lau (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Binyamin_Lau) is an Israeli community leader, educator and social activist. He is the rabbi of the Ramban Synagogue in Jerusalem, founder of the Moshe Green Beit Midrash for Women's Leadership at Beit Morasha's Beren College, and a research fellow at the Israel Democracy Institute. Rabbi Lau also serves as a consultant for a number of leading organizations and is frequently cited in the media. He studied at Yeshivat Har Etzion and Yeshivat Kibbutz HaDati, and received a PhD in Talmud from Bar-Ilan University.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2023 Midwest Book Review
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"The Sages Volume V: The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel." Internet Bookwatch, Feb. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A741327490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1c791b80. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

Ilana Kurshan

If All the Seas Were Ink:

A Memoir

New York: St. Martin's Press, 2017. 299 pp.

Even in our time, with women around the world studying the holy tomes in mixed yeshivas, academic courses and shiurim, few of them dare take up the seven-and-a-half year project of reading the entire Babylonian Talmud, a page a day, in the worldwide Daf yomi project initiated in 1923 by Rabbi Meir Shapiro of the Lublin Yeshiva. Far fewer are those who are able to synthesize that long-haul study program into a literary project revealing a life permeated, structured or even reinvented by art. In fact, for now at least, those individuals may boil down to just one: Ilana Kurshan, who reprises her journey in her inspiring memoir, If All the Seas Were Ink.

An English literature graduate of Harvard and Cambridge, already well embarked on a career as a literary editor, Kurshan followed her heart to Jerusalem in her early twenties, only to see her marriage to the man who had led her there quickly go up in flames. It was time for a new romance, but, notwithstanding her book-centered life, she had never dreamed of taking as her companion "a book I could imagine spending my whole life reading" (p. 7). And yes, reader, eventually her life of learning led her to romance with her ideal man of flesh and blood, and to a fulfilling life of love, marriage, motherhood and continued literary endeavor in Jerusalem.

Several years ago, in a chance meeting with Ilana at an event for editors at the Jerusalem International Book Fair, she told me about her book project and offered her Introduction as a candidate for publication in Nashim (where it was published in 2015, in issue no. 29). I was captivated from the opening lines, which, characteristically, play on the opening pages of Tractate Berakhot--the first in the traditional order of the tractates--and simultaneously on the poem by Wallace Stevens quoted in the chapter's epigraph:

It is early in the morning--the house is quiet and the world is
calm, and I steal out of bed and tiptoe to the bathroom. I wash my
hands and reach for my toothbrush, but in the predawn light it is
hard to distinguish my turquoise toothbrush from my husband's white
one, so I hold them up to the faint rays of sunlight struggling to
make their way through the window.... The rabbis of the Talmud say
that every night is divided into three watches--in the first watch,
the donkeys bray; in the second watch, the dogs bark; and in the
third watch, the mother nurses her child and whispers to her
husband. But my husband and children are blessedly still asleep ...
as I open the volume of Talmud waiting for me on the couch. (p. 1)
I could go on quoting in demonstration of Kurshan's mind-boggling talent at weaving together her life with talmudic and English literary motifs, interspersed with gentle touches of humor, but the pleasure of that discovery awaits the reader, who needn't have read the Talmud in order to enjoy her prose. The book is filled with explanations for the uninitiated, both in the Talmud and in Judaism--occasionally to the point of being pedantic; one wonders whether this is a consequence of Kurshan being a rabbi's daughter, or whether it was recommended by her editors in order to expand the book's potential audience. At any rate, Kurshan beckons and encourages, freely acknowledging her own use of the many study aids available for participants in the Daf yomi program, such as podcasts, daily classes and the Steinsaltz edition of the Talmud, with Hebrew translation and commentary.

The podcasts allow Kurshan, who will never miss a moment that could be used for reading or learning, to study even while on her daily runs through familiar Jerusalem streets, or, later, while folding her babies' laundry or loading the dishwasher. Indeed, life and the Talmud's contents seem to overlap for her with astounding coincidence. Could it be mere chance that she happened to be studying Tractate HagigaKs warnings regarding the study of the prophet Ezekiel's vision of the "chariot of fire" as she boarded a flight to whisk her through the heavens back home to Israel, hugging her volume of the Talmud against the stares of ultra-Orthodox co-travelers? "Suddenly I felt light-headed.... The page of Talmud danced before my eyes, and thinking of Yeats's Irish airman, I relished the lonely impulse of delight that I so often felt when studying Torah" (pp. 95-96).

The answer, I believe, lies both in the nature of the Talmud and in the swift synapses of Kurshan's literary mind. While some may enjoy getting away from the noise of modernity by studying the Holy Books, as Kurshan describes above, I have found from my own sometime forays into Talmud study that the text is hardly divorced from the world, and connections with an issue that confounds me in real life often pop out of the very page I happen to be perusing. Kurshan is dazzlingly quick to make these connections and to make art of them, and to entwine that art in turn with her love of books and of the significant others who people her life.

