The Genizah

On this rainy Friday evening, a boy dwells upon the frustrations of his week. But as the Shabbat candles dance and he feels the warmth of his family gathered around him, he is able to look back and remember that along with the challenges, he also experienced a great deal of joy and awe. From the unexpected kindness of a stranger to a funny joke he learned, the more the boy searches for the light in his life, the more he comes to see that hope, happiness, and gratitude can be found in even the smallest moments. With lyrical rhyming text from Rebecca Gardyn Levington and gorgeous illustrations from Diana Mayo, Looking for Light is a poignant story about a Jewish family celebrating Shabbat, the day of rest, that inspires us to realize that even when good things feel overshadowed, there is always a spark of light to lift us up―if only we choose to look for it. Back matter includes an author's note about Shabbat, as well as a section on “How to Look for Light,” which suggests different ways we can practice gratitude on Shabbat or any day of the week.

When young French woman marries and moves to her German husband’s small hometown, Bad Arolsen, she finds a world where no one discusses what the locals did during the war. She has no idea that her life will be changed forever when she accepts a job at the secretive International Tracing Service―founded by the Allies at the end of WWII to help trace the fates of millions of wartime dead and displaced. Meticulous and conscientious, Irene quickly becomes obsessed with her work―at the cost of her personal life. Years later, she is entrusted with returning thousands of confiscated objects, recovered from the liberated camps. Irène pieces together the identity of each object's rightful owner, in order to give the descendants of the victims something to remember their lost relatives by. A faded cloth doll, a medallion, an embroidered handkerchief . . . every object contains its secrets. During her research, Irène meets people who will inspire and guide her from Lublin to Warsaw, from Berlin to Paris, to discover a past that concerns her personally. In so doing, she glimpses humanity―at its worst, but also, its best―and looking for the dead, she finds the living. Weaving together the trajectories of these individual lives with the collective memory of Europe, this devastatingly beautiful novel is suffused with wisdom and compassion.

With the grocery store shelves bare, the first night of Hanukkah seems like it's going to be a bust. Now, quirky heroine Harriet must collaborate with friends and neighbors to create an unexpectedly perfect Hanukkah feast

Maya and Ethan's Bubbe tells them how, as a child, a storm flooded her Texas town, and she and her father, the local baker, floated down the streets in a barrel delivering challah to neighbors

When Atara’s elderly father dies, he leaves behind a host of unanswered questions about his violent past and his strained relationship with his daughter. Yet one of their final meetings seems to provide a key to understanding: he mistakes Atara for his first wife, Rachel, revealing a warmth and kindness she had never seen in him. Atara sets out to find Rachel and uncover this long-buried chapter of his life. Why did their marriage end abruptly in 1948, after only one year? How were they changed by fighting together in the underground to establish the State of Israel? Atara’s encounter with Rachel will upend her own life and that of her family, sparking an uncontainable cascade of events. As their history is exposed, it illuminates but also casts a pall on the present and the future, confronting each character with dilemmas of fate, control, responsibility, faith, disappointment, and love.

Winner of Brazil’s prestigious São Paulo Prize, Jacques Fux’s brilliant literary debut novel unveils an outrageously entertaining Portrait of the Artist as a Young Schlemiel. Antitherapies relates the life journey of a young Jewish man coming of age in Belo Horizonte, Brazil, from his sensitive childhood and the primal indignation of circumcision, through awkward adolescence, and up to early adulthood and his decision to become a writer. Its peevish protagonist sees Jewishness in general as a festive carnival of irritations. The sources of his joy as well as his misery include his mother’s overbearing love; the Nazis, who never really left the stage after their defeat in 1945; his absurdly high IQ; and his grappling with the perpetual tension between cultural assimilation and the preservation of his Jewish identity and heritage. Told through twenty-one playful “anti-therapeutic” sessions, the narrator summons myriad remembrances of things past, chronicling how he carefully considered and then ultimately rejected an assortment of possible life paths: astrophysicist, delinquent, clairvoyant, forger, hairdresser, logician, charlatan, and mathematician, among others. Fux masterfully integrates poetry, humor, magical realism, and a host of literary allusions—including Borges, Pessoa, Joyce, Primo Levi, Georges Perec, and Phillip Roth—to create a delightfully rich and original work of autofiction.

