Support JWA by purchasing a copy of one of our book picks through our Bookshop.org shop. Sign up to receive emails about author features throughout the year.

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

by Jessica Fein

Jessica Fein takes readers on a journey through the joys and heart-wrenching challenges of love and loss. At the age of five, Jessica's daughter Dalia was diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease. Inspired by Dalia's zest for life, Jessica and her family embark on a remarkable odyssey of love, resilience, and self-discovery.

Camp Jeff

By Tova Reich

An old New York Catskills hotel is converted into a Reeducation center for star #MeToo offenders in a story full of cunning and craft, double meanings and doppelgangers.

Chutzpah Girls

by Julie Silverstein and Tami Schlossberg Pruwer 

Embark on an extraordinary journey to discover the stories of daring Jewish women, past and present, who triumphed over darkness and went on to create a brighter world.

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai

by Dianne Ashton and Melissa R. Klapper

The Civil War Diary of Emma Mordecai is one of the few surviving Civil War diaries by a Jewish woman in the antebellum South. It charts her daily life and her evolving perspective on Confederate nationalism and Southern identity, Jewishness, women's roles in wartime, gendered domestic roles in slave-owning households, and the centrality of family relationships.

Desires

by Celia Dropkin

Celia Dropkin was best known as a poet whose work addressed sexual and erotic themes with a frankness that shocked readers and critics. Like her poetry, Desires reflects on the internal and external conflicts of love, domesticity, and sexuality, as well as the competing impulses that are part of every life.

Displaced Persons: Stories

by Joan Leegant

The stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.

First Lady of Laughs: The Forgotten Story of Jean Carroll, America's First Jewish Woman Stand-Up Comedian

by Grace Kessler Overbeke

First Lady of Laughs tells the story of Jean Carroll, the first Jewish woman to become a star in the field we now call stand-up comedy. Carroll made enduring changes to the genre of stand-up comedy, carving space for women and modeling a new form of Jewish femininity with her glamorous, acculturated, but still recognizably Jewish persona.

Holler Rat: A Memoir

by Anya Liftig 

Anya Liftig grew up with her feet in two very different worlds. While her mother's upbringing was so rural that the other kids called her "holler rat," her father came from a comfortable, upper-middle-class Jewish family. A funny, vivid, and ultimately heartbreaking memoir about forging identity in the chasm between cultures and classes.

Holy Rebellion: Religious Feminism and the Transformation of Judaism and Women's Rights in Israel

by Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks

An in-depth study of Jewish religion and law in Israel from a gendered perspective. In Holy Rebellion, Ronit Irshai and Tanya Zion-Waldoks examine social change in Israel through a rigorous analysis of the shifting entanglements of religion, gender, and law in times of cultural transformation.

I Made It Out of Clay

by Beth Kander

In this darkly funny and surprisingly sweet novel, a woman creates a golem in a desperate attempt to pretend her life is a rom-com rather than a disaster. With moments of moodiness, fierce love and unexpected laughter, I Made It Out of Clay will make you see monsters everywhere.

Invisible Labor: The Untold Story of the Cesarean Section

by Rachel Somerstein

An incisive yet personal look at the science and history of the most common surgery performed in America—the cesarean section—and an exposé on the disturbing state of maternal medical care.

Kissing Girls on Shabbat: A Memoir

by Sara Glass

A moving coming-of-age memoir about one young woman’s desperate attempt to protect her children and family while also embracing her queer identity in a controlling Hasidic community.

Long Island Compromise

by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

An exhilarating novel about one American family and the dark moment that shatters their suburban paradise, Long Island Compromise spans the entirety of one family's history, winding through decades and generations, all the way to the outrageous present, and confronting the mainstays of American Jewish life and the unspoken love and shared experience that unite a family forever.

Matrilineal Dissent: Women Writers and Jewish American Literary History

Edited by Annie Atura Bushnell, Lori Harrison-Kahan, and Ashley Walters

Redefining Jewish American literature through expansive feminist frameworks. Bridging literary studies and cultural history, this edited volume examines Jewish women writers' wide-ranging contributions to American literary culture from the turn of the twentieth century to the present.

On Strike Against God

by Joanna Russ 

Edited by Alec Pollak

A lost feminist masterwork by feminist and speculative fiction icon Joanna Russ about a lesbian's coming-to-consciousness during the social upheaval of the 1970s.

Songs for the Brokenhearted

by Ayelet Tsabari

A young Yemeni Israeli woman learns of her mother's secret romance in a dramatic journey through lost family stories, revealing the unbreakable bond between a mother and a daughter—the debut novel of an award-winning literary voice.

Still Life with Remorse

by Maira Kalman

Through these narratives, Maira Kalman uses her signature wit and tenderness to reveal how family history plays an influential role in all of our work, lives, and perspectives. A feat of visual storytelling and vulnerability, Still Life with Remorse explores the profound hidden in the quotidian, and illuminates the powerful universal truths in our most personal family stories.

The Familiar

by Leigh Bardugo

In a shabby house in the new capital of Madrid, a lowly kitchen scullion hides a gift for little miracles. With the pyres of the Inquisition burning, she must use every bit of her wit and will to win fame and hide the truth of her ancestry—even if that means enlisting the help of the notorious Guillén Santángel, whose own secrets could doom them both.

The Women's Revolution: How We Changed Your Life

by Muriel Fox

A comprehensive, indexed memoir about the Second Wave women's movement by the co-founder of the National Organization for Women. Muriel Fox offers rare, firsthand stories of 29 women (including Betty Friedan) and one man, but also many who have not previously been recognized for their contributions.

Victory Parade

by Leela Corman

The author of the Eisner-nominated graphic novel Unterzakhn now gives us a heart-wrenching, phantasmagorical tale of love, loss, and trauma both personal and global, set during World War II in Brooklyn, New York, and in the newly liberated Buchenwald concentration camp.

What Jewish Looks Like

by Liz Kleinrock and Caroline Kusin Pritchard

Illustrated by Iris Gottlieb

This powerful intersectional anthology celebrates 36 Jewish heroes from Tracee Ellis Ross and Victor "Young" Perez to Doña Gracia Nasi. A first-ever collection that disrupts the narrative of how a Jewish person is perceived, What Jewish Looks Like includes accessible primers on important Jewish history, a map, quotes, and much more!