Not that all is dazzling in Kurshan's life. She frankly recalls her struggle, in her student days, with anorexia, and the heartbreak of her early divorce. In the opening chapter, she describes her learning as a way forward, a part of her healing process:

But then I thought about how moving on is about putting one foot in
front of the other, or turning page after page.... What a healthy
relationship to time, viewing it not as a mark of age but as an
opportunity to grow in wisdom. If I learned a page a day, then
instead of resigning myself to being one day older, I could aspire
to be one day wiser. (p. 4)
However, she is far from burying herself or her heart in study. Having arrived in Jerusalem as a newlywed, she describes herself at the outset leading a lonely life, almost paralyzed by grief at the failure of her marriage. As her life, against all her fears, becomes peopled with new friends and new relationships, it is framed by her learning, and that, indeed, is how she presents it. The book takes its structure from the six Orders of the Talmud, which Kurshan entered at the next to last--the Order of Festivals--because that is where the worldwide Daf yomi program stood when she took on her commitment. Having concluded two lengthy orders and embarked upon the Order of Damages, she meets the man with whom she will fulfill her dreams of romance, shaped by her readings of modern poets like Robert Graves, Wendy Cope and Jack Gilbert, and by lessons gleaned from Tractate Kidushin. The relationship is clinched by his joining her in daily learning. Somehow, in Kurshan's hands, even the very dense and technical tractates of Bava kama, Bava metzia and Bava batra become an accompaniment to love: 'The opening chapters of Bava Metzia deal with the laws of returning lost objects.... Daniel, early on, decided that I was his missing piece, and he was bold enough to tell me so" (p. 169). If you ever doubted the existence of romantic nerds, do read this book!

At this point Kurshan still has three orders to go, but, as her life becomes filled not only with marital bliss but also with caring for a baby boy followed quickly by twin girls--nursed as their mother pores over the daily page--these are perhaps inevitably telescoped, and they occupy only about the last quarter of the book. To me, notwithstanding the engaging accounts of the births and antics of the children and of how these, too, somehow fit with the tractates she was learning at the time, this was the least satisfying part of Kurshan's memoir. Although she still must cope with the kind of difficulties that can beset a busy parent--such as breaking her arm by slipping on ice on a particularly wintry Jerusalem night--these chapters of musings on her current life at times have a somewhat anodyne "happy end" feeling.

Readers hoping to find out how Kurshan's life of literature, learning and domesticity plays out in the context of the realities of modern Israel may also be disappointed. Apart from a few comments about the variety of people to be encountered in Jerusalem, and her satisfaction at raising her children in a rare mixed neighborhood with Jewish and Arab residents, the Jerusalem encountered in this book is rather romanticized. Kurshan's musings do not relate to the violence that has periodically stricken the city, to social tensions or to national or religious politics. She records no hostility or hindrance as she pursues her unconventional religious life, going to one synagogue for an all-male (apart from herself) daily Talmud class and to another to lead egalitarian services. She walks the streets with open books in her hands, occasionally ending up at the Western Wall for prayers. And this is part of the truth of today's Jerusalem, where, in some neighborhoods, educated, liberal, modern religious Jews can live a good life, filled with spiritual and intellectual enrichment and leafy parks where they can take their children to play. At the same time, one senses that some of the complexities of the Jerusalem context--ethnic tensions, social divisions, religious conservatism, the failings of the fragmented school system, and on and on--have been airbrushed out of the picture.

But perhaps this has to do with Kurshan's effervescent optimism and passionate creativity. She is not devoted to studying the daf yomi in order to prove that a woman can do it. She is simply devoted--to learning, to literature, to writing, to running, to Judaism and to her family, and to creating synergies out of all of these. To be inspired by that devotion, and by the craft with which it is expressed, is reason enough to read this book.

At the book's end, Kurshan has started on a second seven-and-a-half-year cycle of learning the daily page. I put down her memoir in the hope and expectation that the second cycle will yield another book by this talented author, who so naturally lives in and laces together the disparate literary worlds of the Talmud and modern English poetry and prose.

