Celebrating Jewish Authors with the Detroit Jewish Book Fair

We are thrilled to partner with The J Detroit on an author event that spotlights four Jewish authors as part of the Detroit Jewish Book Fair festivities! Authors Cindy Frenkel, B.L. Makiefsky, Dr. Jaemi Blair Loeb, and Rabbi Dorit Edut will spend the afternoon presenting their work and chatting about their writing process in an event that is perfect for book lovers of all genres.

The Detroit Jewish Book Fair is the nation’s longest-running Jewish book fair, an annual literary event that features prominent and emerging authors (from our community and from all over the world), and celebrates the global art of Jewish storytelling.

We love seeing who is planning to join us! Your RSVP helps us prepare to host you.

About the Authors:

Cindy Frenkel has over 40 years of experience writing. Cindy's prose has appeared in numerous publications, ranging from Vanity Fair to WIRED.com to The New York Observer, where she was a columnist. Frenkel earned her M.F.A. from Columbia University. She is certified in Visual Thinking Strategies (VTS), and spent a week-long teacher's residency at Falling Water. Cindy is passionate about suicide awareness and prevention, the connection between education and agency, civil rights, animal rescue, antiquing, and design. She serves on the board of A Single Soul, which helps to prevent death by suicide and was a Hambidge Fellow in the spring of 2018.

B.L. Makiefsky was born and raised in Detroit (Mumford High), graduated Michigan State University where among other passions he studied sociology, literature, Spanish, and creative writing, as well as freelanced for the State News. He spent his truly formative years crisscrossing the country on motorcycles, hopping trains and hitchhiking, living an itinerant life that included picking cherries in the Hood River Valley, busing tables in San Francisco, harvesting hemp in Iowa, working construction in California, and reporting news in West Michigan. His last day job was as an analyst for the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services.

Dr. Jaemi Blair Loeb is a technologist and consultant who has been advising public, private, and nonprofit sector organizations on the intersection of humans and technology for the better part of a decade. Her consulting work has taken her inside nonprofits, universities, and small businesses of every size and shape. Across all of them, she has found that the gap between an organization that struggles and one that thrives is almost never about resources. It's about having the right systems, the right people, and knowing how to use both to their full potential. She believes deeply in the power of technology, when designed with intention, to improve people’s lives.

Rabbi Dorit Edut was ordained in 2006 after completing her studies at the Academy for Jewish Religion, a pluralistic Jewish seminary, in Riverdale, NY. She served at several congregations as a student and new Rabbi before returning to Michigan as the congregational Rabbi for Temple Israel of Bay City. Currently she has been teaching and helping with programming at the Downtown Synagogue of Detroit. Under Rabbi Edut’s leadership, the Detroit Interfaith Outreach Network (DION) has begun holding interfaith services and social hours every two months at different religious sites around the city.

About Our Co-Sponsor:

Find Your Center at The J Detroit, a nonprofit organization in southeastern Michigan that provides Jewish programs, events, and community enrichment for people of all ages. For 75 years, the Detroit Jewish Book Fair has worked to inspire and connect generations by sharing the rich diversity of the written word and fosters dialogue through the lens of Jewish literature to promote understanding, empathy and connections across our community.