In generation after generation, there are brilliant and inspiring Rabbis who have shaped Jewish tradition as we know it. Some faced persecution with great courage, some accomplished staggering works of scholarship in their time, and some creating lasting impressions that reverberate through the centuries. Meet Rashi, the father of all Torah and Talmud commentary and champion of women’s learning in the Middle Ages. The Chofetz Chaim, who taught a nation how to speak with kindness. Rabbi Lau, who survived the Holocaust at the age of 2 and went on to lead the State of Israel, and so many more. Each Rabbi is brought to life in full-color illustrations and their entries include dates, locations, and more. Taken together, these stories create a rich history of faith and tradition.

It’s Rosh Hashanah and Stella is finally old enough to make her family’s famous stuffed cabbage rolls. The recipe has been passed down from her Bubbe Sophie to her Nana to her Mama, with each adding their own special touch to the recipe. Now it’s Stella’s turn. What will she add? Pumpkins, peas, potatoes? What is to be her special touch?

One Wednesday afternoon, in the fall of 1943, something momentous happened. Take a minute to find out what. During World War II, the Jews of Europe were in tremendous danger. Anti-Semitic laws were issued, and Jews were attacked and deported. What could be done to save them? A committee of determined American Jews wanted to bring attention to the tragedy going on in Europe. They decided to hold a major rally. Hundreds of rabbis marched to the White House in Washington, D.C., to try and speak with the president and beg for his help. March! is a compelling book about a pivotal event in American Jewish history.

From the late 1950s, as Isaac Bashevis Singer became a major figure in American letters-one of the first Yiddish authors to do so-the future Nobel Laureate thought deeply about the fate of Yiddish culture in posterity. In this provocative series of essays, he advocates for Yiddish as a unique symbol of spiritual power in the face of adversity, a symbol forged during centuries of Jewish exile. Diaspora assimilation may continue apace, while a Hebrew-speaking homeland grows in population, and yet Yiddish remains inseparable from Jewishness-because, Singer writes, "what Yiddish has created can never be lost." In a lucid translation by David Stromberg, who also provides thoughtful introductions to each piece, Singer's prose is captured in all its persuasive verve and precision. From his central theme of Yiddish as the animating pulse of Jewish life, Singer shines a light on the gravest threats to wider civilized society. He warns against the dilution of art as a conduit of moral truth; underscores the importance, and difficulty, of seeing people as individuals rather than a faceless horde; and unmasks extremist movements-religious and secular-as "expressions of human folly." A fiery love letter to Yiddish, alive with psychological nuance and startling insight, this volume confirms Singer as not only a profound philosopher of human nature, but a social critic for the ages.

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.

From one of the most courageous and controversial historians of our time comes an electrifying trilogy of novels—Moses, Eli, and Ghazal—that bring to life the vanished world of Middle Eastern Jewry and its dramatic dissolution under the rising tide of Arab nationalism and Islamist totalitarianism. Bat Ye’or—“Daughter of the Nile,” exile of Nasser’s Egypt, and indomitable witness to the historical fate of Jews and Christians under Islam—has spent a lifetime unearthing hidden truths. Her nonfiction has challenged prevailing myths. Now, in this monumental work of fiction, she turns to the intimate and epic, portraying the human faces behind the centuries of dhimmitude—a status of legal and spiritual inferiority imposed on non-Muslims—and the slow, devastating collapse of a civilization. Spanning the Cairo of the 19th century through the cataclysms of the World Wars to the final expulsion of Jews from Egypt in the 1950s, the trilogy follows three generations of one Jewish family whose members fight—through faith, rebellion, or resignation—to remain anchored in a homeland that steadily unravels around them. At once historical document and literary masterwork, this is a tale of memory and mourning, of identities stifled and voices rising, of lives swallowed by the Nile’s muddy tide and yet luminous in their witness. With the moral clarity of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the historical rigor of Primo Levi, and the lyrical power of Elsa Morante, Bat Ye’or renders an unforgettable account of the “numberless victims of history” and restores them to their rightful place in our collective memory. This is a story that had to be lived to be told—and must be told to be understood.

Odessa, 1905. Yetta is a bright, quick teenage girl with a wild, searching spirit. Stifled by her home, her mother's anxiety, her father's rules, and the path that's been laid out for her, she craves the kind of freedom she doesn't know the edges of. But her family has reason to be cautious and restrictive. Fear has wrapped itself around their shtetl. Jews are mysteriously disappearing, and there are whispers of an impending Gentile attack. When the violence arrives at their door, Yetta is killed. Her father, in his grief, fumbles through his nascent knowledge of ancient texts and dark magic to bring her back. By some miracle, Yetta is returned. Although she looks the same, Yetta is not the girl she once was: she is impossibly strong and unceasingly dutiful. And her father begins to see signs he has done something very wrong. Yetta knows there's a secret her father isn't telling her. The answer resides, in part in the monstruous being stalking the villagers and their enemies, lurking in the woods beyond the shtetl, something that may also be of Mordechai's own making, and a being which has plans of its own.

