Welcome! We are proud to host the 2025 Pittsburgh Jewish Book Festival. These challenging times call for gathering our diverse community to celebrate Jewish culture and traditions and to engage in civil discourse. Our festival includes authors from around the corner and around the globe, and our 2025 program includes children’s books, academics, journalists, artists, cookbooks, Yiddish stories, klezmer and Bob Dylan’s music.
Book Festival Pricing Options
Pass Plus – $180 each
This option provides access to all book festival events (paid and free) and meet and greets with all the headliners. Meet and greet details will be sent to registrants after order submission.
All Festival Pass – $18 each
This option provides access to all book festival events (paid and free) including all headliner events.
Single Headliner Events – $10 each
This option allows a person to choose individual headliners. You can select one headliner or multiple headliners. The headliners include Sam Sussman, Dr. Ilan Stavans, Joshua Leifer, Jonathan Harounoff and Dr. Jeremy Dauber.
FREE Admission
This options allows access to all non-headliner events: the local author showcase, sponsored speaker Adam Sobsey, zoom lunch, and children and family program.
Meet the Headliners
Sam Sussman, author of “Boy from the North Country”
When Evan, 26, is suddenly called home from his life abroad to the secluded farmhouse where he was raised by his mother, June, there is so much he does not yet know. He doesn’t know his mother is dying. He still doesn’t know the identity of his biological father or the elusive story of his mother’s creatively intense, emotionally turbulent romance with Bob Dylan, whom Evan reveres as an artist and whom strangers have long insisted he resembles. He doesn’t know the secrets of his mother’s life before he was born or what drove her to leave New York City for a completely different existence.
In this deeply moving debut novel, Sam Sussman writes one of the most tender and intimate mother-son relationships of our era. Caring for his mother as her illness worsens, and as she begins to tell him truths he has waited so long to hear, Evan comes to understand the startling gift this extraordinary woman has bequeathed him.
Sam Sussman grew up in the Hudson Valley. He graduated with a BA from Swarthmore College and an MPhil from the University of Oxford and has lived in Berlin and Jerusalem. His writing has been recognized by BAFTA and published in Harper’s Magazine. Sam has taught writing seminars in India, Chile, and England and participated in the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature. He lives in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan and his native Hudson Valley.
Dr. Ilan Stavans, co-author of “Sabor Judío”
“Sabor Judío” celebrates the delicious fusion of two culinary traditions, Jewish and Mexican. Written with joy and verve, Ilan Stavans and Margaret Boyle’s lavishly illustrated cookbook demonstrates how cooking and eating connect Jewish Mexicans across places and generations. Featuring 100 deeply personal recipes enjoyed by Jewish Mexicans around the world, the book is organized by meal—desayuno (breakfast), comida (lunch), and cena (dinner)—and also includes dishes made for Shabbat, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Passover, Hanukkah, Shavuot, and other holidays.
“Sabor Judío” isn’t only a cookbook; it is also a vibrant history of Jewish immigration to Mexico from 1492 to the present. It explains how flavors and dishes evolved in Mexican and Jewish kitchens and how they fused into a distinct cuisine, mainly by the labor of Ashkenazi, Sephardic, Mizrahi and converso women. This cookbook is the product of two award-winning, internationally known Jewish Mexican writers and foodies who spent a decade gathering recipes and personal narratives from Jewish Mexican households. The result is a dynamic and delicious array of recipes and experiences, infusing important cultural heritage into this essential culinary record.
Ilan Stavans is Lewis-Sebring professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. Ilan Stavans has taught courses on a wide array of topics such as Spanglish, Jorge Luis Borges, Shakespeare in prison, modern American poetry, Latin music, “Don Quixote”, Gabriel García Márquez, “Modernismo”, popular culture in Hispanic America, world Jewish writers, the cultural history of the Spanish language, Pablo Neruda, the history of the Spanish language, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Yiddish literature, Jewish-Hispanic relations, cinema, Latin American art, and U.S.-Latino culture.
Joshua Leifer, author of “Tablets Shattered”
“Tablets Shattered” is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the 20th century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future.
Joshua Leifer is a journalist and historian. A regular contributor to “Haaretz”, “The New York Review of Books”, and “The Guardian”, his essays and reporting have also appeared in “The New York Times”, “The Nation”, “The New Statesman”, and elsewhere. His first book, “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life”, won a National Jewish Book Award. He is also a doctoral candidate in history at Yale University, where his research examines the politics of antisemitism and the collapse of the post-1989 liberal international order.
Jonathan Harounoff, author of “Unveiled”
In September 2022, 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini is killed by Iran’s morality police in Tehran for allegedly wearing her hijab too loosely. Outrage triggers nationwide protests. Women rip off their headscarves, setting them afire. Others cut their hair in open defiance. Key industries are brought to a standstill, and once-revered banners of the country’s supreme leader are incinerated. It’s the greatest challenge to the Islamic Republic of Iran in its 46-year history not coming from a foreign adversary but from their own freedom-seeking women. Women and girls, perhaps for the first time in the history of the modern Middle East, take center stage in a nationwide uprising, clamoring for a freer Iran and chanting the now-viral battle cry of: “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Acclaimed British-Iranian author Jonathan Harounoff serves as Israel’s international spokesperson to the United Nations.
