2024 Ann Arbor Jewish Book Festival

OCTOBER 27 – NOVEMBER 21, 2024

The Ann Arbor JCC is excited to bring a wide range of authors and their amazing books

to our community, through in-person, virtual, and hybrid events!

Visit our online bookstore!

If you’re interested in purchasing a book, please click on each book cover! Not all books have an image link attached.

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WEEK ONE

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Opening Night + Sponsor Night with Ruth Behar | Across So Many Seas

Sunday, October 27 @ the JCC | 5:45 pm Sponsors’ Dinner | 7 pm Public Program

Moderated by Karla Goldman

Sponsored By

Jewish People of Color Network of Ann Arbor/Washtenaw County | הרשת

In 1492, during the Spanish Inquisition, Benvenida and her family are banished from Spain for being Jewish, and must flee the country or be killed. They journey by foot and by sea, eventually settling in Istanbul. Over four centuries later, in 1923, shortly after the Turkish war of independence, Reina’s father disowns her for a small act of disobedience. He ships her away to live with an aunt in Cuba, to be wed in an arranged marriage when she turns fifteen.

In 1961, Reina’s daughter, Alegra, is proud to be a brigadista, teaching literacy in the countryside for Fidel Castro. But soon Castro’s crackdowns force her to flee to Miami all alone, leaving her parents behind.

Finally, in 2003, Alegra’s daughter, Paloma, is fascinated by all the journeys that had to happen before she could be born. A keeper of memories, she’s thrilled by the opportunity to learn more about her heritage on a family trip to Spain, where she makes a momentous discovery.

Though many years and many seas separate these girls, they are united by a love of music and poetry, a desire to belong and to matter, a passion for learning, and their longing for a home where all are welcome. And each is lucky to stand on the shoulders of their courageous ancestors.

Ruth Behar, the Pura Belpré Award-winning author of Lucky Broken Girl and Letters from Cuba, was born in Havana, Cuba, grew up in New York, and has also lived in Spain and Mexico. Her work also includes poetry, memoir, and the acclaimed travel books An Island Called Home and Traveling Heavy. She was the first Latina to win a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, and other honors include a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship and being named a “Great Immigrant” by the Carnegie Corporation. An anthropology professor at the University of Michigan, she lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Virtual Event with Ari Gold | Father Verses Sons: A Correspondence in Poems

Wednesday, October 30 | 7 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Jeff Kass

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When the global pandemic forced his ninety-six-year-old father into isolation, filmmaker Ari Gold became concerned that loneliness would kill his father’s spirits. As a prolific novelist who began writing in his twenties, Herbert Gold’s incredible oeuvre included twenty-four novels, five collections of stories and essays, and eight nonfiction books. So, Ari mailed his father a poem, asking for one in return. Later, Ari’s twin brother, Ethan, also got into the game. Thus was launched a lifesaving literary correspondence, and a testament to the bonds of family.

The resulting poems are playful, honest, funny, and moving. Secrets are invoked alongside personal—and often painful—history. Ari and Ethan’s mother, Herbert Gold’s second wife, died in a helicopter crash alongside the famous rock promoter and impresario Bill Graham in 1991. Her ghost roams through the poems and the wonderful archival photos included in full color throughout.

In Father Verses Sons, a lushly illustrated “correspondence in poems,” ranges across the life, family, and death of a remarkable father. The father and his sons write tenderly of their hunger for connection, about the woman that all three men have lost (a mother, a wife), and about the passion that all three seek. Ultimately, these poems tell a singular story of men bumbling their way towards love.

Ari Gold is a filmmaker and winner of the Student Oscar. His films have been selected at Sundance four times, and his upcoming movies Helicopter and Brother Verses Brother are companions to this book.

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Hybrid Lunch & Learn with Benjamin Balint & Ken Krimstein | The Art & Influences of Bruno Schulz and Albert Einstein

Thursday, October 31 | 12 pm | Lunch at the JCC, Authors Will Join Virtually

Moderated by Benjamin Paloff

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Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History by Benjamin Balint

The twentieth-century artist Bruno Schulz was born an Austrian, lived as a Pole, and died a Jew. First a citizen of the Habsburg monarchy, he would, without moving, become the subject of the West Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the USSR, and, finally, the Third Reich.

Yet to use his own metaphor, Schulz remained throughout a citizen of the Republic of Dreams. He was a master of twentieth-century imaginative fiction who mapped the anxious perplexities of his time; Isaac Bashevis Singer called him “one of the most remarkable writers who ever lived.” Schulz was also a talented illustrator and graphic artist whose masochistic drawings would catch the eye of a sadistic Nazi officer. Schulz’s art became the currency in which he bought life.

Drawing on extensive new reporting and archival research, Benjamin Balint chases the inventive murals Schulz painted on the walls of an SS villa―the last traces of his vanished world―into multiple dimensions of the artist’s life and afterlife. Sixty years after Schulz was murdered, those murals were miraculously rediscovered, only to be secretly smuggled by Israeli agents to Jerusalem. The ensuing international furor summoned broader perplexities, not just about who has the right to curate orphaned artworks and to construe their meanings, but about who can claim to stand guard over the legacy of Jews killed in the Nazi slaughter.

By re-creating the artist’s milieu at a crossroads not just of Jewish and Polish culture but of art, sex, and violence, Bruno Schulz itself stands as an act of belated restitution, offering a kaleidoscopic portrait of a life with all its paradoxes and curtailed possibilities.

Benjamin Balint is the author most recently of Bruno Schulz: An Artist, a Murder, and the Hijacking of History, which won this year’s National Jewish Book Award in biography and was named a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice. His previous book, Kafka’s Last Trial, awarded the 2020 Sami Rohr Prize, has been published in twelve languages. He lives in Jerusalem.

Einstein in Kafkaland: How Albert Fell Down the Rabbit Hole and Came Up With the Universe by Ken Krimstein

During the year that Prague was home to both Albert Einstein and Franz Kafka from 1911-1912, the trajectory of the two men’s lives wove together in uncanny ways-as did their shared desire to tackle the world’s biggest questions in Europe’s strangest city. In stunning words and pictures, Einstein in Kafkaland reveals the untold story of how their worlds wove together in a cosmic battle for new kinds of truth.

For Einstein, his lost year in Prague became a critical bridge set him on the path to what many consider the greatest scientific discovery of all time, his General Theory of Relativity. And for Kafka, this charmed year was a bridge to writing his first masterpiece, The Judgment. Based on diaries, lectures, letters, and papers from this period amid a planet electrifying itself into modernity, Einstein in Kafkaland brings to life the emergence of a new world where art and science come together in ways we still grapple with today.

Ken Krimstein has published cartoons in The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal. He is the author of The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt (which won the Bernard J. Brommel Award and was a finalist for the Jewish Book Award) and When I Grow Up (named a Best Book of the Year by NPR). He lives in Evanston, Illinois.

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Virtual Event with Samuel Kassow, Lauren Grodstein, and Lisa Barr

Resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto: A Literary Panel

Friday, November 1 | 12 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Julian Levinson

Warsaw Testament: Memoirs of a Survivor by Rokhl Auerbach and Samuel Kassow

Born in Lanowitz, a small village in rural Podolia, Rokhl Auerbach was a journalist, literary critic, memoirist, and a member of the Warsaw Yiddish literary community before the Holocaust. Upon the German invasion and occupation of Poland in 1939, she was tasked by historian and social activist Emanuel Ringelblum to run a soup kitchen for the starving inhabitants of the Warsaw Ghetto and later to join h

is top-secret ghetto archive, the Oyneg Shabes. One of only three surviving members of the archive project, Auerbach’s wartime and postwar writings became a crucial source of information for historians of both prewar Jewish Warsaw and the Warsaw Ghetto. After immigrating to Israel in 1950, she founded the witness testimony division at Yad Vashem and played a key role in the development of Holocaust remembrance. Her memoir Warsaw Testament, based on her wartime writings, paints a vivid portrait of the city’s prewar Yiddish literary and artistic community and of its destruction at the hands of the Nazis.

Samuel Kassow, Northam Professor of History at Trinity College, holds a Ph.D. from Princeton University. He has been a visiting professor at many institutions and helped plan the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. Among his various publications is Who Will Write Our History: Emanuel Ringelblum and the Secret Ghetto Archive (Indiana University Press, 2007).

We Must Not Think of Ourselves: A Novel by Lauren Grodstein

On a November day in 1940, Adam Paskow becomes a prisoner in the Warsaw Ghetto, where the Jews of the city are cut off from their former lives and held captive by Nazi guards to await an uncertain fate. Weeks later, he is approached by a mysterious figure with a surprising request: Would he join a secret group of archivists working to preserve the truth of what is happening inside these walls?

Adam agrees and begins taking testimonies from his students, friends, and neighbors. He learns about their childhoods and their daydreams, their passions and their fears, their desperate strategies for safety and survival. The stories form a portrait of endurance in a world where no choices are good ones.

One of the people Adam interviews is his flatmate Sala Wiskoff, who is stoic, determined, and funny—and married with two children. Over the months of their confinement, in the presence of her family, Adam and Sala fall in love. As they desperately carve out intimacy, their relationship feels both impossible and vital, their connection keeping them alive.

But when Adam discovers a possible escape from the Ghetto, he is faced with an unbearable choice: whom can he save, and at what cost ?

Inspired by the testimony-gathering project with the code name Oneg Shabbat, New York Times bestselling author Lauren Grodstein draws listeners into the lives of people living on the edge. Told with immediacy and heart, We Must Not Think of Ourselves is a piercing story of love, determination, and sacrifice.

Lauren Grodstein is the author of Our Short History, The Washington Post Book of the Year The Explanation for Everything, and The New York Times bestselling A Friend of the Family, among other works. Her stories, essays, and articles have appeared in various literary magazines and anthologies, and have been translated into French, German, Chinese, and Italian, among other languages. Her work has also appeared in Elle, The New York Times, Refinery29, Salon.com, Barrelhouse, Post Road, and The Washington Post. She is a professor of English at Rutgers University-Camden, where she teaches in the MFA program in creative writing.

The Goddess of Warsaw: A Novel by Lisa Barr

Los Angeles, 2005. Sienna Hayes, Hollywood’s latest It Girl, has ambitions to work behind the camera. When she meets Lena Browning, the enormously mysterious and famous Golden Age movie star, Sienna sees her big break. She wants to direct a picture about Lena’s life—but the legendary actor’s murky past turns out to be even darker than Sienna dreamed. Before she was a Living Legend, Lena Browning was Bina Blonski, a Polish Jew whose life and family were destroyed by the Nazis.

Warsaw, 1943. A member of the city’s Jewish elite, Bina Blonski and her husband, Jakub, are imprisoned in the ghastly, cramped ghetto along with the rest of Warsaw’s surviving Jews. Determined to fight back against the brutal Nazis, the beautiful, blonde Aryan-looking Bina becomes a spy, gaining information and stealing weapons outside the ghetto to protect her fellow Jews. But her dangerous circumstances grow complicated when she falls in love with Aleksander, an ally in resistance—and Jakub’s brother. While Lena accomplishes amazing feats of bravery, she sacrifices much in the process.

