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Katherine Janus Kahn, illustrator of ‘Sammy Spider’ Jewish children’s books, dies at 83
More than 30 years ago, a colorful little eight-legged spider named Sammy made his picture book debut and scurried into the homes of Jewish families across the country.
Sammy Spider and his mother live in a house with a young Jewish boy named Josh Shapiro and his family. Starting with “Sammy Spider’s First Hanukkah,” he romped through Jewish holidays, prayers and practices across more than two dozen books — all illustrated with bright watercolor collages that have made the books instantly recognizable to generations of Jewish children.
That was the work of Katherine Janus Kahn, who died Oct. 6 at age 83.
Janus Kahn, a fine artist also noted for her works on political justice and women’s issues, illustrated more than 50 books for Kar-Ben, a publishing house for Jewish children’s books that counts the “Sammy Spider” franchise as among its best-selling.
“We are heartbroken,” Kar-Ben said in a Facebook post, adding, “We are profoundly grateful for her legacy, and for the countless stories and memories she leaves behind.”
David Lerner is the CEO of Lerner Publishing Group, the parent company of Kar-Ben, the country’s largest publisher of Jewish children’s books.
“Katherine’s art and storytelling helped shape the landscape of Jewish children’s literature,” he said in an email. “Her books have been recognized with many national awards, honoring her creative vision and her lasting impact.”
Kar-Ben was a tiny company when it first connected with Janus Kahn in the early 1990s. She had drawn attention with her paper-cut illustrations for “The Family Haggadah,” which became a bestseller when it was published in 1987, and the publisher wanted to pair her with an author named Sylvia Rouss who had dreamed up a little spider with a big Jewish future.
“We liked her many styles and thought the collage work would be fun for Sammy’s Hanukkah,” Judye Groner, Kar-Ben’s founder, wrote in an email. “We had no idea that Sammy would become a children’s favorite character featured in over 20 books.”
In that first title, the curious little arachnid spies the young Josh celebrating Hanukkah, wishes he could warm his spider legs on the menorah and wants to spin the colorful dreidels that Josh gets every night.
“Silly Sammy. Spiders don’t light Hanukkah candles. Spiders spin webs,” his mother tells the disappointed Sammy. The catchy refrain repeats for Hanukkah’s eight nights when his mother gives Sammy eight spider socks spun with colorful dreidels, just like the ones Josh gets.
Over the next three decades, Sammy learned about empathy in “Sammy Spider’s First Mitzvah,” celebrated the entire Jewish holiday cycle from Rosh Hashanah to Shavuot and stowed away in Josh’s luggage in “Sammy Spider’s First Trip to Israel.” The most recent book, “Sammy Spider’s Big Book of Jewish Holidays,” came out this year and compiles many of the classic stories that are now widely distributed to Jewish families through PJ Library.
Janus Kahn’s art brought the characters sparkling to life, according to Heidi Rabinowitz, past president of the Association of Jewish Libraries and host of the Book of Life Podcast about Jewish children’s literature.
“Her rainbow-soaked collage artwork give the Sammy Spider books a huge advantage,” Rabinowitz wrote in an email. “They make Sammy and Mrs. Spider friendly and even beautiful, completely removing the ‘ick factor’ from their arachnid identity.”
For Janus Kahn, who studied art at Jerusalem’s Bezalel Academy after graduating from the University of Chicago, the work connected to her core identity. In a 2017 watercolor essay, she said her study at Bezalel came after she volunteered to support Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967 and headed to Israel, where she said “reconciliation felt possible,” even after the war’s end.
“My Judaism and my books are tied together so integrally that I don’t think I could ever untie them,” she said in a 2013 video with Rouss that showed her demonstrating her artistic techniques in her home studio.
Among her other titles was “The Hardest Word: A Yom Kippur Story,” published in 2001, the first in a series written by Jacqueline Jules about a Ziz, a large, magnificently colored Jewish mythological bird. Like Sammy Spider, the Ziz books struck a chord and are now part of the canon of Jewish children’s books.
“She was just so creative,” recalled Jules, who had multiple books illustrated by Janus Kahn. Their first book together, “Once Upon a Shabbos,” published by Kar-Ben in 1998, was about a bear who gets lost in Brooklyn just before the start of Shabbat. Jules was struck by how Janus Kahn’s illustrations added new texture to a story inspired by an Appalachian folktale.
