Look out world, it's time to Code Like a Girl. Ever wanted to know how to code? This is your entry. Starts with Scratch, shifts to Python. Puts together a computer from a Raspberry Pi, goes to motion sensors that send you emails. Begin with knowing very little. Leave understanding the five basics and the Internet of Things. Written with love and fascination for building things and telling stories about code and with code. Code Like a Girl is a welcoming how-to-code book for middle school girls, and for everyone. 

The follow-up to The Daring Book for Girls was published during the recession of 2008. It sold very few copies, and few have heard of it. That's a shame, because the book has some good stories about the underground railroad and about cowgirls, and more stuff to keep life interesting: info on how to tie a sarong, make a labyrinth, win at scrabble with 2 and 3-letter words, turn your backyard into a farm, and much more. In the publishing world of my dreams, it is reissued as a series of five books. 

The Daring Book for Girls began as a feminist dare, really. Andi and I were  between books, and  we were running, with Stacy DeBroff, a digital book promotion startup called MotherTalk. That's how we learned about the Dangerous Book for Boys. Sounds goo, we though, but where's the book for girls? Turns out there was none, so we had to write it, which we did in the summer of 2007. No way were we going to let the boys have all the outdoors, make-it break-it learn-it fun for themselves. My fave chapters include, well, all of them, as well as the punk-themed  Daring Book trailer. 

I wrote this book while trying to understand my new life as a parent and a mother, once my first daughter was born. It was my first attempt to write a popular book, to crossover from academe and to experiment with a non-fiction voice that was ever more personal. I wanted to create a book about motherhood that didn't give up, which looked across class and race lines, and which didn't pretend that women are superhumans who can do everything. The truth? It's the system, not we individuals, that constrain our choices. Until that  changes, no mother, parent or child wins.

 "Miriam Peskowitz offers a dramatic revision to our understanding of early rabbinic Judaism. Using a wide range of sources―archaeology, legal texts, grave goods, technology, art, and writings in Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin―she challenges traditional assumptions regarding Judaism's historical development."  This description stands. Spinning Fantasies is the book that emerged from my dissertation. In it I experimented with a writing voice  for ancient history that is personal; not memoirish, but personal, close, and takes history seriously. lts exploration of the cultural construction of the "ordinary tedium of everyday life" and how that creates meaning is still something that animates my writing. It was part of the University of California Press' Contraversions series of studies in Jewish literature, culture and society. Amazingly for an academic book, it's still in print. 

Now you know how I spent my late 20's: "Judaism Since Gender  offers a radically new concept of Jewish Studies, staking out new intellectual terrain and redefining the discipline as an intrinsically feminist practice." While Laura Levitt and I were assistant professors we wrote our individual first books (hers was Jews and Feminsm: the Ambivalent Search for Home) and we edited this anthology. We were young. We were brash. We decided to take an entire field of classical knowledge and transform it. 

The book contains my classic essay, "Engendering Jewish Religious History." In Spinning Fantasies I wrote about physical tools that people used. Here, I wrote about having a critical and analytical toolbox, and what that means. I love this book, love that Routledge published it in the late 90's when the press was doing so much to spread the discipline of cultural studies, and love that this book, too, is still in print and still being read.