Over a decade after escaping the horrors of the ghetto, Bina, now known as Lena, rises to fame in Hollywood. Yet she cannot help but be reminded of her old life and hungers for revenge against the Nazis who escaped justice after the war. Her power and fame as a movie star offer Lena the chance to right the past’s wrongs . . . and perhaps even find the happy ending she never had.

A gripping page-turner of one of history’s most heroic uprisings and an actress whose personal war never ends, The Goddess Of Warsaw is filled with secrets, lies, twists and turns, and a burning pursuit of justice no matter the cost.

Lisa Barr is The New York Times bestselling author of Woman on Fire, The Unbreakables, and the award-winning Fugitive Colors. She has served as an editor for The Jerusalem Post, managing editor of Today’s Chicago Woman and Moment magazine, and as an editor and reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times. She has appeared on Good Morning America and Today for her work as an author, journalist, and blogger. She lives in the Chicago area with her husband and three daughters.

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WEEK TWO

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Virtual Event with Ayelet Gundar-Goshen and Maya Arad

Sunday, November 3 | 7 pm over Zoom

Sponsored by

Moderated by Yardenne Greenspan

The Wolf Hunt: A Novel by Ayelet Gundar-Goshen

Lilach has it all: a beautiful home in the heart of Silicon Valley, a successful husband and stable marriage, and a teenage son, Adam, with whom she has always felt a particular closeness. Israeli immigrants, the family has now lived in the U.S. long enough that they consider it home. But after a brutal attack on a local synagogue shakes their sense of safety, Adam enrolls in a self-defense class taught by a former Israeli Special Forces officer. There, for the first time, he finds a sense of confidence and belonging.

Then, tragedy strikes again when an African American boy dies at a house party, apparently from a drug overdose. Though he was a high school classmate, Adam claims not to know him. Yet rumors begin to circulate that the death was not accidental, and that Adam and his new friends had a history with Jamal. As more details surface and racial tensions in the community are ignited, Lilach begins to question everything she thought she knew about her son. Could her worst fears be possible? Could her quiet, reclusive child have had something to do with Jamal’s death?

Praised for “instilling emotional depth into a thriller plot” (New York Times Book Review on Waking Lions), Ayelet Gundar-Goshen once again brings together taut, page-turning suspense, superb writing, and razor-sharp insight into the fault lines of race, identity, and privilege and the dark secrets we hide from those we love most.

Ayelet Gundar-Goshen is the author of The Liar and Waking Lions, which won the Jewish Quarterly – Wingate Prize, was a New York Times Notable Book, and has been published in seventeen countries. She is a clinical psychologist, has worked for the Israeli civil rights movement, and is an award-winning screenwriter. She won Israel’s prestigious Sapir Prize for best debut.

The Hebrew Teacher: Three Novellas by Maya Arad

Three Israeli women, their lives altered by immigration to the United States, seek to overcome crises. Ilana is a veteran Hebrew instructor at a Midwestern college who has built her life around her career. When a young Hebrew literature professor joins the faculty, she finds his post-Zionist politics pose a threat to her life’s work. Miriam, whose son left Israel to make his fortune in Silicon Valley, pays an unwanted visit to meet her new grandson and discovers cracks in the family’s perfect façade. Efrat, another Israeli in California, is determined to help her daughter navigate the challenges of middle school, and crosses forbidden lines when she follows her into the minefield of social media. In these three stirring novellas—comedies of manners with an ambitious blend of irony and sensitivity—celebrated Israeli author Maya Arad probes the demise of idealism and the generation gap that her heroines must confront.

Maya Arad is the author of eleven books of Hebrew fiction, as well as studies in literary criticism and linguistics. Born in Israel in 1971, she received a PhD in linguistics from University College London, and for the past twenty years has lived in California where she is currently a writer in residence at Stanford University’s Taube Center for Jewish Studies.

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Patron of the Arts Kickoff – Live Event with Hasia Diner | Opening Doors: The Unlikely Alliance Between the Irish and Jews in America

Monday, November 4 @ the JCC | 7 pm

The story of America is the story of the unlikely groups of immigrants brought together by their shared outsider status. Urban American life took much of its shape from the arrival of Irish and Jewish immigrants in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and Forged in America is the story of how Irish America and Jewish America collided, cooperated, and collaborated in the cities where they made their homes, all the while shaping American identity and nationhood as we know it.

Bringing together leading scholars in their fields, this volume sheds light on the underexplored histories of Irish and Jewish collaboration. While mutual antagonism was clearly evident, so too were opportunities for cooperation, as settled Irish immigrants served to model, mentor, and mediate for Jewish newcomers. Together, the chapters in this volume draw fascinating portraits that show mutuality in action and demonstrate its cultural reverberations.

Hasia Diner is a professor of American Jewish History and former chair of the Irish Studies program at New York University. She is the author of numerous books on Jewish and Irish histories in the U.S., including the National Jewish Book Award-winning We Remember with Reverence and Love, which also earned the Saul Veiner Prize for most outstanding book in American Jewish history, and the James Beard finalist Hungering for America. Diner has also held Guggenheim and Fulbright fellowships and served as Director of the Goren Center for American Jewish History.