She and Janus Kahn realized they lived near each other in the Washington, D.C., area. After meeting at an event for the book, they headed to a coffee shop for a two-hour conversation that launched a decades-long professional relationship and close friendship. They socialized together, along with Groner, who also lived nearby.
The two were paired up for the Ziz books, another series that has charmed generations of Jewish children. For those books, Janus Kahn created a fanciful creature using paints rather than collage.
“She borrowed different characteristics from a variety of birds. The legs were from a flamingo, the feet were from a rooster,” Jules said.
Now, the Ziz has taken on a life of its own, making appearances in synagogue plays and other programs based on the books. Just a few weeks ago, Jules saw a photo of someone who dressed up as the Ziz at a synagogue event for Yom Kippur, in keeping with the first book’s theme.
Janus-Kahn would often join Jules for a Ziz storytelling at Jewish venues, bringing a feltboard to embellish the Ziz props and a hand-made Ziz puppet that Jules used. At one memorable event, at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Janus Kahn arrived with two colorful feather boas, Jules recalled.
“She made the Ziz come alive,” she said.
With Janus Kahn’s death, Jules, Groner and Rouss not only lost the gifted master illustrator for their books. They have also lost a treasured friend of many decades.
“Kathy was a gift and our friendship was a gift,” Jules said.
Janus Kahn is survived by her husband, David Kahn, and a son, Robert.
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Why God Is Offering Us an Olive Branch Today
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
In “Anthem,” a song from his 1992 album The Future, Leonard Cohen sang: “There is a crack, a crack in everything — that’s how the light gets in.” Beautiful words, if somewhat haunting.
They echo the words uttered decades earlier by another Cohen — the first Chief Rabbi of modern Eretz Yisrael, Rav Avraham Yitzchak HaKohen Kook: “Out of the wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will shine forth.” Never in recent history has this sentiment felt more piercingly true.
Rom Breslavski, who was on duty as a security guard at the Nova music festival on October 7th and was kidnapped into Gaza by terrorists, spent two years in solitary confinement under Islamic Jihad. He never saw daylight. He was starved, beaten, and terrorized. The guards forced him to sleep beside the bodies of murdered hostages. They tried to force him to convert to Islam. They taunted him with lies — that Israel had been destroyed, that his family was dead, that the war with Iran had wiped out everything he loved.
They tried to break him, body and soul, and came close to succeeding. Now Rom is home. He stands for hours every day by the window, just looking at the sky. His sad eyes betray the broken spirit of someone who has been to hell and back. He doesn’t say much.
His freedom is real, yes – but it doesn’t yet feel like freedom. For now, there is a crack — and we can only hope that through it, the light is beginning to get in. That out of this wreckage of destruction, the light of redemption will, at last, shine forth.
The look in Rom’s eyes is the same exact look you see in those haunting photographs of Holocaust survivors taken in early 1945 – men and women stepping through the gates of Auschwitz or Bergen-Belsen, technically free but hollow-eyed and gaunt, their spirits shattered.
They are alive, but not yet living. One nightmare has ended, but another is only beginning – the long, slow struggle to feel human again.
Liberation is never a single moment. It’s a process – slow, uneven, and often painfully drawn out. The first breath of freedom is always jagged and uncertain. Trauma doesn’t evaporate when the door opens – it lingers in the air for a long time after, and truthfully, it never entirely disappears. As Viktor Frankl, the psychiatrist and Auschwitz survivor, later wrote, liberation was not the euphoric experience he and his fellow prisoners imagined it would be.
When the camp gates finally opened, many felt strangely numb, unable to rejoice. They walked out, Frankl said, “like sleepwalkers,” their souls lagging behind their bodies.
In Man’s Search for Meaning, Frankl describes how the sudden transition from horror to safety left survivors bewildered, and even depressed. Their horrific experiences under the Nazis had stripped them of their ability to feel. They were conditioned to expect pain or betrayal at every turn. Which meant that freedom was not the end of their suffering — it was the beginning of their healing.
And it’s in exactly this fragile space — the uneasy aftermath of catastrophe — that the Torah offers one of its most poignant symbols. Towards the end of the story of Noah’s flood, after months sealed inside the ark while the world drowned beneath torrential waters, the storms finally subsided. Hoping their ordeal was over, Noah sent out a dove to see whether the earth had begun to dry. The bird returned with something small and unexpected — “an olive leaf torn off in her mouth” (Gen. 8:11).
