Celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month with these fiction and nonfiction reads that highlight the history, identity, and culture of Jewish folks!
Told in alternating timelines, Jewish seventeen-year-old Natalya spends one summer in New York with her dad, trying to muster the courage to talk to her girl crush, and the other in Los Angeles with her estranged mom, going for a guy she never saw coming.
Based on the true experiences of her grandmother's childhood in Holocaust-era Romania, author Elana K. Arnold weaves a tale of love and loss in the darkest days of the twentieth century, and one young woman's will to survive them.
Hoodie Rosen's life isn't that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie's world hasn't changed that much. He's got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren't happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in at once, but that's not Hoodie's problem. That is, until he meets and falls for Anna-Marie Diaz-O'Leary, who happens to be the daughter of the obstinate mayor trying to keep Hoodie's community out of the town. And things only get more complicated when Tregaron is struck by a series of antisemitic crimes that quickly escalate to deadly violence. As his community turns on him for siding with the enemy, Hoodie finds himself caught between his first love and the only world he's ever known.
In the very white, very Christian world of Atlanta society in 1958, New York transplant Ruth decides not to tell her new high school friends and boyfriend that she is Jewish, but when a violent act rocks the city, Ruth must figure out where her loyalties lie.
Tyler Feder shares her story of her mother's first oncology appointment to facing reality as a motherless daughter in this frank and refreshingly funny graphic memoir.
College student and certified nerd Arthur Rose has got issues: he's estranged from his Jewish faith, he needs a recommendation for grad school, and getting back with his ex, Lynn, is going to take more than an apology and chocolate. He's trying to balance it all when he starts seeing shapes in the dark. Soon after, a mysterious young woman approaches. She tells him she killed his father, and is now seeking a stone blessed by God Himself. What follows is a tale ripped out of Arthur's wildest fantasies: to protect the world from evil, he must join a secret order of Jewish demon-hunters that have spanned millennia. He'll have to master Hebrew magic, uncover the secrets of his past, and embrace his family heritage. In so doing, he won't just reclaim his faith, but become Sanhedrin.
Stuck in a time loop, queer Jewish teens Phoebe and Jess start to fall for each other, causing chronically ill Phoebe to worry about a future that may never come.
Benji and his grandma, Bubbe Rosa, are gathering the ingredients for a Friday night dinner. As they wander the streets of Brooklyn and Manhattan, Bubbe struggles to reconcile the world of her memories with the new realities that surround her. A powerful and affecting story of Jewish identity, of generational divides, of tolerance and acceptance, and of a restless city and its inhabitants.
Emma Goldman made trouble her whole life. The first time was by accident. Her birth (in Lithuania, in 1869) angered her father. He had wanted a dutiful son, not a headstrong daughter. The other times were on purpose. When she arrived in America as a young woman, she loved its democratic ideals but was appalled by its hypocrisy. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness seemed to be only for those at the top. Something had to be done for everyone else. Someone had to speak up. Soon Emma was delivering rousing speeches on topics like workers' rights, feminism, and the atrocities of capitalism. This is the story of Emma's complex love affair with America. It's also the story of her many romances with the men she met while trying to change America. Emma believed marriage was disempowering to women and lived her life according to the principles of free love. Emma called herself an anarchist and a freethinker. Her critics called her a troublemaker, a "loudmouth." But sometimes you need to be loud, if you want your voice to be heard.
On the night before her wedding, 17-year-old Sorel leaps from a window and runs away from her life. To keep from being discovered, she takes on the male identity of Isser Jacobs, but it soon becomes clear that there is a real Isser Jacobs, and people want him dead. Her mistaken identity takes Sorel into the dark underworld of her small city in the Pale of Settlement, where smugglers, forgers, and wicked angels fight for control of the Jewish community. In order to make it out, Sorel must discover who Isser Jacobs really is — and who she wants to be.
Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young people, Essie, goes missing. Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way, the angel and demon encounter humans in need of their help, including Rose Cohen, whose best friend (and the love of her life) has abandoned her to marry a man, and Malke Shulman, whose father died mysteriously on his way to America. But there are obstacles ahead of them as difficult as what they've left behind. Medical exams (and demons) at Ellis Island. Corrupt officials, cruel mob bosses, murderers, and poverty.
Probing the lives of historic icons like Anne Frank and Emma Goldman to contemporary heroines such as Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Janet Yellen, the book also provides an overview of modern Jewish history. Subjects ranging from Anna Freud, the founder of psychoanalytic child psychology, to fashion mogul Diane von Furstenberg to comedian Sarah Silverman offer a fascinating window into the ways Jewish women have approached their fields and embraced their identities. The captivating stories of luminaries from the worlds of politics, literature, activism, the arts, business, science, and more show how these women—in many cases—overcame the obstacles of being both Jewish and female to make their unique mark, and how being Jewish impacted their journeys.
