Nora Curry
A Jewish American Heritage Month Reading List

Novels and histories of the Holocaust are published in abundance and often quite popular, and certainly a great deal of them are worth our attention, but there is far more of the Jewish experience that can be and has been conveyed through literature. Please explore the reading list below to discover novels, histories, memoirs, cookbooks, poetry, and more related to Jewish heritage. Click on the links to learn more about each book and/or to request them in our catalog.
Fiction
Rashi's Daughters, Maggie Anton
Florence Adler Swims Forever, Rachel Beanland
Milk Fed, Melissa Broder
People of the Book, Geraldine Brooks
Margot, Jillian Cantor
The Yiddish Policemen's Union, Michael Chabon
Kaddish.com, Nathan Englander
Everything Is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
The Lost Shtetl, Max Gross
The World That We Knew, Alice Hoffman
Eternal Life, Dara Horn
The Weight of Ink, Rachel Kadish
Forest Dark, Nicole Krauss
The Complete Stories, Bernard Malamud
The Chosen, Chaim Potok
American Pastoral, Philip Roth
Maus, Art Spiegelman
Love and Treasure, Ayelet Waldman
Memoirs, Biographies, and Other Nonfiction
The Light of Days: the untold story of women resistance fighters in Hitler's ghettos, Judy Batalion
Jew-ish: reinvented recipes from a modern mensch: a cookbook, Jake Cohen
The Choice: embrace the possible, Edith Eva Eger
One of These Things First, Steven Gaines
Letters to Auntie Fori: the 5000-year history of the Jewish people and their faith, Martin Gilbert
Kaddish and other poems, 1959-1960, Allen Ginsburg
The People and the Books: 18 classics of Jewish literature, Adam Kirsch
Little Book of Jewish Sweets, Leah Koenig
Genius & Anxiety: how Jews changed the world, 1847-1947, Norman Lebrecht
999: the extraordinary young women of the first official transport to Auschwitz, Heather Dune Macadam
What They Saved: pieces of a Jewish past, Nancy K. Miller
When Time Stopped: a memoir of my father's war and what remains, Ariana Neumann
Morality: restoring the common good in divided times, Jonathan Sacks
The Story of the Jews: finding the words, 1000 BC - 1492 AD, Simon Schama
The Story of the Jews: belonging, 1492-1900, Simon Schama
Inheritance: a memoir of genealogy, paternity, and love, Dani Shapiro
Little Failure: a memoir, Gary Shteyngart
The Cut Out Girl: a story of war and family, lost and found, Bart Van Es
The Jewish Americans: three centuries of Jewish voices in America, Beth Wenger
Night, Elie Wiesel
Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier