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Liz Kleinrock was at a writers retreat in 2021 when the idea came to her for a children’s book about notable Jews from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds.

She immediately texted Caroline Kusin Pritchard, another children’s book author with whom she had struck up a friendship on Instagram a year earlier, and asked her: Would you do this with me?

“It was impossible to say no,” Kusin Pritchard, a Stanford graduate who lived in the Bay Area for 18 years before moving to Virginia last year, told J. in a joint interview with Kleinrock over Zoom. “Any project with Liz is a dream. And this book in particular is so deeply needed.”

“What Jewish Looks Like,” which comes out Sept. 24, spotlights 36 Jewish “heroes” who have “changed our world for the better,” the authors write in the introduction. The subjects include the famous, such as Israeli violinist and conductor Itzhak Perlman and basketball player Sue Bird, and the less well-known, such as the 16th-century Portuguese businesswoman and philanthropist Doña Gracia Nasi and Beta Israel (Ethiopian Jewish) leader Uri Ben Baruch.

Two Bay Area icons — politician Harvey Milk and actor Daveed Diggs — made the cut. Around half of those featured are American, and most were born in the 20th century.

Ruth Behar, the Cuban American author and cultural anthropologist who researches Cuban Jewry, is one of several people with Sephardic ancestry represented in the book.

“I love being brought inside such a capacious tent where there is space for so many different definitions of what Jewish looks like,” she wrote in an email to J. “This book breaks all the stereotypes and lets us see Jewishness as an identity that is always evolving and connected to a vast range of communities around the world.”

Kleinrock said this is a book she wished she had had growing up in Washington, D.C., as the South Korean-born adopted daughter of white, Ashkenazi parents.

“I am a transracial adoptee,” she said. “I don’t look like anybody in my family. I didn’t look like anybody in my synagogue. I just felt very much like a square peg trying to be fit into a round hole.”

Another reason she decided to tackle this project is because she’s an anti-bias educator, and she wanted to create a resource that could be used in classrooms. There are biography books for young readers about other minority communities, such as “Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History” and “Notable Native People,” but there is nothing comparable about Jews that captures the fullness of their diversity, she said.

“You see so much misinformation in Western media about who we are, and I thought it would be really helpful to have a book that sought to dismantle a lot of those stereotypes and assumptions,” Kleinrock said. “It’s something that’s for children, and very much for adults, too.”

“What Jewish Looks Like” begins with several “big questions,” including “Are Jews white?” and “What is Jewish diaspora?” The biographies are organized into sections based on specific Jewish values embodied by the subjects, including “Tikkun Olam,” “Ometz Lev” (“Courage”) and “Pikuach Nefesh” (“To Save a Life”).

In addition, there are blurbs about Jewish communities around the world and organizations in the U.S. that promote diversity, including two with local ties: Be’chol Lashon, which was founded in San Francisco, and the Jews of Color Initiative, which is based in Berkeley.

“We really wanted this to feel layered and dynamic and alive, and we wanted there to be multiple access points,” Kusin Pritchard said.

Iris Gottlieb drew the book’s joyful illustrations. Gottlieb lived in the Bay Area for five years and worked at the San Francisco Exploratorium and the Oakland Museum of California.

Out of all the accomplished Jews who have ever lived, how did the authors decide who to profile?

“The process has been such a rollercoaster,” Kusin Pritchard said, as Kleinrock shared her screen, revealing a complex spreadsheet the two of them used to keep track of the 100 or so people under consideration.

They sought to strike a balance of racial and gender identities, national origins and professions. Once they had whittled the list down to 36, a symbolic number in Judaism, they divided up the writing duties.

Kusin Pritchard, 36, said one of her favorite people to research was Bill Pinkney, the first Black sailor to complete a solo voyage around the world and a convert to Judaism. “He has such a cool story,” she said.

Kleinrock, 37, was drawn to the story of Ruby Myers, an actress in India known by her stage name Sulochana. “I had never heard of her growing up, and it was really interesting to do this deep dive into her body of work as an actress,” she said.

Both writers said they hope young Jews of color feel seen while reading the book. They also want to help non-Jews understand that Jews are not a monolith. Kusin Pritchard has four mixed race children with her Samoan husband; their 7-year-old son was excited to find New Zealand-born filmmaker Taika Waititi in the book.

“He said, ‘He’s a Polynesian Jew just like me!’” she recalled. “It’s so important that every Jewish kid feels proud and helps co-create what Jewish looks like together.”

“What Jewish Looks Like” by Liz Kleinrock and Caroline Kusin Pritchard, illustrated by Iris Gottlieb (128 pages, HarperCollins, ages 8-12). The authors will discuss the book at 12 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 28, at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, 736 Mission St., S.F. Free with museum admission.