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Virtual Event with Benjamin Resnik, Zachary C. Solomon, and Hilary Zaid | New Works in Jewish Speculative Fiction

Wednesday, November 6 | 7 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Jeffrey Pickell

Sponsored by

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Next Stop: A Novel by Benjamin Resnick

When a black hole suddenly consumes Israel and as similar anomalies spread across the globe, a conspiracy takes hold: will the holes swallow the Jews, or will they swallow the earth?

Against a backdrop of antisemitic paranoia, restrictions on Jewish life, and spasms of violence, Ethan and Ella, Jewish citizens of a nameless American city, meet and fall in love. Ella, a photojournalist, documents the changes in daily life, particularly among the city’s Jewish residents. Some Jews, feeling inexplicably drawn to the unusual events, go underground to an abandoned subway system that seems to connect the entire world. Others leave for the south, forming militias and stockpiling weapons. But most, like Ethan, Ella, and her young son Michael, stay and try to make their way amid the hostility and small joys of the ever-changing landscape.

But then thousands of commercial planes are sucked from the sky. Air travel stops. Borders close. Refugees pour into the capital. Eventually all Jews in the city are forced to relocate to the Pale, an area sandwiched between a park and a river. There, under the watchful eye of border guards, drones, and robotic dogs, they form a fragile new society.

Suspenseful, thought-provoking, and brilliantly conceived, Next Stop is an enthralling novel that explores the fault lines between our collective, national, and individual memories and how our deepest bonds can be unexpectedly reshaped in moments of crisis.

Benjamin Resnick is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he lives in Pelham with his family. Next Stop is his first novel.

A Brutal Design by Zachary C. Solomon

After the fascist takeover of his homeland and the murder of his parents, Jewish architecture student Samuel Zelnik thinks that he and his friends are bound for the gulag―or worse. Instead, he receives an unexpected offer of freedom working in the experimental utopian city of Duma. Awed by the city’s dramatic architecture but confused by the other residents’ strange behavior, Zelnik searches for his long-lost uncle who emigrated to Duma before him. His wanderings reunite him with Miriana Grannoff, an exiled avant-garde artist who was once his teacher. Her memorial installations hidden around the city equally enchant and repel him. And gradually, they begin to reveal a truth: Duma is not the workers’ paradise it pretends to be.

Zachary C. Solomon is from Miami, Florida. He received an MFA from Brooklyn College, where he was a Truman Capote fellow. He lives with his wife, the novelist Mandy Berman, and their two children in New York’s Hudson Valley. A Brutal Design is his first novel.

Forget I Told You This: A Novel by Hilary Zaid

Amy Black, a queer single mother and an aspiring artist in love with calligraphy, dreams of a coveted artist’s residency at the world’s largest social media company, Q. One ink-black October night, when the power is out in the hills of Oakland, California, a stranger asks Amy to transcribe a love letter for him. When the stranger suddenly disappears, Amy’s search for the letter’s recipient leads her straight to Q and the most beautiful illuminated manuscript she has ever seen, the Codex Argentus, hidden away in Q’s Library of Books That Don’t Exist—and to a group of data privacy vigilantes who want her to burn Q to the ground.

Amy’s curiosity becomes her salvation, as she’s drawn closer and closer to the secret societies and crackpot philosophers that haunt the city’s abandoned warehouses and defunct train depots. All of it leads to an opportunity of a lifetime: an artist’s residency deep in the holographic halls of Q headquarters. It’s a dream come true—so long as she follows Q’s rules.

Hilary Zaid has been a Tennessee Williams Scholar at the Sewanee Writers’ Conference, a James D. Houston Fellow at the Community of Writers and a two-time attendance of Tin House Writers’ Workshop. Her work has appeared in Mother Jones, Ecotone, Day One, Lilith Magazine, and elsewhere. Long-listed for the 2018 Northern California Independent Booksellers’ Award for Fiction, her novel Paper is White is a 2018 Foreword Indies silver medalist and the winner of the 2018 Independent Publishers’ Book Awards (IPPY) in LGBT+ Fiction. Her novel Forget I Told You This, is the inaugural winner of the Barbara DiBernard Award.

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In-Person Lunch & Learn with Eddie Shapiro | Here’s to the Ladies: Conversations with More of the Great Women of Musical Theater

Wednesday, November 6 @ the JCC | 12 pm

In Here’s to the Ladies, the follow-up to Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater, theatre journalist Eddie Shapiro sits down for intimate, career-encompassing conversations with yet more of Broadway’s most prolific and fascinating leading women.

Full of detailed stories and reflections, his conversations with such luminaries as Barbara Cook, Kelli O’Hara, Heather Headley, Faith Prince, Stephanie J. Block, Tonya Pinkins, and a host of others dig deep into each actor’s career -together, these chapters tell the story of what it means to be a leading lady on Broadway over the past fifty years.

Alan Cumming described Nothing Like a Dame as “an encyclopedia of modern musical theatre via a series of tender meetings between a diehard fan and his idols. Because of Eddie Shapiro’s utter guilelessness, these women open up and reveal more than they ever have before, and we get to be the third guest at each encounter.” This new volume brings more fly-on-the-wall opportunities for fans to savour, students to study, and even the unindoctrinated to understand the life of the performing artist.

Eddie Shapiro is the author of Nothing Like a Dame: Conversations with the Great Women of Musical Theater, A Wonderful Guy: Conversations with the Great Men of Musical Theater, and hundreds of articles in magazines with much shorter and more sensible titles than his books. He lives in New York City and Los Angeles.

