The Genizah

Set in a suburban New Jersey interfaith community during the fall of 2023 and told through the eyes of the passionate, inclusivity-minded Rabbi Adinah, the novel unfolds as the shadow of Hamas’ gruesome attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza looms over an already fractured community. The narrative opens with Rabbi Adinah returning from a summer in Haifa, only to find her synagogue literally falling apart: a hurricane has torn through the roof, and her office is flooded. Within her congregation, a new conservative member causes strife in her weekly Torah class, and differing opinions about Israel threaten to upend her authority. In the wider community, a young Syrian refugee she mentors lies in a coma, the victim of a brutal hate crime, and the treasured alliances she’s cultivated with leaders of other faiths become increasingly challenged. Rabbi Adinah struggles to keep her community together while her foundational beliefs and closest relationships are tested. Through a kaleidoscope of characters, Nathaniel Popkin reflects the contemporary American experience, unraveling the existential consequences that political divisions pose to a community that has long offered strength, purpose, and belonging to all its members. PARTLY STRONG, PARTLY BROKEN tackles questions that have fractured countless families, friendships, and communities even before October 7th. What does it mean to be a Jew in America today? How can the suffering in Gaza and Israel’s promise of refuge be reconciled? When core religious, personal and political values conflict, how do people respond? The novel doesn’t offer easy answers—but it grapples with these questions with urgency, intimacy, and honesty. By exploring them through fiction, Popkin captures the emotional and moral complexities, the nuances and contradictions, that are too often drowned out in rancorous debate.

As a self-described ‘90s suburban high school weirdo, Alicia Jo Rabins spent her time practicing violin and smoking cigarettes behind the mall while secretly dreaming of setting out on a spiritual quest no one around her seemed to understand. She often found herself drawn to the more ritualistic and rigorous Judaism that her parents had abandoned to assimilate and “become American.” In college, a chance meeting led her on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to study rabbinical texts (and play bluegrass fiddle on the street for cash). But that two years of immersing herself in traditional observance was only the start of a journey full of twists and turns. When We’re Born We Forget Everything follows Alicia’s relentless, often embarrassing, sometimes enlightening search for the sacred in everyday life as she tours America playing with a klezmer-punk band, falls in and out of love, scrapes through the initiations of motherhood, and witnesses the beauty—and danger—of mysticism. Rabins braids this personal narrative with the hidden stories of biblical women, uncovering a path of queer identity, feminist awakening, and spiritual self-invention. This lyrical, searching memoir is a meditation on longing, lineage, and what it takes to find meaning in a fractured world.