Deborah Greniman is Managing Editor of Nashim and Senior Editor of English-language publications at the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and she is also a translator from Hebrew, an occasional writer and a student at the Schechter Institute. She lives in Jerusalem with her spouse, Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann. nashim@schechter.ac.il

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 Indiana University Press
http://www.iupress.indiana.edu/catalog/index.php?cPath=519_678
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Greniman, Deborah. "Ilana Kurshan: If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir." Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 33, fall 2018, pp. 235+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A568117879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f205a0e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

"Kurshan, Ilana: CHILDREN OF THE BOOK." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A837325687/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=aa9d8eda. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025. "Aluma, Neri: THE HEDGEHOG WHO SAID, WHO CARES?" Kirkus Reviews, 15 Jan. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A779191124/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=18184f1e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025. "The Folktale/Fairytale Shelf." Children's Bookwatch, Jan. 2024. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A783034139/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=ccaa9b13. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025. Sontag, Jennifer. "BAIT, Nati. Uri and the King of Darkness: A Hanukkah Story." School Library Journal, vol. 70, no. 9, Sept. 2024, p. 80. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A836878985/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=fde7ab2a. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025. "The Sages Volume V: The Yeshivot of Babylonia and Israel." Internet Bookwatch, Feb. 2023. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A741327490/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=1c791b80. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025. Greniman, Deborah. "Ilana Kurshan: If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir." Nashim: A Journal of Jewish Women's Studies and Gender Issues, no. 33, fall 2018, pp. 235+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A568117879/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9f205a0e. Accessed 23 Oct. 2025.

• Jewish Journal
  https://jewishjournal.com/culture/arts/books/384506/a-guide-to-living-textually-ilana-kurshans-children-of-the-book/
  Word count: 1137

  A Guide to Living Textually: Ilana Kurshan’s ‘Children of the Book’
  Throughout the memoir, Kurshan balances her love for Jewish texts and literature with raising her children.
  Picture of Na’amit Sturm Nagel
  Na’amit Sturm Nagel
  October 22, 2025

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  In Ilana Kurshan’s new memoir, “Children of the Book: A Memoir of Reading Together,” the author describes a familiar predicament: a mother with work to do is trapped in her children’s room because they do not want her to leave until they fall asleep.

  While most parents recognize the frustrations of this familiar struggle, they will likely be less familiar with Kurshan’s solution: She transforms her children’s requests into an opportunity by practicing chanting the weekly Torah portion for synagogue in their rooms, accomplishing a third, more ambitious task: “I would like Torah to become the soundtrack for my life. I would like Torah to become the soundtrack for my children’s lives, too.”

  Throughout the memoir, Kurshan balances her love for Jewish texts and literature with raising her children. Rather than presenting those needs as in tension with one another, however, she depicts her own development as a Jewish woman with a career in tune with motherhood. Needing to prepare for Shabbat services while dealing with her children’s needs does not hamper her parenting but symbiotically, miraculously, harmonizes with it. In reading with her children, to her children, or surrounded by her children, Kurshan depicts and models the rhythm of a richly Jewish textual life.

  Kurshan’s memoir demonstrates how the annual Jewish liturgical cycle of Torah reading synchronizes with raising a family, enabling the author and her mother to simultaneously better understand the Torah’s wisdom from week to week, and the brilliance of her children as they weave their Torah learning into their daily lives. Working in literary publishing, being a skilled translator and a prominent Jewish educator, while parenting is an arduous task. Yet the porousness of the boundaries between secular and Jewish texts and lived experiences and literary experiences enables Kurshan to see how religious texts can shape and develop the religious life and vice versa: “The more we read together, the more I come to know my children. And the better I am at reading them.”

  Categorizing “Children of the Book” can be complex. Kurshan’s first memoir, “If All the Seas Were Ink,” which won a National Jewish Book Award, described her experiences of marriage and divorce through her daily study of the Talmud. While it was organized by the tractates that Kurshan was reading and how those tractates bled into her lived experiences, “Children of the Book” is organized by the five books of the Torah, and each of its sections and sub-sections can be savored slowly along with the weekly Torah portion. The text is a bibliomemoir because it traces the author’s life through the literature being read, yet it is unique because bibliomemoirs usually focus on how the reading experience of a single text shapes an author’s life. Though the memoir describes how Torah portions become the literary backdrop for all of Kurshan’s reading, writing and lived experiences, “Children of the Book” overflows with intertextuality and Kurshan’s love for all texts. As a result, the Torah reshapes how Kurshan reads secular and religious texts, while the books she reads reframe her understanding of the weekly Torah portion. In Kurshan’s life, wisdom flows not in a single direction but circulates freely, so that sometimes her children help her read the Torah, and at other times it is the Torah that helps her read her children.

  Since this is a book about reading with and around children, it is a boon for readers who think about the role of reading in a parent-child relationship. Reading selective subsections asynchronously supports someone trying to find a work-life balance. This reader even chose to take a page both literally and metaphorically from Kurshan’s playbook and found success in reading this book about reading to her own children. I found that reading Kurshan’s parsha-inflected tales with my kids helped them think like the author and relate texts and Torah to their own lives.

