Two decades ago, after leaving the Wall Street Journal, one of my wife’s first jobs in the Jewish world was working for a nascent project at the Harold Grinspoon Foundation to send Jewish children’s books to families every month.

The idea was brilliantly simple: Children want their parents to read to them at bedtime. If they get a book in the mail with their name on it, they’ll run to their parent and beg/demand for them to read it. Fertile soil. Now plant the seed of a story about Shabbat, Jewish holidays, or the like, and you’ve created a moment of Jewish education that may not have existed before.

For its first five years, Natalie led the book selection committee. She worked with authors and illustrators and publishers. It wasn’t a simple process (and still isn’t), and she certainly learned that you can’t satisfy everyone.

Natalie eventually went on to other work. But over the last 21 years, the PJ Library has reached 670,000 Jewish families and shipped over 50 million books. And evaluation research has shown that many of them are significantly more engaged in Jewish life and Jewish education as a result. Pretty amazing.

Harold Grinspoon has long shared that the idea for PJ came from Dolly Parton, who passed away this week. In case you missed it, one of Dolly’s most significant legacies is her Imagination Library, a program that sends over 3 million children’s books every month........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)