Jewish Life Stories: The authors that left us

Robie Harris, 83, whose books told kids that sex was ‘perfectly normal’

Robie H. Harris, 83, whose best-selling sex-ed books for children earned her awards and a prominent place on lists of banned books, died January 6 in New York. She was 83.

Her 1994 book, “It’s Perfectly Normal: Changing Bodies, Growing Up, Sex, and Sexual Health,” featuring frank talk about puberty and same-sex relationships for children 10 and up, was translated into 27 languages and sold 1 million copies, according to PEN America. The New Yorker said it had “an endearing and companionable matter-of-factness.”

But that matter-of-factness made it a target of book bannings, and 30 years after its first publication it continues to make the American Library Association’s list of “Frequently Challenged Children’s Books,” along with two other Harris books: “It’s So Amazing!: A Book about Eggs, Sperm, Birth, Babies, and Families” and “Who’s In My Family?: All About Families (Let’s Talk About You and Me).”

“Robie was utterly fearless,” PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel said in a statement. “She believed very strongly that children had the right to know about their own bodies, sexuality and puberty and as a former teacher of young children took it upon herself to make that happen.”

Roberta Mary Heilbrun, whose father was a physician and whose mother had worked in a biology lab, was a teacher as well as a writer for the children’s television show “Captain Kangaroo.” She wrote the first of some 30 books after the birth of her two sons.

“I grew up in a Reform temple in Buffalo [New York] called Temple Beth Zion,” she told the Forward in 2006, “and our rabbi, Joseph Fink, was a wonderful man, a real social justice person. Whether he was talking about race or poverty or helping others, it was: What can you do to help others?”

Jules Harlow, 92, editor of a classic Conservative movement prayer book

Rabbi Jules Harlow, a liturgist who edited what became the standard prayer book used in North American Conservative synagogues for a quarter century, died Monday. He was 92. As the Director of Publications for the movement’s Rabbinical Assembly, he was the editor in 1985 of “Siddur Sim Shalom.” While traditional in scope, the new prayer book and its High Holiday companion further refined the language and theology for Judaism’s centrist movement, which long sought a middle ground between the strict traditionalism of Orthodox Judaism and the liberal innovations of Reform. “What Jules managed to do is not only produce a book with liturgical beauty and a beauty of design and translation,” an admirer, Rabbi Wolfe Kelman, said in 1985, “but produce a book which traces the evolution of Conservative Jewish theology.” Harlow also served as literary editor for “Etz Hayim: A Torah Commentary,” published in 2002, which would become the standard version of the Five Books of Moses found in Conservative pews.

Si Spiegel, 99, the Jewish father of the artificial Christmas tree

Si Spiegel, a Jewish World War II pilot credited with popularizing the mass-produced artificial Christmas tree, died January 21 at his home in Manhattan. He was 99. After returning from his military service — when he flew 35 missions at the helm of a B-17 Flying Fortress — Spiegel found work as a machinist at a brush-making company. There he developed skills he would use in founding artificial tree businesses that would turn out some 80,000 trees a year. It was a career choice, he said, made possible by antisemitism: When he applied to be a commercial pilot after the war, the airlines turned him down. “They were blatant about it,” he said in 2010. “It wasn’t that they gave you some excuse. They told you, ‘We don’t hire Jews.’”

Nina Gottlieb, 91, Holocaust survivor and subject of a New Yorker documentary

Nina Gottlieb, who broke eight decades of silence about her experiences during the Holocaust in an award-winning documentary that aired in 2023, died February 4 in Manhasset, New York. She was 91. In “Nina & Irena,” a New Yorker film made by her grandson Daniel Lombroso, Gottlieb opens up about her childhood in Kielce, Poland, and the death of about 25 members of her family, including her older sister Irena. Only she and her parents survived. The film, which made its New York City debut in July 2023, has been a success on the festival circuit. In December, Gottlieb was invited to celebrate Hanukkah with Vice President Kamala Harris in Washington, DC. In an interview with PBS, she explained why she hadn’t spoken about her experiences in the Holocaust before making the film. “Nobody was interested, you know. Nobody spoke about the Holocaust,” she said. “So I figured okay, the future, future, future. The future never came until my grandson here decided that there is a story to be told, and that’s what he did.”

“Reb Moishe” Geller, 71, a disciple of Shlomo Carlebach and Jerry Garcia

Moshe Pesach Geller, a Bronx-born teacher who spread the gospel of the late Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and the Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia with nearly equal fervor, died in Israel on February 12. He was 71. Geller grew up in Forest Hills and attended Yeshiva High School of Queens. Like Carlebach, the German-born teacher and musician who died in 1994, Geller was an acolyte of neo-Hasidism, which combined Modern Orthodoxy with elements of the 1960s counterculture and Judaism’s mystical tradition. In the early 1980s, he joined the Grateful Dead superfans known as Deadheads who followed the jam band around the country, and was one of the founders of the Jewish “Jerusalem Camp” at annual Rainbow Family events — utopian hippie encampments that would spring up each year on the Fourth of July in various parks and forests. In 2006, “Reb Moishe” moved to Israel, where he “dedicated his life to helping others,” according to a friend, Lorelai Kude, co-founder of Jerusalem’s Radio Free Nachlaot, a “Jewish hippie internet radio station” for which Geller was a regular guest DJ. “I have life and I live it as Heaven sends me to live it; to be there for others in their joys and their tragedies, in their triumphs and their failures,” he once wrote. “And to help them get through them in the best way possible.”

Charles Fried, 88, legal scholar and solicitor general under Ronald Reagan

Charles Fried, a US solicitor general in the Reagan administration who later pushed back against the right-wing drift of the Republican Party, died January 23 at 88. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1935, he and his Jewish family moved to England in 1939 to flee Nazi persecution and settled in the United States two years later. As solicitor general, he argued for the reversal of the Roe v. Wade abortion decision, but years later said that overturning the ruling would be “an act of constitutional vandalism.” One of Harvard Law’s longest serving professors (most recently he defended the controversial congressional testimony of ousted Harvard president Claudine Gay), he was the author of more than 10 books on moral and political philosophy and contemporary law.

Robert Chazan, 87, medievalist who fostered an explosion in Jewish studies

Robert Chazan, a scholar of medieval Jewry who helped establish the field of Jewish studies as an academic discipline, died February 12. He was 87. As a young scholar who earned his PhD at Columbia in 1967, he was part of a vanguard that helped Jewish studies programs spread to universities across the country. In positions at Ohio State University, Queens College and most recently New York University, he dispelled stereotypes about Jews in the Middle Ages: Contrary to an impression of constant persecution, he once wrote, “there were many times and places in which medieval Jewish people and Jewish culture thrived.”