Will you do it?
Here’s the thing with me: ideas are always pouring out of my head. I can’t stop it – it’s like a creative faucet that I can’t turn off – so wherever I go I carry pen and paper. Even by my bed at night I have pen and paper and it’s not unusual for me to wake up three or four times to write down ideas for books and articles.
For some reason, more ideas flow out of my head on Shabbos, and they seem to be the best ideas I have, but of course I can’t write them down, so I try to come up with ways to memorize them until after Shabbos. I make up acronyms for these ideas, and after Shabbos I try to remember what these acronyms stand for. Sometimes I’ll spend an hour trying to decipher them.
Do you really have so many book ideas?
I literally have hundreds and hundreds of files in my home office of ideas I could pursue for a book. I create a file for every idea I think is valid and I build these files with information over time to ascertain whether I think they might be transformable into full-length books.
So let’s say “Jewish artifacts” would be one idea I might be anxious to pursue. On the other hand, I might have another idea I think has more commercial potential. Agents are not so anxious to represent niche Jewish books because the market for them is not as wide as a more general book. That doesn’t mean I won’t pursue it, but there are financial considerations when you spend two or three years investing a huge amount of time and your advance doesn’t even cover you for more than a few months.
I have all these Jewish book ideas that I would love to pursue – and I do intend to pursue them. I just think I’m going to go after some of the more commercial ideas first.
What’s your Jewish background?
I’m from the Philadelphia area. My mother came from an Orthodox family, my father from a Conservative family. I’ve always been observant, shomer Shabbos. But I have always lived in areas where there have been no Orthodox synagogues within walking distance. So I belong to a Conservative synagogue even though I don’t like Conservative synagogues today because of their more liberal inclinations.
I daven every morning. It takes me an hour to daven; I’m a very slow davener. I’m praying all day long. I keep kosher. But I’m not in Brooklyn, so I don’t have that kind of outlet in terms of a shul to belong to. But I love being Jewish. I love everything about being Jewish. And I would say it narrates my life. Everything I do is based in one way or another on Judaism.
Has anyone ever commented positively or negatively on your Jewish observance throughout the years?
Growing up, most of my friends were Jewish but not Orthodox, and I was always being teased for keeping kosher and being Shabbos observant. So I got my worst flak from Jews. It was always in a kidding sense, but on Shabbos they would make a remark like, “Your body is working; isn’t that against your rules?”
Any parting thoughts?
I just want to say how grateful I am to Jason Maoz. I cannot praise him enough. I hope he won’t be so humble that he’ll cut these remarks out of the interview. He’s the best editor I’ve ever worked with. My career has kind of been backwards; most people write articles and then go into books while I started out writing books and then went into writing articles. Jason has given me that opportunity. He’s nurtured me and encouraged me, and I’m so grateful to him that I feel like all I do now in terms of writing articles I owe to him.