May 20, 2024 – May is Jewish American Heritage Month, as proclaimed by President George W. Bush in 2006. The month of May was chosen due to the highly successful celebration of the 350th Anniversary of American Jewish History in May 2004, which was organized by the Commission for Commemorating 350 Years of American Jewish History.
Materials Librarian Allison Zordell curated a list of recently published novels and memoirs by Jewish writers in honor of the month.
"Jewish American Heritage Month celebrates the contributions and achievements of Jewish Americans to American culture, society, and history," she said. "These books offer diverse perspectives and powerful narratives that celebrate the rich heritage and contributions of Jewish Americans to the fabric of American society."
Browse the books below, and click on their covers to put them on hold in our catalog. Book descriptions are excerpted from the catalog, which pulls from information provided by publishers.
"Send for Me" by Lauren Fox (2021)
Annelise is a dreamer: imagining her future while working at her parents' popular bakery in Feldenheim, Germany, anticipating all the delicious possibilities yet to come. There are rumors that anti-Jewish sentiment is on the rise, but Annelise and her parents can't quite believe that it will affect them; they're hardly religious at all. But as Annelise falls in love, marries, and gives birth to her daughter, the dangers grow closer: a brick thrown through her window; a childhood friend who cuts ties with her; customers refusing to patronize the bakery. Luckily Annelise and her husband are given the chance to leave for America, but they must go without her parents, whose future and safety are uncertain. Two generations later, in a small Midwestern city, Annelise's granddaughter, Clare, is a young woman newly in love. But when she stumbles upon a trove of her grandmother's letters from Germany, she sees the history of her family's sacrifices in a new light, and suddenly she's faced with an impossible choice: the past, or her future.
"The Plot" by Jean Hanff Korelitz (2021)
Jacob Finch Bonner was once a promising young novelist with a respectably published first book. Today, he's teaching in a third-rate MFA program and struggling to maintain what's left of his self-respect; he hasn't written – let alone published – anything decent in years. When Evan Parker, his most arrogant student, announces he doesn't need Jake's help because the plot of his book in progress is a sure thing, Jake is prepared to dismiss the boast as typical amateur narcissism. But then ... he hears the plot. Jake returns to the downward trajectory of his own career and braces himself for the supernova publication of Evan Parker's first novel: but it never comes. When he discovers that his former student has died, presumably without ever completing his book, Jake does what any self-respecting writer would do with a story like that – a story that absolutely needs to be told. In a few short years, all of Evan Parker's predictions have come true, but Jake is the author enjoying the wave. He is wealthy, famous, praised and read all over the world. But at the height of his glorious new life, an email arrives, the first salvo in a terrifying, anonymous campaign: You are a thief, it says. As Jake struggles to understand his antagonist and hide the truth from his readers and his publishers, he begins to learn more about his late student, and what he discovers both amazes and terrifies him. Who was Evan Parker, and how did he get the idea for his "sure thing" of a novel? What is the real story behind the plot, and who stole it from whom?"
"The Matzah Ball" by Jean Meltzer (2021)
When her publisher insists that she write a Hanukkah romance, Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt, a Jewish woman with a secret career as a Christmas romance novelist, unexpectedly finds inspiration when she encounters a childhood acquaintance at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah.
"Our Country Friends: A Novel" by Gary Shteyngart (2021)
It’s March 2020 and a calamity is unfolding. A group of friends and friends-of-friends gathers in a country house to wait out the pandemic. Over the next six months, new friendships and romances will take hold, while old betrayals will emerge, forcing each character to reevaluate whom they love and what matters most. The unlikely cast of characters includes a Russian-born novelist; his Russian-born psychiatrist wife; their precocious child obsessed with K-pop; a struggling Indian American writer; a wildly successful Korean American app developer; a global dandy with three passports; a Southern flamethrower of an essayist; and a movie star, the Actor, whose arrival upsets the equilibrium of this chosen family.
"The Wolf and the Woodsman: A Novel" by Ava Reid (2021)
Inspired by Hungarian history and Jewish mythology, the author's debut novel follows a young pagan woman with hidden powers and a one-eyed captain of the Woodsmen as they form an unlikely alliance to thwart a tyrant.
"Happy for You" by Claire Stanford (2022)
Four years into work on a still-unfinished philosophy dissertation, and seemingly unready to accept a marriage proposal from her long-term boyfriend, Evelyn Kominsky Kumamoto feels stalled. Meanwhile, all around her, everyone else seems to be getting on with their lives: her corn-fed, relentlessly optimistic boyfriend, Jamie, has no hesitation about committing to a shared future, and even her reserved Japanese father is energized by a new relationship – his first since her mother's passing when Evelyn was just fourteen. The privacy-invading, norm-reinforcing apps, algorithms, and self-optimization messaging that surround her seem more sure of what Evelyn should think and want than she is. Looking for a change, Evelyn accepts a job as a researcher at the third-most popular internet company, housed at a glass and steel office building in downtown San Francisco. There, she is charged with aiding in the development of an app that will help users quantify-and augment-their happiness. As she grapples with the tech world's bewildering work culture and jolting excess, an unexpected development in her personal life upends her assumptions about her future, and Evelyn embarks on a journey towards an authentic happiness all her own.