It was the first sign that the world outside the ark was beginning to heal, that life after the flood might once again be possible. But, as the commentaries note, the olive leaf was hardly a symbol of complete restoration.
The Ramban sees the olive leaf as proof that the world was only beginning to heal, but was not yet fully ready. Some land had reemerged, and hardy trees like the olive had started to sprout leaves – but the earth was still soggy and unstable, not yet ready for cultivation. The message was not “It’s over,” but rather, “It’s time to begin again.”
The Kli Yakar makes a striking observation: Adam and Eve covered themselves with fig leaves after their sin – symbols of shame. But the dove brought Noah an olive leaf, a symbol of light and atonement; olive oil would one day fuel the pure flame of the sacred Menorah. Here was the light shining through the crack – a hopeful beginning, even if the world wasn’t quite ready to be whole.
The Zohar, sourcebook of Jewish mysticism, adds another layer: an olive yields its oil only when it is crushed. So it is with humanity, which often produces its greatest illumination only after being broken. The olive leaf was not meant to be a token of comfort or triumph, but a reminder that most often, it is from brokenness that light will emerge.
Noah’s emergence from the ark wasn’t the end of the story — it was the start of a long, difficult climb. The flood may have symbolically washed the world clean, but it hadn’t cured the human heart. Within the next few chapters, we encounter the Tower of Babel, Sodom and Gomorrah, jealousies and betrayals within families, and eventually Egypt’s enslavement of Jacob’s descendants. The story of humanity after the flood was a catalogue of all kinds of failure and failings, one generation after another.
The olive leaf that the dove carried to Noah as the trauma of the flood drew to a close was not a declaration of victory. It was a divine whisper: the worst of the nightmare is over, but don’t celebrate just yet — there’s still a long way to go. It reminded Noah, and every generation after him, that rebuilding the world is never a single act of survival, but a lifelong process of reconstruction. Every step along the way must be seen for what it is — a platform for growth, a chance to reach higher, and an opportunity to shape a better future.
Rom Breslavski, like those Holocaust survivors before him, knows this truth instinctively. Freedom isn’t a doorway you walk through into sunshine — it’s a staircase you ascend, one painful, uncertain step at a time. The dove’s olive leaf wasn’t telling Noah that the storm was over — Noah already knew that. It was reminding him that the healing had only just begun.
That’s how God redeems the world: not in an instant, but through slow, deliberate rebirth. The cracks remain, but through them — as Leonard Cohen says it — the light gets in.
That’s what the dove offered Noah. It’s what God offered the survivors of the Shoah. And it’s what He is offering us today, after two years of trauma following October 7th — a tiny olive leaf, a call to rebuild, and the promise that even through the cracks, His light still finds a way in.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
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Media Blindness: When Hamas Breaks the Ceasefire and Headlines Blame Israel
The headquarters of The New York Times. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
The Gaza ceasefire almost collapsed this week. It happened because Hamas killed two Israeli soldiers in an area controlled by the IDF, according to the internationally-backed agreement with the terror group.
In response, Israel retaliated with air strikes on Hamas targets in the enclave.
Yet the media managed to blur the first fact and emphasize the second, portraying Israel as a regional bully breaking a fragile truce.
They did it by using skeptical language — or by omitting Hamas from the story altogether.
Skepticism and Doubt
The first tactic questioned what Hamas actually did. Phrases that made Hamas’ actions look like a mere “accusation” made headlines in The New York Times:
Two Israeli soldiers lie dead & more are seriously injured.
How much evidence does it take before @nytimes stops treating Hamas crimes as more than an “accusation?”
So, NYTimes, stop spitting in the faces of both Israel and your readers and start reporting the facts. pic.twitter.com/OUUaFBRI0m
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 19, 2025
The BBC was also skeptical — but it went further. The UK broadcaster subtly questioned whether Israeli troops were indeed inside the agreed-upon perimeter, known as “The Yellow Line,” effectively implying the attack might have been justified.
According to @BBCNews, it all started when Israel fired back.
When Hamas breaks the ceasefire and attacks Israelis, guess who the BBC frames as the aggressor.
And the yellow line is the area that multiple countries signed off on — not “what Israel says,” according to the BBC. pic.twitter.com/rJs0hifemm
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 19, 2025
Sky News even doubted whether the Hamas operatives who killed the two soldiers by firing an RPG directly at them were terrorists. And it relied on Hamas — disguised under the title “The Gaza government media office” — to blame Israel for other violations.
