Favorite Reads for Jewish Book Month

By Rachel Kahn (Seward Park), Sherri Machlin (SNFL), and Avigail Sharon (West Farms)
November 17, 2022
West Farms Library

In the 1920s Fanny Goldstein, a librarian from the Boston Public Library, created Jewish Book Week to celebrate Jewish authors and stories. In the 1940s, the celebration was extended to a month-long event taking place in the weeks leading up to Hanukkah, the Jewish festival of lights, miracles, and identity. 

Nonfiction

  • Yiddish Folktales

    edited by Beatrice Silverman Weinreich; translated by Leonard Wolf

    Nearly 200 tales in this collection of Jewish folklore reveal the rich culture and tradition of Eastern European Jewry.

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    Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons, and Gangster Dreams

    by Rich Cohen

    In 1930s Brooklyn, there lived a breed of men who now exist only in legend and in the memories of a few old-timers: Jewish gangsters. Growing up in Brownsville, they made their way from street fights to underworld power, becoming the execution squad for a national crime syndicate. Murder Inc. did for organized crime what Henry Ford did for the automobile, and Tough Jews is the first in-depth portrait of these men, a thrilling glimpse at the muscle that made possible the success of gangster statesmen such as Bugsy Siegel, Meyer Lansky, and Lucky Luciano.

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    Stanley Kubrick: New York Jewish Intellectual

    by Nathan Abrams

    Drawing on archival materials, this study analyzes the films of director Stanley Kubrick to reveal how they reflect his ethnic and cultural roots. Searching for both the presence and the absence of Jewish themes in his films, the book examines his film treatment of subjects including ethics, men’s issues, and evil. In addition, it reflects on his own Jewish identity (or lack of it) and explains why he removed Jewish characters from his film adaptations of books.

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    Why the Jews?: How Jewish Values Transformed Twentieth Century American Pop Culture

    by Robert D. Cherry

    The author explores the important role that Jewish performers and middlemen played in the evolution of popular culture throughout the century, from stage and big screen to radio, television, and the music industry. He concludes with a discussion of Jewish values that helps explain the role that Jews continue to play in American popular culture.

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    Jews Don't Count

    by David Baddiel

    In his unique combination of close reasoning, polemic, personal experience, and jokes, Baddiel argues that those who think of themselves as on the right side of history have often ignored the history of anti-Semitism. He outlines why and how, in a time of intensely heightened awareness of minorities, Jews don't count as a real minority: and why they should.

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    Bambi's Jewish Roots and Other Essays on German-Jewish Culture: Portraits and Self-Portraits

    by Paul Reitter

    Organized around German-Jewish culture and relevant issues, such as racism, the Holocaust, Hitler, and discrimination, Reitter presents 26 essays which he aims to situate in meaningful contexts of debate. Some address new translations of primary works of Heine, Kafka, Scholem, Weininger, inter alia, while others are commentaries on such things as Stefan Zweig hatred, Zionism in Salten’s novel Bambi, and Fred’s theory of anti-Semitism.

Fiction

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    Three Sisters

    by Heather Morris

    After surviving years of imprisonment in Auschwitz, three Slovakian sisters travel to Israel where the battle for freedom takes on new forms as they face the ghosts of their past and secrets they have kept from each other to find true peace and happiness.

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    Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

    by Gabrielle Zevin

    Embarking on a legendary collaboration launching them to stardom, two friends, intimates since childhood, have the world at their feet until they discover that their success, brilliance, and money won’t protect them from their own creative ambitions or the betrayals of the heart.

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    The Village Idiot

    by Steve Stern

    During a boat race in 1917 Paris, immigrant painter Chaim Soutine, persuaded by Modigliani to don a ponderous diving suit and trudge along the floor of the river Seine to help him win, becomes disoriented by the artificial air in his helmet and stumbles through the events of his past and future life.

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    Funny You Should Ask

    by Elissa Sussman

    Hired to write a profile on the movie star who is her number one celebrity crush, a writer has a whirlwind weekend with the actor and is still questioned about it ten years later despite her own successful career. 

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    The Intimacy Experiment

    by Rosie Danan

    The co-founder of a popular sex-education platform joins forces with a young rabbi who would save his cash-strapped synagogue to host a seminary series on modern intimacy, before their professional partnership is complicated by their unexpected attraction. 

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    The Matchmaker's Gift

    by Lynda Cohen Loigman

    After her beloved grandmother passes away, leaving behind a collection of handwritten journals recording the details of her matches, Abby, a successful Manhattan divorce attorney, finds more questions than answers as she discovers she also has the unique gift of seeing soulmates in the most unexpected places. 

Memoir

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    The Art of Leaving

    by Ayelet Tsabari

    An intimate memoir in essays by an award-winning Israeli writer who travels the world, from New York to India, searching for love, belonging, and an escape from grief following the death of her father when she was a young girl.

Graphic Novel

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    Tunnels

    by Rutu Modan; translation by Ishai Mishory

    When a great antiquities collector is forced to donate his entire collection to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, Nili Broshi sees her last chance to finish an archeological expedition begun decades earlier—a dig that could possibly yield the most important religious artifact in the Middle East. Motivated by the desire to reinstate her father's legacy as a great archeologist, Nili enlists a ragtag crew to help. As Nili's father slips deeper into dementia, warring factions close in on and fight over the Ark of the Covenant!

Kids

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    Welcome Back, Maple Mehta-Cohen

    by Kate McGovern

    Maple Mehta-Cohen has been keeping a secret: she can't read all that well. She has an impressive vocabulary and loves dictating stories into her recorder-especially the adventures of a daring sleuth who's half Indian and half Jewish like Maple herself-but words on the page just don't seem to make sense to her. Despite all Maple's clever tricks to hide her troubles with reading, her teacher is on to her, and now Maple has to repeat fifth grade.

Summaries provided via NYPL’s catalog, which draws from multiple sources. Click through to each book’s title for more.