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A Virtual Yom Ha’aliyah Event with Asaf Elia-Shalev | Israel’s Black Panthers: The Radicals Who Punctured a Nation’s Founding Myth

Friday, November 8 | 12 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Bryan Roby

Sponsored By

Jewish People of Color Network of Ann Arbor/Washtenaw County | הרשת

Israel’s Black Panthers tells the story of the young and impoverished Moroccan Israeli Jews who challenged their country’s political status quo and rebelled against the ethnic hierarchy of Israeli life in the 1970s. Inspired by the American group of the same name, the Black Panthers mounted protests and a yearslong political campaign for the rights of Mizrahim, or Jews of Middle Eastern ancestry. They managed to rattle the country’s establishment and change the course of Israel’s history through the mass mobilization of a Jewish underclass.

This book draws on archival documents and interviews with elderly activists to capture the movement’s history and reveal little-known stories from within the group. Asaf Elia-Shalev explores the parallels between the Israeli and American Black Panthers, offering a unique perspective on the global struggle against racism and oppression. In twenty short and captivating chapters, Israel’s Black Panthers provides a textured and novel account of the movement and reflects on the role that Mizrahim can play in the future of Israel.

Asaf Elia-Shalev is an Israeli American journalist based in Los Angeles. He is a staff writer for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, which distributes his work to dozens of media outlets in multiple languages.

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A Virtual Kristallnacht Commemoration with Chris Heath | No Road Leading Back: An Improbable Escape from the Nazis, and the Tangled Way We Tell the Story of the Holocaust

Saturday, November 9 | 7:30 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Tim Chupp

No Road Leading Back is the remarkable story of a dozen prisoners who escaped from the site where more than 70,000 Jews were shot in the Lithuanian forest of Ponar after the Nazi invasion of Eastern Europe in 1941. Anxious to hide the incriminating evidence of the murders, the S.S. later in the war enslaved a group of Jews to exhume every one of the bodies and incinerate them all in a months-long labor—an episode whose specifics are staggering and disturbing, even within the context of the Holocaust. From within that dire circumstance emerges the improbable escape made by some of the men, who dug a tunnel with bare hands and spoons while they were trapped and guarded day and night—an act not just of bravery and desperation but of awesome imagination. Based on first-person accounts of the escapees and on each scrap of evidence that has been documented, repressed, or amplified since, this book resurrects their lives, while also providing a complex, urgent analysis of why their story has rarely been told, and never accurately. Heath explores the cultural use and misuse of Holocaust testimony and the need for us to face it—and all uncomfortable historical truths—with honesty and accuracy.

Award-winning journalist Chris Heath has written about a wide array of subjects for GQ, The Atlantic, Esquire and Vanity Fair. His story 18 Tigers, 17 Lions, 8 Bears, 3 Cougars, 2 Wolves, 1 Baboon, 1 Macaque, and 1 Man Dead in Ohio won the 2013 National Magazine Award for Reporting; his story The Militiamen, the Governor and the Kidnapping That Wasn’t was nominated for the 2023 National Magazine Award for Feature Writing. Heath is currently based in Brooklyn, New York.

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WEEK THREE

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Live Event with Noah Rinsky | The Old Jewish Men’s Guide to Eating, Sleeping and Futzing Around

Sunday, November 10 | 12 pm | Third Mind Books, 118 E. Washington St.

Moderated by Chuck Newman

Sponsored By

From the viral social media account @oldjewishmen comes a hilarious and irresistible guide and perfect gift for every OJM and the people who put up with him

Here is a humorous, surprisingly stylish, and crotchety celebration of a most fascinating group of fellas: Old Jewish Men. In this essential guide, readers learn how to eat, dress, get around town, and schmooze like a seasoned OJM. Ever wonder why Old Jewish Men eat so much cottage cheese and melon? If Larry David and Bernie Sanders have the same barber? Who is the next great up-and-coming OJM? (NOTE: You don’t need to be old, Jewish, or a man—it’s a lifestyle.) Plus, there’s helpful jargon, detailed deli and coffee shop rundowns, and the ten OJM archetypes, from New York Schlubs to Tough Guys to Grumpy Intellectuals. A perfect gift for any Jewish dad/granddad/uncle/brother or anybody who likes a healthy shmear of classic Jewish humor, the book is full of hilarious full-color illustrations and chapters including: How to Exist in This Fakakta World; The Art of the Schmooze; How to Live Forever; and King of the Temple.

Noah Rinsky is a writer and the creator of the Instagram account @oldjewishmen. When he’s not chasing down Old Jewish Men in South Florida, New York, and Tel Aviv or hocking overpriced OJM merchandise, he’s probably hanging out with his wife at Mister Wontons, filming old men in the sauna for a mockumentary about the World Sauna Championships or brewing a fresh pot of decaf. Noah lives in Brooklyn. Shocking, eh?

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Live Event with the Honorable David S. Tatel | Vision: A Memoir of Blindness and Justice

Sunday, November 10 @ the JCC | 7 pm

In Conversation with Eli Savit, Washtenaw County Prosecutor

David Tatel has served nearly 30 years on America’s second highest court, the United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, where many of our most crucial cases are resolved—or teed up for the Supreme Court. He has championed equal justice for his entire adult life; decided landmark environmental and voting cases; and embodied the ideal of what a great judge should be. Yet he has been blind for the past 50 of his 80-plus years.

Initially, he depended upon aides to read texts to him, and more recently, a suite of hi-tech solutions has allowed him to listen to reams of documents at high speeds. At first, he tried to hide his deteriorating vision, and for years, he denied that it had any impact on his career. Only recently, partly thanks to his first-ever guide dog, Vixen, has he come to fully accept his blindness and the role it’s played in his personal and professional lives. His story of fighting for justice over many decades, with and without eyesight, is an inspiration to us all.