  When Kurshan describes how literature uses foreshadowing, for example, she relates the practice to both her family’s experience of living through the unknown period of the coronavirus and the Biblical Israelite experience in the desert. Reflecting on her children being bored and restless during the pandemic and the unknown, she recalls, “I thought about God’s pledge to bring the Israelites to a land ‘flowing with milk and honey’ (Numbers 14:8), and realized that every divine promise is a spoiler of sorts. With so much uncertainty around us, I was relieved that I could promise my children that at least in the book we were reading, it would all turn out OK.”

  Of course, Kurshan also weaves in a secular children’s book by connecting Beverly Cleary’s Ramona’s complaints to her children’s complaints and the Israelites’ kvetching, weighing the benefits and pitfalls of knowing what is coming in a story and in life. But she also uses the Torah and children’s literature as guides—texts that provide “spoilers” for our twenty-first-century lived experiences—so that, even amid an unprecedented modern-day pandemic, one does not have to feel as though the literary past has no guidance to offer our contemporary moment.

  After reading Kurshan, I started paying attention not just to what I read to my children, but how I read to and with them.

  After reading Kurshan, I started paying attention not just to what I read to my children, but how I read to and with them. I began slowing down and did not rush my five-year-old son when he made me pause my reading of Cary Fagan’s “Mr. Zinger’s Hat” to ask me if any of his hats would also have stories buried in them. I was just trying to get him to bed so that I could get some work done, but “Children of the Book” reminded me that there are stories buried everywhere around us, and if we don’t slow down to unearth them with our children, we are missing out on both connecting to texts and to our kids. Though I still put my son right to bed, when he woke up the next morning, we immediately searched his hats.

  Na’amit Sturm Nagel is a doctoral candidate in the English department at UC Irvine.

• Jewish Book Council
  https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/book/children-of-the-book-a-memoir-of-reading-together
  Word count: 631

  Chil­dren of the Book: A Mem­oir of Read­ing Together
  Ilana Kur­shan
  Review
  By Jaime Hern­don – August 25, 2025
  Ilana Kurshan’s new mem­oir, Chil­dren of the Book: A Mem­oir of Read­ing Togeth­er, is a cere­bral mem­oir of both read­ing and moth­er­hood, which should sur­prise no one who’s read the author’s pre­vi­ous work. Kurshan’s first mem­oir, If All the Seas Were Ink, about her learn­ing daf yomi (the ​“dai­ly page” of Tal­mud) after her divorce, also braid­ed schol­ar­ly explo­ration togeth­er with her every­day life. She makes no secret that books and read­ing are cen­tral to her exis­tence, and her newest mem­oir shows that she hasn’t let moth­er­hood inter­fere much with her read­ing — in fact, it has enriched the experience

  In the book’s intro­duc­tion, Kur­shan gives the read­er an idea of her read­ing life with her kids and what the over­all scope of her mem­oir is: ​“The sto­ry of my life has become not just the sto­ry of the books I am read­ing but also the sto­ry of the books I read with my chil­dren, and reen­counter through their eyes.” Indeed, her mem­oir explores the books she reads with her chil­dren and the lessons they learn, but she ties her family’s read­ing life into some­thing big­ger as well — that of Torah. Just as each time we read the Torah cycle, we get new insights and lessons, time has giv­en Kur­shan new ways of see­ing her chil­dren through their literature.

  The mem­oir is bro­ken down into five parts that cor­re­spond with the five books of the Torah. Part 1 (Gen­e­sis) is about the start of her children’s read­ing lives; part 2 (Exo­dus) explores inde­pen­dent read­ing; part 3 (Leviti­cus) looks at the Taber­na­cle as a sort of metaphor for the library; part 4 (Num­bers) is about her family’s jour­ney through COVID times, and part 5 (Deuteron­o­my) looks at auto­bi­og­ra­phy and telling our own sto­ries. If this sounds intense, it is. While she writes about Beezus and Ramona and Ivy and Bean, Kur­shan also sprin­kles in bib­li­cal terms and lessons, as well as rab­binic thought. Kur­shan begins each part of the book with a brief sum­ma­ry that ties in the spe­cif­ic book of the Bible and its main ideas/​events with themes in her children’s reading.

  Kur­shan is a won­der­ful­ly obser­vant writer and an equal­ly astute Juda­ic schol­ar. Jux­ta­pos­ing the jour­ney of read­ing with her chil­dren with the pro­gres­sion of the books of the Torah is a big under­tak­ing, and at times it feels a bit over­whelm­ing to read. But Kurshan’s smart and some­times unex­pect­ed sense of humor keeps the read­er engaged. Books are a life­line for Kur­shan, and this mem­oir can be seen as a love let­ter to read­ing, as well as to her kids. As Kur­shan writes, ​“It is a sto­ry about the sacred spaces we cre­ate when we con­nect with our chil­dren over what is most impor­tant to us.”

  And indeed, Kur­shan has made her home a sacred space.

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