The Best Jewish Books of 2024
Here are the ten best Jewish books published in 2024.
It's unclear if it was a particularly easy, or hard, year to locate the best of Jewish literature, but it was clear that there was a common set of themes authors were working through. We are at a place where we are seeing the intense anxiety of American and European Jewish life showing through, as well as where intense debates about the future of Zionism are playing out as the front-stage conflict in most Jewish families. What we ended up with is a striking step forward in Jewish writing that moved beyond the bounds that are often set for what is typeset as Jewish storytelling, while also showing us a very point of contention that each writer is dealing with.
Here are my favorite Jewish books of the year, you'll see some overlap (as you might expect), and hopefully a few surprises as well. Authors are often tasked with the unfair responsibility to tell us where we are headed before we collectively acknowledge it, and Jewish writers are doubly-screwed since we have to compete with a prophetic canon constantly demanding our moral register. Many of these titles take up that mission, and their impact will largely be measured in how well we heard them.
The Bat-Man: First Knight - Dan Jurgens, Mike Perkins, and Mike Spencer
The first entry on this list is perhaps the strangest. While the world of comic books is intensely Jewish, from the string of original creators to the underlying cultural subtext of characters like Superman, DC Black Label’s 2024 miniseries Bat-Man may be the most overtly Jewish series in a decade. Set in 1939, the same year that the original Batman character was launched, Dan Jurgens and Mike Spencer offer up a Depression-era pulp noir set against the backdrop of the emerging Holocaust and use the community synagogue as the alternative social force to the depravity of Gotham’s underworld. Jewishness is treated as the access point to a different way of life, a challenge to those who would wield violence as a tool of control, yet without the saccharine bifurcation people mostly find in Holocaust-era Jewish narratives.
Perhaps the most interesting historical revival of the year. In the 1940s, Joseph Cohen, the former editor of the influential Yiddish anarchist newspaper Fraye Arbeter Shtime (Free Voice of Labor) wrote what he intended to be a definitive account of the Jewish anarchist movement in the first half of the 20th Century. It was written in Yiddish, then went out of print and was without a readership until IWW member Esther Dolgoff (wife of Sam Dolgoff) translated it by hand. She was unable to find a publisher, so The Jewish Anarchist Movement in America languished in a university archive, which is where scholar of Yiddish anarchism Kenyon Zimmer found it and completed the project by updating the translation, adding extensive annotations, fixing mistakes, and writing an introduction. Now we have access to one of the most important artifacts in both Jewish and anarchist history that, more than anything, remains just as engaging today as it was when Cohen first put it on the page.
Clearly the most controversial book on this list, but one that reads like an incredibly fluid and, at times, devastating history of the American Jewish 20th Century, one seeking to combine the Jewish left’s critique of suburban Jewish culture while sitting with the crisis that American Judaism is clearly experiencing. Many detractors have focused on Leifer’s somewhat step away from anti-Zionism, but what comes through in the book is still a commitment against the Occupation, though one that is struggling (incorrectly, in some cases) to find its moral center. Just as much criticism has been leveled at Leifer’s suggestion that liberal Judaism is faltering and that Orthodoxy might be the answer, a fairer criticism and yet reveals that so many are searching for how to establish spiritual communities in a world that doesn’t support this kind of commitment. The book reads more as a challenge to those constructing an obligation-driven, liberatory Jewish vision rather than simply a detraction from our efforts, but told in such a direct and at times abrasive style that it often cuts through our defenses and challenges our most basic assumptions about what it means to build community. Tablets Shattered has made an impact on the Jewish world and not because it is filled with theses that are agreeable, but specifically because it forced us to take stock of what we want and how we intend on getting there.
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Our Palestine Question: Israel and American Jewish Dissent, 1948-1978 - Geoffrey Phillip Levin and The Threshold of Dissent: A History of American Jewish Critics of Zionism - Marjorie Feld
Both books by Levin and Feld cover such remarkably similar ground (including each holding a chapter on the same Jewish journalist) that it was hard for me to decouple them in my mind, despite each standing out stylistically and in their approach to the history. Both came at perhaps the perfect moment in Jewish life, when Jewish organizations are fighting to determine what is “over the line” in the realm of criticizing Israel and in their effort to “speak for the Jewish community” are defining out an entire generation of young Jews. Levin holds a particularly insightful chapter on Breira, the “two-state” Jewish New Left group (whose best known member was Arthur Waskow) who caused a stir when they met with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and Feld begins her discussion by looking at the American Council for Judaism, a Reform-oriented collection of anti-Zionist rabbis that has become the subject of a lot of historical re-analysis as of late. Both books are expertly written, mix precise scholarship with readable prose, and are certain to stand out as we build up an alternative canon of Jewish history, identity, and challenge when it comes to Zionism.