Judge David Tatel served on the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit from 1994 to 2023. His previous three-decade career as a civil rights lawyer included private and government positions, focusing heavily on equal educational opportunity and access to justice. Judge Tatel and his wife, Edie, have four children and eight grandchildren. They live in Virginia and Washington, D.C.

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Virtual Event with Myra Sack, Gila Pfeffer, Jessica Fein, and Virginia Isaacs Cover | Genetic Counseling and Jewish Genetic Disorders

Tuesday, November 12 | 7 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Wendy Uhlmann, Director of Medical Genetics Clinic, University of Michigan

Sponsored by

Fifty-seven Fridays: Losing Our Daughter, Finding Our Way by Myra Sack

Life is unfolding as planned for Myra Sack and her husband Matt until their beautiful year-old daughter Havi is diagnosed with Tay-Sachs, a fatal neurodegenerative disease, and given only a year to live. Myra and Matt decide to celebrate Havi’s short life and vow to show her as much of the world as they can, surrounded by friends and family who relocate to be in Havi’s orbit. Tapping their Judaism, they transform Friday night Shabbats into birthday parties—“Shabbirthdays”—to replace the birthdays Havi will never have.

Myra Sack is certified in Compassionate Bereavement Care and is the founder and project director for E‑Motion, a program she designed that integrates movement and grief to support those who have lost a loved one. She was awarded an MBA in Social Impact from Boston University and has been inducted into the Lower Merion High School Hall of Fame in Philadelphia and the Philadelphia Jewish Sports Hall of Fame, where she serves as a board member. She has written for numerous publications including Upworthy, Hadassah Magazine, and TODAY.com. Fifty-Seven Fridays is her first book.

Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer, and Other Inconveniences by Gila Pfeffer

By the time she was thirty, Gila Pfeffer was the oldest living member of her family, having lost both parents to cancer. She underwent genetic testing and, after learning that she carried the BRCA1 gene, decided to have a double mastectomy. That choice saved her life.

This memoir follows her journey to break the cycle of death in her family. After becoming a reluctant expert on how to sit shiva, she grows up, falls in love, and becomes a mother, before her life is derailed yet again.

Her double mastectomy reveals cancer already growing in one breast. After enduring eight rounds of chemo and the removal of her ovaries, she takes her last-ever dip in the mikvah waters as a bald, menopausal, thirty-five-year-old mother of four.

Drenched in Gila’s dark humor, honed over years of repeatedly surviving the worst, Nearly Departed is a story about thriving against the odds, leaning in to her Jewish faith, and leaving a better legacy for her children than the one she inherited.

Gila Pfeffer is a Jewish American humor writer and personal essayist whose work has appeared in McSweeney’s, The New York Times, The New Yorker, Today.com, and others. Gila’s monthly “Feel It on the First” campaign reminds women to prioritize their breast health. She splits her time between New York City and London.

Breath Taking: A Memoir of Family, Genes, and Broken Dreams by Jessica Fein

At the age of five Jessica Fein’s daughter Dalia was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease that would claim her life at 17. Before that moment came, and inspired by Dalia’s own insuppressible zest for life, Fein and her family would discover how to live in the present when the future can’t be fixed. In this heartfelt yet clear-eyed memoir, Fein maps both her journey to becoming an adoptive mom and the roller coaster ride of loving and caring for a terminally ill child, persevering when the simple act of taking a breath can become an act of courage. Through it all, she discovers the need to be both relentless advocate and calm presence, to show vulnerability as well as strength, and to allow joy to be louder than sorrow.

Jessica Fein, a former op-ed columnist for The Boston Globe, is a seasoned media contributor, with forums including HuffPost, Psychology Today, Zibby Mag, and Kveller. She balances writing, podcasting, motherhood, and advocacy with her work as a senior marketing executive at a global multi-billion-dollar education company. She serves on the board of MitoAction, the Mitochondrial disease action committee. She lives in Framingham, MA.

Supplemental Needs: A Novel by Virginia Isaacs Cover

An expected phone call from her obstetrician turns the world of pregnant Rachel and her husband upside down. Thrilled at what they consider to be a miracle pregnancy, they learn that their unborn child has a genetic condition called Klinefelter syndrome, which can cause a range of developmental disabilities. The doctor at the genetic counseling center advises them to terminate the pregnancy. They are frightened, confused, and heartbroken. This compelling novel traces the journey of Rachel and Dave Gold from their decision to continue the pregnancy, through the gradual process of accepting that their child has special needs and learning to plan for a life where some level of disability may always be a consideration.

Virginia (Ginnie) Isaacs Cover holds a Master of Social Work, focusing her career on children and adults with developmental disabilities. She has expertise in X and Y chromosome variations, including Klinefelter syndrome, the genetic condition portrayed in Supplemental Needs. She previously published a widely read guide for these conditions. Her writing interests include contemporary American Judaism, intermarriage, disability, and sexuality.

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In-Person Lunch & Learn with Dr. Mimi Zieman | Tap Dancing on Everest: A Young Doctor’s Unlikely Adventure

Wednesday, November 13 | 12 pm | Lunch @ the JCC

Moderated by Dr. Jonathan Trobe

Sponsored by

The plan was outrageous: A small expedition of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, summitted only once before. They would climb without using supplemental oxygen, porter support, or chance for rescue. Mimi Zieman would accompany the climbers as the doctor—and only woman—although she was still in her third year of medical school.