Miriam is the youngest, but that doesn’t mean she doesn’t know things. She’s not as gullible as her parents or older siblings think, and she is too old for ridiculous stories that make no sense. So, using her superior detective skills, she sets out to find the truth about all of the fantastical things that people tell gullible kids. It’s finally summer vacation, and that means one thing: Miriam and her family are headed to Mermaid Lake! Legend has it the lake was named after the mermaid who swims beneath its waters, but as an experienced magical mystery detective, Miriam is determined to find out the truth. She has the perfect trap in mind . . . if she can get up the courage to climb the big waterslide. This could be her most challenging case yet, but Miriam’s determined to find the mermaid—if she even exists.

A debut novel by the critically acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of The Light of Days, following two very different Jewish women in Warsaw in the late 1930s as they unexpectedly come together in their search for love, meaning, and a sense of home, and as they grapple with the storm clouds gathering around them 1938: Fanny Zelshinsky is a sophisticated, modern daughter of the city’s Jewish elite who wants nothing more than to be recognized as a legitimate artist by her family, her radical professor whom she idolizes, and the world at large. And all while she wonders if she is really going to go through with her wedding. Meanwhile, Zosia Dror has left behind her small northeastern shtetl and religious family in the wake of violence. Part of a budding youth movement that believes in social equality and creating a Jewish homeland, all she wants is to not get distracted by the glitz and hubbub of the city—or by the keen eyes of a certain tall, handsome comrade. When legendary artist Wanda Petrovsky—both a member of Zosia’s movement leadership and Fanny’s beloved photography professor—goes missing, the two young women are thrown together in the pursuit of the elusive firebrand. Is Wanda simply hiding, or is her disappearance connected to the rise in antisemitic laws and university practices? Fanny and Zosia may be the most unlikely of allies, but they must bridge their differences to help someone they both care for—and dodge the danger mounting around them in the process.

Lizzie’s never experienced shiva before. When she and her mom arrive at Joshua’s house, Lizzie is determined to cheer up her friend who is mourning the loss of his grandfather. But Joshua isn’t in the mood for their usual puzzles or magic tricks. He misses his favorite baking partner. As Lizzie participates in the Jewish customs of shiva, she begins to learn a new meaning of friendship. Maybe all Joshua needs right now is someone to listen. Something Sweet balances themes of processing grief, experiencing another culture, and learning how to be a good friend—and does so with tender care.

By Guggenheim Fellow and Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center Wayne Koestenbaum, a novel chronicling the increasingly obsessive psychosexual relationship between a rabbi and the man devoted to him, an entanglement with unpredictable consequences for the two men and those around them

Esther Kreitman’s fiction explores the realities of Jewish life in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. Uncompromising in her critique of injustice and hypocrisy, she exposes the emptiness of those who maintain nothing of Judaism but rituals devoid of meaning. She insists on the dignity of those denied opportunity: the poor, women, and all excluded from modern education. Her characters love and work, despair and rebel as they move through the streets and homes of the shtetl, Warsaw, Antwerp, and London.

This Passover, Jordanita's family is leaving their Miami apartment and flying to Argentina to spend the holiday with cousins. Their cousins' house is the best, since it not only has a giant yard-they also two dogs, a cat, two turtles, and two parrots called Tic and Toc! But when Jordanita hears the Passover story this year, she can't help but notice that Tic and Toc are in a cage. If the point of Passover is to celebrate freedom, shouldn't that apply to all creatures? Celebrated Jewish Argentine author Ana María Shua explores the nature of freedom and the love of family in this warm-hearted tale, perfectly paired with the gentle humor of Spanish illustrator Angeles Ruiz's lively illustrations

For Ethan and his family, Passover, the Festival of Freedom, is a holiday full of longstanding traditions, food, family, and great company. And at Ethan’s family seder, one message of the Haggadah is never forgotten: let all who are hungry, come and eat. This year, however, Ethan is anticipating a very small seder. Until . . . Knock, Knock, Knock. Each unexpected guest brings something surprising and special, reminding us all that the seder’s most essential ingredient is community.

From lighting a candle and reciting Kiddush, to singing dayenu, this beautiful portrait of Jewish heritage is filled with joy. With bright illustrations and simple, yet informative, text there's no better way to introduce little ones to this special holiday.