Born to a Jewish family in a small Polish village, Estelle Nadel-then known as Enia Feld-was just seven years old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939. Once a vibrant child with a song for every occasion, Estelle would eventually lose her voice as, over the next five years, she would survive the deaths of their mother, father, their eldest brother and sister, and countless others. A child at the mercy of her neighbors during a terrifying time in history, The Girl Who Sang is an enthralling first-hand account of Estelle's fight for survival during World War II. She would weather loss, betrayal, near-execution, and spend two years away from the warmth of the sun—all before the age of eleven. And once the war was over, Estelle would walk barefoot across European borders and find remnants of home in an Austrian displaced persons camp before finally crossing the Atlantic to arrive in New York City.
Anxious eighteen-year-old Tally and her twin Max set off on a whirlwind high school exchange trip to Israel where she grapples with her Jewish identity, mental health, and sexuality.
When sixteen-year-old Mateo and Chela discover each other and their powers during a political battle between neighborhood factions, they set aside their differences to unravel the mystery behind their sunken homeland and to stop a dangerous political operative who is trying to harness their gifts to unleash terror on the world.
Lithuania, 1943: A father drowns in the all-consuming grief of a daughter killed by the Nazis. He can't bring her back. But he can use kishuf, an ancient and profane magic, to create an avenging golem in her image. Vera was made for vengeance. She is the Jew that the Nazis cannot kill. But is she more than the wrath that her creator infused within her?
It's 1950s New York, and Marisabina Russo is being raised Catholic and attending a Catholic school that she loves, but when she finds out that she's Jewish by blood and that her family members are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, her childhood is thrown into turmoil. To make matters more complicated, her father is out of the picture, her mother is ambitious and demanding, and her older half-brothers have troubles, too. Following the author's young life into the tumultuous, liberating 1960s, this graphic-novel memoir explores the childhood burdens of memory and guilt, and Marisabina's struggle and success in forming an identity entirely her own.
Nine months after Danny disappeared, his closest friends, Ellie, Rae, and Deenie, deal with their loss very differently, but will have to share secrets about the night he disappeared to uncover the truth.
Throughout the years, both Rowan and Neil have been at competition with one another on everything from who has the best ideas for school functions to which one will be their graduating class's valedictorian. However, in the twenty-four hours left they have as high school students, the two learn they share something much deeper than a rivalry.
Now: Grieving the loss of her mother, college student Lilah is hoping to reconnect with a grandfather who refuses to talk about his past. Then she receives a mysterious letter from a fellow student, Tommaso, claiming he's found a lost family heirloom, and her world is upended. Soon Lilah finds herself in Rome, trying to unlock her grandfather's history as a Holocaust survivor once and for all. But as she and Tommaso get closer to the truth—and their relationship begins to deepen into something sweeter—Lilah realizes that some secrets may be too painful to unbury.
Then: It's 1943, and nineteen-year-old Bruna and her family are doing their best to survive in Rome's Jewish quarter under Nazi occupation. Until the dreaded knock comes early one morning, and Bruna is irrevocably separated from the rest of her family. Overcome with guilt at escaping her family's fate in the camps, she joins the underground rebellion. When her missions bring her back to her childhood crush, Elsa, Bruna must decide how much she's willing to risk — when fully embracing herself is her greatest act of resistance.
Clara loves rules. Rules are what have kept her and her sister, Molly, alive-or, rather, undead-for over a century. Work their historic movie theater by day. Shift into an owl under the cover of night. Feed on men in secret. And never fall in love. Molly is in love. And she's tired of keeping her girlfriend, Anat, a secret. If Clara won't agree to bend their rules a little, then she will bend them herself. Boaz is cursed. He can't walk two city blocks without being cornered by something undead. At least at work at the theater, he gets to flirt with Clara, wishing she would like him back. When Anat vanishes, and New York's monstrous underworld emerges from the shadows, Clara suspects Boaz, their annoyingly cute box office attendant, might be behind it all.
It's the beginning of the school year, and Briar's newest resident, D.J. Rosenblum, is not here for it. Ever since her cousin Rachel died, D.J.'s family has been a mess: Her aunt and uncle are catatonic. Her mom is even more scatterbrained than usual. She had to postpone her bat mitzvah a whole year. Worst of all, she and her mom had to move—leaving her best friend, Eva, behind. Briar does have one redeeming factor, though: Here, in Rachel's hometown, D.J. can finally get to the bottom of her cousin's death. With the help of a chatty journalist and a queen-bee hacker, D.J. can fill in the last days of Rachel's life. And if she can just figure out her Torah portion—with help from her cute tutor, Jonah—maybe, just maybe, she'll be able to solve a bigger mystery.