Full of self-doubt, Zieman grappled with whether to go but couldn’t resist the call of the wilderness and mountains. On Everest, when three climbers disappeared during their summit attempt, she reached the knife edge of her limits and dug deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.

Sparkling with suspense and vulnerability, Tap Dancing on Everest is a true survival story about the risks we take to become our most authentic selves. In this inspiring coming-of-age travel memoir that includes solo hiking through Nepal, Zieman weaves her childhood as the daughter of Jewish immigrants raised in 1970’s New York City, her father a Holocaust survivor, with adventure, medicine, and empowerment. She captures the curiosity and awe of a young woman as she faces down messages to stay small and safe and ventures into the unknown.

Mimi Zieman is an author, physician, and speaker, active with Jewish Women’s Archive and National Council of Jewish Women, which awarded her the Women Who Dare prize. Far from her New York roots, home is in Atlanta, where she doesn’t eat grits, biscuits, or collards, but loves her community of friends and the canopy of trees which keeps her grounded.

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Live Event with Amir Tibon | The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderland

Thursday, November 14 | JCC of Greater Ann Arbor | Time TBD

Sponsored by

Barbara & Victor Klein Jewish Book Festival Fund

On the morning of October 7, Amir Tibon and his wife were awakened by mortar rounds exploding near their home in Kibbutz Nahal Oz, a progressive Israeli community less than a mile from Gaza City. Soon, they were holding their two young daughters in the family’s reinforced safe room, urging them not to cry as gunfire echoed just outside the door. With his cell phone battery running low, Amir texted his father: “The girls are behaving really well, but I’m worried they’ll lose patience soon and Hamas will hear us.”

Some 45 miles north, Amir’s parents had just cut short an early morning swim along the shores of Tel Aviv. Now, they jumped in their Jeep and sped toward Nahal Oz, armed only with a pistol but intent on saving their family at all costs.

In The Gates of Gaza, Amir Tibon tells this harrowing story in full for the first time. He describes his family’s ordeal—and the bravery that ultimately led to their rescue—alongside the histories of the place they call home and the systems of power that have kept them and their neighbors in Gaza in harm’s way for decades. Woven throughout is Tibon’s own expertise as a longtime international correspondent, as well as more than thirty original interviews: with residents of his kibbutz, with the Israeli soldiers who helped to wrest it from the hands of Hamas, and with experts on Gaza, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and the failed peace process. More than one family’s odyssey, The Gates of Gaza is the intimate story of a tight-knit community and the broader saga of war, occupation, and hostility between two national movements—a conflict that has not yet extinguished the enduring hope for peace.

Amir Tibon is an award-winning diplomatic correspondent for Haaretz, Israel’s paper of record, and the author of The Last Palestinian: The Rise and Reign of Mahmoud Abbas (co-authored with Grant Rumley), the first-ever biography of the leader of the Palestinian Authority. From 2017-2020, Tibon was based in Washington, DC as a foreign correspondent for Haaretz, and he also has served as a senior editor for the newspaper’s English edition. He, his wife, and their two young daughters are former residents of Kibbutz Nahal Oz but are currently living as internal refugees in northern Israel.

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Virtual Event with Melvin S. Marsh and Reuven Fenton | A Conversation on Jewish Conversion

Saturday, November 16 | 7:30 pm over Zoom

Moderated by Rabbi Josh Whinston

View the Zoom recording

Passcode: *x8c079a

Leaving Bacon Behind: A How-to Guide to Jewish Conversion by Melvin S. Marsh

Leaving Bacon Behind provides a comprehensive, easy-to-read guide for conversion that focuses on questions prospective Jews by Choice might have, including “Why should one convert to Judaism?” and “What happens after the conversion?”

This book is a direct result of the questions the author fielded during his time as a moderator in one of the largest Jewish-by-Choice internet communities and his own personal experience as a disabled transsexual Jew by Choice. This includes content discussed in Judaism conversion classes and live courses, as well as questions, comments, and feedback from prospective and successful Jews by Choice. No other book on Jewish conversion has incorporated widescale, peer-reviewed feedback from the target community. As the author himself does not fit the stereotype of an able-bodied, middle-class, white heterosexual female converting for marriage, this book includes a section of additional considerations for converting on a budget, if one is LGBT, disabled, or non-white, if one is already married to a non-Jew, or if one already has children.

Melvin S. Marsh is the award-winning, Amazon bestselling author of Leaving Bacon Behind. After growing up in South Florida and becoming interested in Judaism, he set forth on a trip that spanned over 16 years to get to the mikvah in part due to the barriers of being transgender as well as disabled. This is his first book.

Goyhood: A Novel by Reuven Fenton

When Mayer (née Marty) Belkin fled small-town Georgia for Brooklyn nearly thirty years ago, he thought he’d left his wasted youth behind. Now he’s a Talmud scholar married into one of the greatest rabbinical families in the world – a dirt-poor country boy reinvented in the image of God.

But his mother’s untimely death brings a shocking revelation: Mayer and his ne’er-do-well twin brother David aren’t, in fact, Jewish. Traumatized and spiritually bereft, Mayer’s only recourse is to convert to Judaism. But the earliest date he can get is a week from now. What are two estranged brothers to do in the interim?

So begins the Belkins’ Rumspringa through America’s Deep South with Mom’s ashes in tow, plus two tagalongs: an insightful Instagram influencer named Charlayne Valentine and Popeye, a one-eyed dog. As the crew gets tangled up in a series of increasingly surreal adventures, Mayer grapples with a God who betrayed him and an emotionally withdrawn wife in Brooklyn who has yet to learn her husband is a counterfeit Jew.

