Jewish Life & Culture

In Lauren Grodstein‘s A Dog in Georgia: A Novel, Amy Webb was a chef. Then she became a wife, a stepmother, and an emergency contact, and the chef in her disappeared, along with her sense of self. Now it’s time to acknowledge her needs and what she really wants, and to find herself – and a missing dog in a former Soviet republic. In Hannah Orenstein’s Maine Characters: A Novel, Vivian Levy and Lucy Webster are half-sisters who meet for the first time at their father’s cabin in Maine after his unexpected death.…

Commemorating the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, Leslie Gelrubin Benitah‘s documentary The Last Ones of Auschwitz collects the stories of the last remaining Holocaust survivors, with a focus on those who endured the horrors there. Filmed around the globe over the course of seven years, the project documents more than 200 testimonies and includes more than 30 from Auschwitz survivors and Miami-based Holocaust survivors David Schaecter, Saul Blau, Hedy Fladell, and Irene Zisblatt. In Melting Point: Family,…

Lisa F. Rosenberg’s Fine, I’m a Terrible Person is a mother-daughter caper story starring overweight former beauty Aurora and her high-strung daughter, Leyla. Over the course of a weekend in LA, their two separate but intersecting quests will provoke hijinks, chaos, and yes, even some healing. In Margie Zable Fisher‘s The Cabernet Club: A Novel, 68-year-old Debbie finally decides to follow her longtime dream of retiring to Florida, but immediately hits a roadblock – helicopter daughter Lori,…

Haley Cohen Gilliland’s A Flower Traveled in My Blood: The Incredible True Story of the Grandmothers Who Fought to Find a Stolen Generation of Children tells the stunning tale of the kidnapping of hundreds of pregnant women by Argentina’s military junta in 1976. A group of fierce, grief-stricken grandmothers known as the “Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo” rose up against these crimes, defying terror to find their missing loved ones. In Miriam Lewin’s Iosi, the Remorseful Spy,…

In Renée Ahdieh’s Park Avenue: A Novel, Jia, the ambitious daughter of Korean bodega owners, is living her dream as a Manhattan lawyer. But when she’s tasked with managing the famous billionaire Park family, she’s drawn into a whirlwind of scandal and secrets. As she chases truth and success, she must decide what she really wants – and needs. Emily Everett’s All That Life Can Afford: A Novel follows Anna, a young American who longs for the fairy-tale London she envisioned – far and away from the moldy flat she finds herself in – until she’s swept into the dazzling world of the Wilder family.…

Angela Flournoy’s The Wilderness: A Novel is the story of five Black women navigating two decades of friendship, from young adulthood into midlife. Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia move through love, family, ambition, and upheaval amid the increasing volatility of modern American life in an exploration of the profound connections of friendship over a lifetime. Set in the 1960s before Roe, Laney Katz Becker’s In the Family Way: A Novel follows a group of suburban housewives as they navigate marriages,…

This is a free event that requires a ticket for entry. Both a memoir and spiritual guide for everyday living, Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging chronicles Angela Buchdahl’s journey to become the first Asian American rabbi. Despite the naysayers and periods of self-doubt, Buchdahl stayed the course, finally landing at the pulpit of one of the largest, most influential congregations in the world. Buchdahl will be in conversation with journalist and author Abigail Pogrebin,…

This panel brings together three poets whose distinct voices form a harmony of female subjectivity, resilience, adaptation, and innovation around questions of art, pop culture, and globalization. Resting Bitch Face by Taylor Byas uses some of our most common ways of “watching” throughout history (painting, films, sculpture, and photographs) to explore how these mediums shape Black female subjectivity. Carlie Hoffman’s One More World Like This World is a lyrical study of contemporary life – its lines echo amidst the imbalanced interdependence of globalization,…

In Black Mestiza, Yael Valencia Aldana reckons with her identity as a Caribbean Afro-Latinx/e woman with Indigenous, Black, and white roots and pays homage to the legacy, resilience, and fortitude of her ancestors as a mixed-race woman, daughter, and mother. Drawing on various languages and geographies from South Korea to Peru to the American heartland, Ae Hee Lee’s Asterism is a collection of grace and grit, the work of a mind at work – in, and on,…