Unsettled: American Jews and the Movement for Justice in Palestine - Oren Kroll-Zeldin
Also coming out at a particularly salient moment, San Francisco University Jewish Studies Professor Oren Kroll-Zeldin’s look at Jewish-American Palestine solidarity activism is not the first of its kind, but amongst the most empathetic and told from an ethnographic point of view that ensures the reader takes a grassroots view of the subjects in question. The book echoes earlier volumes like Atalia Omer’s Days of Awe in discussing Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), IfNotNow, and Jewish co-resistance with the Center for Jewish Non-Violence, which Kroll-Zeldin spends a special amount of time discussing since he was active in their efforts to document, and block, IDF abuses in the West Bank. The book builds on Kroll-Zeldin’s deep knowledge of Jewish history and life and re-lodges this type of activism back into the American Jewish story, just as it always has been.
Three Worlds: Memoirs of an Arab-Jew - Avi Shlaim
An astounding and groundbreaking book by Israeli “New Historian” Avi Shlaim, who tells his family's story that begins at the end of Baghdadi Jewish life in Iraq and ends with their move to Israel and a place of cultural erasure that broke apart many aspects of their family’s continuity and identity. Shlaim’s criticism of Israel’s founding, and the ideology of Zionism, is made tactile and personal as we see the paths of Jewish life not taken, what has been snuffed out by the flattening of Jewish experience, and exactly how diverse much of the Jewish world has been across our history. It is also pieced together with the type of linguistic elegance that Shlaim is known for, and it reclaims not just his family’s tragedies, but their triumphs, away from the Ashkenormative character that Zionist historiography so often relies on.
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In a year that is full of Jewish books set, at least in part, during World War II, Leela Corman’s virtuoso effort Victory Parade offers something incredibly new and with characters who are as relatable as any I’ve encountered in years. The story focuses on German-Jewish emigres to the U.S., women working while one’s husband is away fighting and the other grows increasingly restless with thoughts of what is happening to her family back at home. We get interlocking stories of an affair, a marriage dissolving from war trauma, the complex intersections of female employment before and after the war, and a woman who dominates in the professional wrestling ring by imitating the accent of those who forced her to flee her home country. Heartbreaking in one moment and hysterical in another, Victory Parade stands out as how to avoid the trappings of Jewish period pieces by refusing to simply retell the lachrymose story and instead allowing a sense of triumph to permeate instead.
From the Ashes: Grief and Revolution in a World on Fire - Sarah Jaffe
Every moment of Jaffe’s latest oeuvre is a gut punch. Starting with the death of her father, a thread that connects her to each of the sites of grieving she moves to throughout the book, Jaffe sits with the idea that grief may be the operative concept of political action today. From acknowledging the cosmic threat of climate change to the deaths that precipitate the mass confrontations against police violence to the growing number of dead and missing in Gaza, she takes on this sadness as both the starting point and the kindling for a fire that could consume the past. Grief is not just something beautiful and healing, “it will unmake you,” something so obvious to the grieving and so often missed by literally every witness, until they are likewise torn to pieces. The pain of the book is so relatable (and unmistakably Jewish) that it is sometimes hard to take, and that is exactly what makes it hit with the kind of aplomb necessary to experience any form of healing from literature.
For Times Such as These: A Radical Guide for the Jewish Year - Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg
While so many have focused on the anti-Zionism of authors Ariana Katz and Jessica Rosenberg, that is really just a minor starting point for what becomes one of the most important books ever written attempting to take Judaism past Zionism. Both rabbis take a deeply Reconstructionist approach to the Jewish calendar, bringing together history, activism, profound spirituality and mysticism, and an approach that is equal parts traditional and innovative, with the hope of helping deliver Jewish education and access to those who so often felt left behind by the mainstream Jewish world. For Times Such as These is such a nourishing well that those who have a long background in the Jewish classroom will still be challenged to renew the meaning of our rituals and it will likely become a starting point for those building up Diasporist Jewish communities and minyanim, something that is happening at an astounding pace since October 7th. One of the best books on the Jewish year ever written and a clarion call for the Jewish renewal that is already taking place.
What is so astounding about Toby Lloyd’s novel Fervour is not just how it intermixes Jewish religious and secular ideas, or how it overlaps narratives both invented and timeless, or even how it melds genre writing with deeply personal familial strife, but that he does it in such a structurally brilliant way that it’s hard to believe this is his first effort. This is not only my favorite book of the year, it may be the best book I’ve read so far this decade, and it’s hard for me to consider any moment of this book a misstep or anything other than pitch perfect Jewish storytelling. Narrating the life of an Orthodox British family in various states of undress, while simultaneously allowing material and mythic strands of explanation for their dissolving relationships, Lloyd creates an uncommon kind of unity, between the spiritual and the historical, that is necessary for Jewish literature. Instead of a divide between the secular and religious we end up with a decidedly Jewish narrative, one that rejects the bifurcation so universalized in the Western canon and often projected onto Jewish authors (I stubbornly refuse to acknowledge Lloyd's atheism). Instead, Lloyd plums a type of Yiddish consciousness in his work, one where the entire history of Jewish storytelling and debate hangs over every page, and where astute readers may just realize that there has been someone watching their journey since the first page. It’s just unclear who that someone is.