Reuven Fenton has been covering breaking news for The New York Post since 2007, and has earned national recognition for his exclusive reporting on myriad national stories. He is a graduate of Yeshiva University and Columbia University School of Journalism. Goyhood is his debut novel.

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WEEK FOUR

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LOCAL AUTHORS BRUNCH

Sunday, November 17 | 11 am at the JCC

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Live Event with Abigail Pogrebin, R’Dov Linzer, and Boruch Cohen | Two Jews; Three Opinions

Monday, November 18 @ the JCC | 7 pm

Moderated by Rabbi Joel Goldstein

It Takes Two to Torah: An Orthodox Rabbi and Reform Journalist Discuss and Debate Their Way Through the Five Books of Moses

For the first time, in a single volume, readers can take a tour of the entire Torah through the medium of one challenging, instructive, irreverent, animated conversation. Rabbi Dov Linzer, an Orthodox rabbi, and Abigail Pogrebin, a Reform journalist talk their way through the Five Books of Moses with candor, humor, emotion, personal revelation, and scholarship.

Rabbi Linzer is President and Rabbinic Head of YCT Rabbinical School (a Modern Orthodox seminary,) and Abigail Pogrebin is a veteran journalist, author of “My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew” and former producer for “60 Minutes.” Dov is a renowned expert in Torah and Talmud, whose personal values run liberal and egalitarian, but who also has clear parameters about what is halachically correct and comfortable when it comes to Jewish law and tradition. Abby is our relatable every-Jew in America, deeply engaged in Jewish life, but less through strict observance and prayer as through study, reporting, synagogue, and community.

This book is the product of two people literally meeting in the middle to bring us their most honest intellectual and relevant understanding of the Torah. Pogrebin and Linzer engaged in short dialogues on a podcast for Tablet Magazine, and they have now been collected and edited so that the full, fascinating exploration can be found in one place. This book is a Torah conversation-starter for families on Shabbat, for religious school instructors with students of all ages, for individuals who have never found a way to read the entire Torah in bite-size, relatable nuggets, and for young clergy looking for some sermon ideas if they’re stuck! Most of all, it is a snapshot of what Torah study is meant to be: a real-time, candid, instructive, challenging exchange of responses to ancient text. “It Takes Two to Torah” is not just an education, it’s an invitation – to join the oldest Book Club in the world.

Rabbi Dov Linzer is the President and Rabbinic Head of YCT Rabbinical School of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. He has written for The Forward, Tablet and The New York Times and published over 100 teshuvot (responsa) and scholarly articles.

Abigail Pogrebin is the author of My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew which was a finalist for a 2017 JBC National Jewish Book Award and Stars of David: Prominent Jews Talk About Being Jewish. She has written for The Atlantic, The Forward, and Tablet, and moderates conversations for The Streicker Center and Jewish Broadcasting Service.

Think Outside the Lox: A Fresh Perspective on Jewish Teachings and Traditions

They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover. But this book is different.

Think Outside the Lox is a new collection of transformative essays revealing fresh perspectives on Jewish teachings and traditions, based on age-old Chassidic texts and the insights of the Baal Shem Tov. These essays―sharing the Torah’s rich meaning and mystical light―can be read on their own or according to the weekly Torah readings and yearly holidays. The book also features, among other arcane tidbits, a flying fish.

Captivating, imaginative, fun―this book is rendered in a delightful style that anyone can appreciate, from the Hebrew school dropout to the advanced Talmudic scholar, leaving readers both inspired and entertained.

Boruch Cohen (then known by the exotic name “Bruce”) received a B.A. from Wesleyan University, followed by acceptance to Columbia University’s MFA fiction program, when an unexpected encounter with a colorful rabbi inspired new aspirations: a move to the Rabbinical College of America, leading to a 25-year career in Jewish outreach, and the publication of his first book.

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Virtual Event with Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey | Empty Nesters Cookbook Club

Kugels and Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina

Wednesday, November 20 @ the JCC | 6 pm

Moderated by Amanda Fisher

Where people go, so goes their food. In Kugels & Collards: Stories of Food, Family, and Tradition in Jewish South Carolina, Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey celebrate the unique and diverse food history of Jewish South Carolina. They gather stories and recipes from diverse Jewish sources―Sephardic and Ashkenazi families who have been in the state for hundreds of years, descendants of Holocaust survivors, and more recent immigrants from Russia and Israel―and explore how cherished dishes were influenced by available ingredients and complemented by African American and regional culinary traditions. These stories are a vital part of the South’s “Jewish geography” and foodways, stretching across state lines to shape southern culture. On the southern Jewish table, many cultures are savored. Extensively illustrated with original and archival photographs, Kugels & Collards collects includes more than eighty recipes from seventy contributors. Barnett and Harvey draw on family cookbooks and troves of personal recipes and highlight Jewish staples like kreplach dumplings and stuffed cabbage as well as adaptations of southern favorites such as peach cobbler, plus modern fusions like grits and lox casserole, and of course kugels and collards. Kugels & Collards invites readers into family homes, businesses, and community centers to share meals and memories.

Rachel Gordin Barnett and Lyssa Kligman Harvey are lifelong South Carolinians who have been instrumental in preserving Jewish history across the state. They are founding members of the Historic Columbia Jewish Heritage Initiative and creators of the Kugels & Collards blog. They live in Columbia, South Carolina.