In Dan Fesperman’s Pariah: A Novel, Hal, a disgraced comedian-turned-politician, is recruited by the CIA to infiltrate Bolrovia, a corrupt Eastern European country. Posing as a guest of its brutal dictator, he faces his ultimate acting challenge – and what begins as espionage soon becomes a high-stakes battle of wits, with life-or-death consequences and a chance for redemption. David McCloskey’s The Persian: A Novel takes readers into the shadow war between Iran and Israel. Kamran Esfahani,…

Con Negro en la costa, María E. Hernández Caballero se adentra por los subsuelos del mundo cultural cubano de los años ochenta reflejando las relaciones interraciales, la disidencia sexual y el racismo. Juan Carlos Méndez Guédez presenta Cuando vuelva diciembre, novela donde un personaje recurre a las memorias de un plato de su infancia para sobrellevar la soledad y el desmoronamiento de su vida en la España actual. Rasgada obsesión, de Saúl Sosnowski, entrelaza una historia de amor con reflexiones sobre la memoria judía,…

Join Altie Karper, editorial director of Schocken Books/Penguin Random House for more than 20 years; Todd Portnowitz, senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf; and Rose Waldman, translator of Chaim Grade’s Sons and Daughters: A Novel, for a discussion centered around the book, held by many as one of the foremost collections of contemporary Yiddish literature. Originally serialized in the 1960s and ’70s in New York–based Yiddish newspapers, the epic Sons and Daughters is a precious glimpse of the rich Yiddish culture of Poland and Lithuania that the Holocaust would eradicate.…

During the historic dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama, as told in his international bestseller The Jew in the Lotus, Rodger Kamenetz heard a penetrating question from His Holiness to the rabbis, “How does your spiritual practice purify afflictive emotions?” To Kamenetz, this seemed the most fundamental question to ask of any religion or philosophy of life. Embedded in a rich poetic narrative, Seeing into the Life of Things: Imagination and the Sacred Encounter offers down to earth practices from “count your blessings,” to savoring perception,…

Jack El-Hai’s The Nazi and the Psychiatrist: Hermann Göring, Dr. Douglas M. Kelley, and a Fatal Meeting of Minds at the End of WWII chronicles the improbable relationship between fallen Reichsmarschall Hermann Göring and ambitious U.S. Army physician Douglas Kelley, which becomes a hazardous quest into the nature of evil amid the devastation of Europe at the end of World War II. In The Girl Bandits of the Warsaw Ghetto: The True Story of Five Courageous Young Women Who Sparked an Uprising,…

In Allison King’s The Phoenix Pencil Company: A Novel, a hidden magic – the ability to reforge pencils and revive the memories they contain – binds college recluse Monica to her fading grandmother, Yun, and a long-kept family secret. Blending Yun’s wartime past in Shanghai with Monica’s present-day search for connection, King presents a moving saga of memory, family, and the power of stories. In Stuart Nadler’s Rooms for Vanishing: A Novel, war has blown apart the universe of the Altermans,…

Karmela Waldman is an octogenarian psychotherapist and Holocaust survivor. Her son, Joel Z. Waldman, is a successful broadcast journalist. Mastering podcasting is one thing; figuring out the meaning of life is a challenge of an entirely different order. Surviving the Survivor: A Brutally Honest Conversation about Life (& Death) with My Mom: A Holocaust Survivor, Therapist & My Podcast Co-Host offers insights into their frank, real-time, and on-air discussions ranging from child-rearing, aging, illness, and death to the secrets of enjoying life no matter how complicated it gets.…

Join us for a panel with three highly regarded Jewish American poets as they reflect on the life and work of midcentury poet Hyam Plutzik (1911-62), a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize whose poetry came to fruition at a time of cultural change set against the historical rupture of the Holocaust and World War II. Rodger Kamenetz, Jacqueline Osherow, and Maxim D. Shrayer were part of a collective of 18 scholars working over a period of 15 years with editor Victoria Aarons to create  Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time – a collection of essays and selected poems.…

