What’s everybody reading? Readers suggest the defining Jewish books of the 21st century

Last December, in a column about the Jewish books of 2023, I predicted that “next year’s list will include a slew of books dealing with the crisis in Israel or will be read through the lens of the war.”

It was an easy call: If this year’s nonfiction Jewish authors didn’t focus directly on the tragedy or aftermath of Oct. 7 — Israeli journalist Lee Yaron in “10/7: 100 Human Stories,” massacre survivor Amir Tibon in “The Gates of Gaza” and Adam Kirsch in “On Settler Colonialism: Ideology, Violence, and Justice,” to name a few — many added a chapter on the crisis to projects that had long been in the works. 

Joshua Leifer told me he had to rewrite “about 20,000 words” of “Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life,” his autobiographical critique of the Jewish mainstream. Three books of Jewish theology intended for wide audiences — “To Be a Jew Today” by Noah Feldman, “The Triumph of Life” by Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg and “Judaism Is About Love” by Rabbi Shai Held — included additional chapters taking into account the fresh wounds and nascent implications of the attack and the war.

In a typical year, the books by Leifer, Feldman, Greenberg and Held — and perhaps “The Amen Effect,” an inspirational volume by Rabbi Sharon Brous — would have competed for the book that best captured the Jewish moment and discourse. It’s a category I’ve been thinking about lately, after asking JTA readers to suggest Jewish books that define 21st-century Jewry and that — here’s the key part — are likely to be found on the shelves of the Jewish readers they know. I was inspired by universally read, era-defining books like 1958’s “Exodus” by Leon Uris, which fed and presaged the Zionist fervor of the 1960s, and “World of Our Fathers” by Irving Howe, which in the 1970s remembered what the children and grandchildren of Eastern European immigrants were already starting to forget.

I’ll get to the readers’ nominees in a moment, but I want to start by suggesting that it is still too early to pick a book, or books, that best reflects where Jews have landed in the wake of Oct. 7. The war still grinds on, and the Jewish community remains uncertain how it will end or what it will ultimately mean. Some themes are emerging, including resurgent antisemitism, the international isolation of Israel, a rupture between Jews and the political left, and perhaps a return to Jewish religious practice and belonging. Any author will need some time and distance to make sense of the upheaval.

It may not be surprising then that the book most frequently suggested by the dozens of readers who responded to my callout, “People Love Dead Jews,” anticipated these upheavals and the Jews’ sense of abandonment. Novelist Dara Horn’s first nonfiction collection, published in 2021, posited that societies that are happy building memorials and museums to Jewish suffering are reluctant to show respect or understanding to actual living Jewish communities. The book “really helped me wrap my head around present-day antisemitism,” wrote reader Marianne Leloir Grange. 

For many readers, “People Love Dead Jews” serves as a skeleton key to understanding the worldwide backlash against Israel in a war that began when Hamas slaughtered 1,200 mostly Jews on Oct. 7. As Horn explained in an interview in April with the online European Jewish magazine K., “You’ll see that people love dead Jews, as long as they’re vulnerable and helpless. In fact, I found it remarkable how much people seemed to relish the idea of showing their support for murdered Jews, until Israel responded with force. That’s how people love the Jews: powerless to stop their own slaughter. As soon as the Jews show any capacity for action, it’s all over.”

(When I asked Horn this week what books spoke to her this year, she said she appreciated Kirsch’s book, the anthology “Young Zionist Voices” edited by David Hazony, and Benjamin Resnick’s dystopian novel “Next Stop.”) 

Another frequently mentioned book seemed almost to act as a balm to Horn’s thesis: “The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store” by James McBride. Last year’s best-selling, prize-winning historical novel is set in a small Pennsylvania town at a moment when immigrant Jews and poor Black families found common cause. “‘The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store’ by James McBride is probably one of the most popular recent books likely to be on an American Jew’s bookshelf,” Galina Vromen wrote me. “I would argue that part of the attraction to Jews today is in light of antisemitism and nostalgia when Jews and Blacks saw themselves on the same side of just causes and Jews were not regarded as enemy white people.”

Vromen, a novelist, had a number of strong suggestions for the kinds of recent books likely to be on American Jewish bookshelves, including “The Netanyahus,” Joshua Cohen’s 2021 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that serves as a cutting critique of present-day Israeli politics; “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” Michael Chabon’s best-selling 2000 novel about the Jews who pioneered superhero comics; and “Start-Up Nation” by Dan Senor and Saul Singer. The last one, published in 2009, presented Israel as an incubator of high tech innovation (and coined an enduringly popular nickname for the country) and offers readers a comforting rebuke to the activists who see Israel as an oppressor and colonizer. 

A number of readers recommended Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America,” which imagined an America run by the populist, isolationist, Nazi-sympathizing and antisemitic Charles Lindbergh in the early years of World War II. The book has had a number of lives: Roth said he wrote it as a rumination on Jewish security in America, but by 2016 it was seen by Donald Trump’s critics as an eerie prophecy of his rise and first election; HBO adapted it for a miniseries in 2020; and this year the New York Times named it one of the “100 Best Books of the 21st Century.”

Philip Roth’s 2004 novel “The Plot Against America” was seen by Donald Trump’s critics as an eerie prophecy of his rise and first election. (Houghton Mifflin)

Beyond that, no other book was suggested by more than one reader, although the ones they did mention seem like strong contenders for the current Jewish book shelf: “Everything Is Illuminated,” Jonathan Safran Foer’s 2002 magical realist novel that anticipated the current vogue for works about Jewish roots tours in Eastern Europe; “My Promised Land” by Ari Shavit and “Like Dreamers” by Yossi Klein Halevi, two 2013 nonfiction works by Israeli authors attempting to explain the country’s heart and soul; and Deborah Lipstadt’s 2019 “Antisemitism: Here and Now” (although I am guessing her 2005 memoir “History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier,” which became the motion picture “Denial,” is better known). 

Samuel Freedman’s “Jew vs. Jew: The Struggle for the Soul of American Jewry,” published in 2000, fell just short of the 21st century, but was a prescient look at the internal political and religious divides that would only yawn wider in the coming decades. 

I was also pleased to hear from readers who suggested cookbooks. “Jerusalem” by Sami Tamimi and Yotam Ottolenghi (2011) not only kicked off a mania for high-end Middle Eastern cooking but presented a complex and even hopeful version of Jewish and Palestinian coexistence (which did not, over time, include the authors). Joan Nathan’s “Jewish Cooking in America” (1994) cemented her role as Jewish cuisine’s Julia Child. And it’s the rare kosher-keeping home cook who doesn’t own a volume in Susie Fishbein’s “Kosher By Design” series. Fishbein “single-handedly raised Jewish cooking to a gourmet level [and] opened the floodgates to a new sub-industry,” Barbara Kessel wrote me from Jerusalem.

What became clear from my unscientific survey is that in a polarized and media-saturated age, there are fewer books that American Jews might have in common than, say, 40 years ago. But maybe that’s OK. Each year sees a flood of new Jewish books, capturing voices beyond the ashkenormative assumptions of the 20th century and as diverse as the people who write and read them: Mizrachim, women, interfaith families, LGBT Jews, Jews of color, Jews by choice, the religious, the formerly religious.

“Today, my understanding of Jewish life is so much bigger (and richer),” the writer Erika Dreifus wrote me, remembering her own childhood among Ashkenazi Jews in the metro New York area. “I’m so much more aware of Jewish experience that differs from my own.”

is editor at large of the New York Jewish Week and managing editor for Ideas for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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