"The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights: A Novel" by Kitty Zeldis (2022)
In 1924 Brooklyn, dress shop owner Beatrice forms a close friendship with a neighbor, leaving Alice, the teenaged orphan she brought to the north with her, feeling left out, setting off a series of events that force all three women to confront the past to envision a better future.
"Take What You Need" by Idra Novey (2023)
Set in the Allegheny Mountains of Pennsylvania, "Take What You Need" follows the estrangement and reconciliation of stepmother and daughter, Jean and Leah. Leah always felt her path diverged from Jean's and left her hometown without looking back, making a life for herself in the city as a young mother and academic. Now that Jean's gone, Leah must return to sort through all Jean has left behind. What she wasn't expecting to find was Jean's studio filled with metal sculptures born from the scraps of Pennsylvania's industrial history – its beauty challenging all she had initially thought of her hometown, and her own skepticism for why Jean had held onto to it so dearly.
"Künstlers in Paradise" by Cathleen Schine (2023)
There was a time when the family Künstler lived in the fairy-tale city of Vienna. Circumstances transformed that fairy tale into a nightmare, and in 1939 the Künstlers found their way out of Vienna and into a new fairy tale: Los Angeles, California, United States of America. An ill-timed visit forces twenty-something New Yorker Julian to shelter in place in Venice Beach with his glamorous and eccentric ninety-three-year-old grandmother, Mamie Künstler, and her inscrutable housekeeper. To pass the time, Mamie regales Julian with stories of her adolescent adventures among the émigré elite, from tennis lessons with Arnold Schoenberg to a romance with Greta Garbo. During his unexpected extended stay in his grandmother's crumbling domain, Julian undergoes his own personal quest as he reckons with the trajectory of the life he thought he wanted and what role he will choose to play in it all.
"Jewish Comedy: A Serious History" by Jeremy Asher Dauber (2017)
A celebrated scholar’s rich account of Jewish humor: its nature, its development and its vital role throughout Jewish history.
"I Want You to Know We're Still Here: A Post-Holocaust Memoir" by Esther Safran Foer (2020)
Esther Safran Foer grew up in a family where history was too terrible to speak of. The child of parents who were each the sole survivors of their respective families, for Esther the Holocaust was always felt but never discussed. So when Esther's mother casually mentions an astonishing revelation – that her father had a previous wife and daughter, both killed in the Holocaust – Esther resolves to find the truth. Armed with only a black-and-white photo and hand-drawn map, she travels to Ukraine, determined to find the shtetl where her father hid during the war. What she finds not only reshapes her identity but gives her the long-denied opportunity to mourn the all-but-forgotten dead.
"Chasing History: A Kid in the Newsroom" by Carl Bernstein (2022)
In this triumphant memoir, Carl Bernstein, the Pulitzer Prize-winning coauthor of "All the President's Men" and pioneer of investigative journalism, recalls his beginnings as an audacious teenage newspaper reporter in the nation's capital – a winning tale of scrapes, gumshoeing, and American bedlam.
"Lost & Found: A Memoir" by Kathryn Schulz (2022)
Eighteen months before her beloved father died, Kathryn Schulz met Casey, the woman who would become her wife. "Lost & Found" weaves together their love story with the story of losing Kathryn's father in a brilliant exploration of the way families are lost and found and the way life dispenses wretchedness and suffering, beauty and grandeur all at once. Schulz writes with painful clarity about the vicissitudes of grieving her father, but she also writes about the vital and universal phenomenon of finding. The book is organized into three parts: "Lost," which explores the sometimes frustrating, sometimes comic, sometimes heartbreaking experience of losing things, grounded in Kathryn's account of her father's death; "Found," which examines the experience of discovery, grounded in her story of falling in love; and finally, "And," which contends with the way these events happen in conjunction and imply the inevitable: life keeps going on, not only around us but beyond us and after us.
"The Best Strangers in the World: Stories from a Life Spent Listening" by Ari Shapiro (2023)
From the beloved host of NPR's All Things Considered, a stirring memoir-in-essays that is also a lover letter to journalism. In his first book, broadcaster Ari Shapiro takes us around the globe to reveal the stories behind narratives that are sometimes heartwarming, sometimes heartbreaking, but always poignant. He details his time traveling on Air Force One with President Obama, or following the path of Syrian refugees fleeing war, or learning from those fighting for social justice both at home and abroad. As the self-reinforcing bubbles we live in become more impenetrable, Ari Shapiro keeps seeking ways to help people listen to one another; to find connection and commonality with those who may seem different; to remind us that, before religion, or nationality, or politics, we are all human.