Heather Clark’s The Scrapbook: A Novel begins in the late 1990s with Harvard student Anna, who falls for Christoph, a visiting German student, and follows him to his home country. Their romance unfolds amid family legacies – including those of Anna’s grandfather, an American GI, and Christoph’s, a Nazi soldier. Traumas of the past and the aftershocks of fascism haunt them, reverberating through to the present. In Maggie Stiefvater’s The Listeners: A Novel, it’s January 1942 and the aristocratic owners of the elegant Avallon Hotel &…

Iddo Gefen’s Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory: A Novel, translated by Daniella Zamir, begins with the title character drinking a martini in a crater in the Israeli desert. Her adult son, Eli, navigates handling his wacky mother, a missing hiker, and a possible romance with Tamara, a visitor to their family hostel. Then the Lilienblums build a company around its matriarch’s invention, making comedy out of startup culture and family secrets. In Ed Park’s An Oral History of Atlantis: Stories,…

GRADES 3-7 Three Cuban American authors celebrate the resilient hope of the journeying heart in their newest middle grade novels. In A Raft of Dreams, Jenisbel Acevedo shares the author’s experiences immigrating from Cuba on the boat that both represented the pain of leaving everything behind, and the restoration of her ability to dream and hope. Ruth Behar’s Across So Many Seas retraces five hundred years of Jewish women who moved their families from Spain to Turkey to Cuba and finally Miami to flee persecution and find opportunity.…

Reuven Fenton’s Goyhood: A Novel is the story of Mayer Belkin, a devoutly Orthodox man who discovers in middle age that he isn’t, in fact, Jewish. Traumatized and spiritually adrift, Mayer embarks on a surreal road trip through the Deep South with his estranged twin, his mother’s ashes, an Instagram influencer, and a one-eyed dog, while grappling with God, identity, and marriage woes. In Jason Diamond’s Kaplan’s Plot: A Novel, Elijah returns to Chicago broken – his mother Eve is dying and his business has failed.…

In 2021, French writer Lola Lafon was granted permission to stay overnight – alone for 10 hours – in the Annex in Amsterdam, where Anne Frank and her family hid from the Nazis. In When You Listen to This Song: On Memory, Loss, and Writing, she reflects on what we tell ourselves about tragedy, grappling with loss, and why, facing danger and confinement, women write. Moderating is Michael Glickman, CEO and founder of jMUSE, Jewish Museums Project,…

Chloé Caldwell’s Trying: A Memoir is one woman’s story told through selective journaling: her struggle with infertility, the dissolution of her marriage – and an eventual reawakening to her long-buried desires and queer identity. Throughout, Caldwell kept writing, making sense of her new reality in real time. She captures the continuous process of becoming and the mysterious ways that writing informs that process. As a child, Atash Yaghmaian endured terrors at home and outside, as Iran was on fire.…

Esther Chehebar’s Sisters of Fortune: A Novel is the story of three sisters in a Syrian Jewish family: a rebellious – and single – older sister; a middle sister questioning her upcoming marriage; and a baby sister sneaking around with a charming older bachelor. They find themselves caught between tradition and modernity, reckoning with what their tight-knit community wants for them against what they want for themselves. Jeanine Cummins’ Speak to Me of Home: A Novel is a multigenerational story of family and identity.…

This is a free event that requires a ticket for entry. In Antisemitism, an American Tradition, Pamela S. Nadell traces nearly four centuries of antisemitism in the United States, from Peter Stuyvesant’s attempt to deport Jews in 1654 to tragic manifestations of antisemitism in Charlottesville, Virginia, and Pittsburgh. Chronicling prejudice, violence, and exclusion alongside Jewish resistance and resilience, Nadell reveals how antisemitism – and resistance to hatred – endures, representing a deeply rooted legacy. Joining Nadell in conversation is Lisa Hostein,…