This Jewish Community Library programming will take place over Zoom. Please click here to register and receive a link to the event.
Join us for a reading and conversation with Rachel Biale, author of Growing Up Below Sea Level: A Kibbutz Childhood, and Sue Fishkoff, editor of J. Biale’s newly released memoir is composed of twenty-six stories that tell a history of growing up on a kibbutz in the 1950s and ‘60s.
Click here to order the book through Afikomen Judaica and support a local bookshop!
“Rachel Biale’s fresh and vivid stories of her kibbutz childhood, raised in the biblical landscape of the Jordan River by European-born parents who had barely fled the Nazis, are pulsating with love and unblinking insight into early kibbutz life. I read these stories with amazement and deep personal recognition.” — Fania Oz-Salzberger, Israeli scholar raised on a kibbutz, co-author with her father, Amos Oz, of Jews and Words
“A remarkable, haunting remembrance of worlds which are no more – the youthful world of Rachel Biale’s parents in Holocaust-era Europe, and that of her own childhood within the collectivist kibbutz of the 1950s and ‘60s.” — Bradley Burston, Haaretz columnist
Rachel Biale is a clinical social worker and Bay Area Jewish community professional and activist. She is known to J. readers from her column “Parenting for the Perplexed.” Her other books include the path-breaking Women and Jewish Law (1984) and the forthcoming What now? 2-Minute Tips for Solving Common Parenting Challenges (June 2020).
Sue Fishkoff is a longtime journalist working in the Jewish media in Israel and the United States. Currently the editor-in-chief of J. The Jewish News of Northern California, she is the author of The Rebbe’s Army and Kosher Nation, and spent more than four years living on a kibbutz.