An Iran and Israel expert, Harounoff’s articles and commentaries have appeared in “The New York Post”, “Haaretz”, “BBC”, “Newsweek”, “The LA Times”, “The Jewish Chronicle”, “NewsNation”, “Fox News” and “Iran International”.
He previously served in strategic communications roles at a Fortune 500 firm, as well as at an NGO focused on foreign affairs.
He holds a BA in Arabic, Persian and Middle Eastern history from Cambridge University, a master’s in journalism from Columbia Journalism School and is also an alumnus of Harvard University, where he studied international relations and diplomacy.
“Unveiled: Inside Iran’s #WomanLifeFreedom Revolt” is his debut book. He lives in New York City with his wife, Stephanie.
Dr. Jeremy Dauber, author of “Jewish Comedy”
In a major work of scholarship both erudite and very funny, Columbia professor Jeremy Dauber traces the origins of Jewish comedy and its development from biblical times to the age of Twitter. Organizing the product of Jews’ comic imagination over continents and centuries into what he calls the seven strands of Jewish comedy―including the satirical, the witty, and the vulgar―he traces the ways Jewish comedy has mirrored, and sometimes even shaped, the course of Jewish history. Persecution, cultural assimilation, religious revival, diaspora, Zionism―all of these, and more, were grist for the Jewish comic mill; and Dauber’s book takes readers on the tour of the funny side of some very serious business. (And vice versa.)
In a work of dazzling scope, readers will encounter comic masterpieces here that range from Talmudic rabbi jokes to medieval skits, Yiddish satires and Borscht Belt routines to scenes from “Seinfeld” and “Broad City”, and the book of Esther to Adam Sandler’s “Hanukkah Song.” Dauber also explores the rise and fall of popular comic archetypes such as the Jewish mother, the Jewish American Princess, and the schlemiel, the schlimazel, and the schmuck, and the classic works of such masters of Jewish comedy as Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, Franz Kafka, the Marx Brothers, Woody Allen, Joan Rivers, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, Sarah Silverman, Jon Stewart, and Larry David, among many others.
Dr. Jeremy Dauber is the Atran Professor of Yiddish Language, Literature and Culture and, for a decade, directed the Institute of Israel and Jewish Studies at Columbia University; he is currently also the Mendelson Family Professor of American Studies and directs Columbia’s Center for American Studies. He is the author of seven non-fiction books: “Antonio’s Devils: Writers of the Jewish Enlightenment” and the “Birth of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literature” (Stanford University Press, 2004); “In the Demon’s Bedroom: Yiddish Literature and the Early Modern” (Yale University Press; 2010); “The Worlds of Sholem Aleichem” (Schocken Books, 2013); “Jewish Comedy: A Serious History” ( W.W. Norton, 2017); “American Comics: A History” (W.W. Norton: 2021); “Mel Brooks: Disobedient Jew” (Yale University Press: 2023); and, most recently, “American Scary: A History of Horror From Salem To Stephen King” and “Beyond” (Algonquin: 2024). He frequently lectures on topics related to Jewish literature, history, humor, and popular culture at the 92nd St Y and other venues throughout the United States. As J.A. Dauber, he writes fiction for young adults and middle-graders; his latest novel, “Press 1 For Invasion”, is available now at bookstores everywhere.
Thank you to the following who made this event possible
Carolyn Slayton and Seth Glick
Jewish Book Council
Pittsburgh Jewish Chronicle
Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh
Thank you to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh Funds
Arthur J. and Betty F. Diskin Cultural Endowment Fund
Early in her career as a teacher and graduate student at NYU, Betty Diskin eagerly partook of Broadway shows, operas, ballets and concerts. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1952, she continued her lifelong love of the performing arts and was herself active in local theater, including the Little Lake Theater and the original Pittsburgh Playhouse. She never stopped studying and learning and earned her PhD from the University of Pittsburgh later in life.
Betty and her husband, Arthur Diskin, a highly respected attorney, were enthusiastic and generous supporters of the cultural and civic organizations of the Pittsburgh community.
After the tragic loss of her husband, Arthur, and their two sons, William Diskin and Robert Diskin, Betty felt strongly about creating a legacy to honor their memory. Betty established the Arthur J. and Betty F. Diskin Cultural Endowment Fund to be administered by the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh. The goal of the Fund is to reflect the Jewish values of cultural literacy and increased understanding of humanity through the support of cultural, educational, literary and civic organizations of the Pittsburgh community, particularly those organizations devoted to music and theater.
SteelTree Fund
The SteelTree Fund’s purpose is to strengthen the Jewish community of Pittsburgh by funding new and inventive programs and initiatives.
Thank you to the Leadership Team
Ronna Harris Askin
Mark Frisch
Seth Glick
Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman
Chris Hall
Bob Halperin
Eleanor Hershberg
Beth Kissileff
Jean Reznick
Toby Tabachnick
Nancy Tuckfelt
Ray Wallach
Thank You Community Partner