.@SkyNews also doesn’t know what the “Gaza government media office” is that they are relying on for their “news.”
It’s propaganda straight from Hamas, and Sky is happy to broadcast it. https://t.co/fpLd9FM00D
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 20, 2025
The Times of London did not bother attributing accusations. Its headline simply led with Israel’s strike and called Hamas’ attack “alleged.”
Two dead Israeli soldiers are being buried today. Yet, somehow, they were killed in an “alleged attack” according to @thetimes.
And somehow, the ceasefire is in doubt, not because of the attack that breached it, but Israel’s response.
Make it make sense. pic.twitter.com/2DQKIHY6kc
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 20, 2025
Omitting Hamas
Meanwhile, Reuters avoided the facts altogether by not mentioning Hamas in its headline — which focused solely on Israel.
And the leading paragraph in the agency’s story described “an attack” without perpetrators:
The Israeli military said on Sunday a ceasefire in Gaza had resumed after an attack killed two of its soldiers and prompted a wave of airstrikes that Palestinians said killed 26 people, in the most serious test yet of this month’s truce.
The Associated Press followed suit, offering no mention of Hamas:
France24 went even further, not only omitting Hamas entirely and blaming Israel, but also adding its own spin — that the Jewish State acted “despite [the] ceasefire agreement.”
The Israeli media reported that Hamas broke the ceasefire by killing two Israeli soldiers in Gaza and that Israel then *retaliated* against Hamas.
Not an “attack on Gaza despite a ceasefire agreement.”
But that would ruin @France24_en‘s skewed anti-Israel narrative. pic.twitter.com/JQtlpdtHG1
— HonestReporting (@HonestReporting) October 20, 2025
This pattern isn’t accidental — it’s systemic. By omitting Hamas or labeling its actions as “alleged,” much of the media shields the terror group from accountability while turning Israel into the perpetual villain.
When Hamas kills Israelis during a ceasefire, it breaks the truce. When Israel responds, it’s defending itself. But in the headlines, that truth is blurred — and readers are misled. Journalism’s role is to clarify, not conceal. When major outlets obscure who fires the first shot, they become complicit in rewriting the story of aggression and victimhood.
The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.
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Palestinian Authority: It’s Lawful to Murder Israelis; It’s Unlawful to Arrest Palestinian Murderers
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas looks on as he visits the Istishari Cancer Center in Ramallah, in the West Bank, May 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohammed Torokman
Naive European leaders embrace and praise Palestinian Authority (PA) leader Mahmoud Abbas as a peacemaker — but the PA continues to justify and even glorify terror when the Europeans aren’t looking or listening.
While official PA TV regularly interviews PA officials who laud imprisoned and released terrorists, the most explicit support for terror was expressed in three official Twitter posts on the Palestinian Authority’s X page.
The PA’s post lamented that “still more than 10,000 captives are unlawfully held by Israel” followed by, “over 10,000 remain unlawfully held captive.”
The use of the term “unlawfully” is consistent with PA ideology that Palestinians have the right to murder Israelis and thus all terrorist prisoners are “prisoners of war” — lawful fighters who were captured during lawful combat and therefore must be freed.
The PA’s “lawful” fighters include bomb builder Abdullah Barghouti, who was responsible for the murder of 67 Israelis, and Ibraham Hamid, who is serving 54 life sentences. They are responsible for the murder of these people:
The naive European leaders embrace Mahmoud Abbas because he claims publicly that he condemns terrorism. However, when addressing Arabic-speaking, Palestinian audiences, he says that murdering Israelis is legitimate resistance, that those who kill Israelis “are more honorable” than all other Palestinians, and that they are “stars in the sky of the Palestinian people.”
Since Mahmoud Abbas does not consider the murder of Israelis to be terrorism, he can tell President Macron and Prime Minister Starmer that he condemns terrorism while embracing and rewarding those same murderers.
These newest Twitter posts make it clear that the PA hasn’t changed one iota from being a terror-supporting entity, in spite of all the lavish praise from Europe.
Here’s Palestinian Media Watch (PMW)’s suggestion to Macron and Starmer. Pick up the phone, call Mahmoud Abbas, and ask him one simple question: Are Abdullah Barghouti and Ibrahim Hamed terrorists? Tell him that the phone call is being recorded and that his answer will be publicized.
PMW is waiting to hear Abbas’ answer.
The author is the Founder and Director of Palestinian Media Watch, where a version of this article first appeared.