To help you find the perfect Hanukkah present for the avid reader in your life, here’s a selection of notable new books — all with a Jewish twist.
“The Devil in Jerusalem” (St. Martin’s Press), by best-selling American-born Israeli author Naomi Ragen, is a crime thriller based on real events from a notorious Jerusalem court case. When two young brothers are brought to Hadassah Hospital with horrific injuries, an Israeli detective finds herself navigating her way through the Old City streets and parsing kabbalistic texts and cult rituals in pursuit of answers.
Although Ragen has often written about the haredi realm, her new novel “is about psychopaths who happen to be a part of the Jewish world,” she said in a Jewish Book Council interview.
Before Carrie Brownstein made her name nationally as co-creator and co-star of IFC’s “Portlandia,” she was already an icon to fans of her feminist punk band Sleater-Kinney. And before that she was an ambitious Jewish girl growing up in the Pacific Northwest.
Her deeply personal memoir “Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl” (Riverhead Books) reveals Brownstein’s journey from her childhood in Washington — with an anorexic mother and a father who would eventually come out of the closet — to her days as a pioneer of an underground music movement, to a career that earned her a spot as the only woman on a Rolling Stone list of the 25 Most Underrated Guitarists of All-Time.
Sigal Samuel’s beautifully written debut novel “The Mystics of Mile End” (William Morrow Paperbacks), allows the author to explore a range of interlocking and conflicting themes: religion, science, chaos, order, love, grief and the many pathways to find meaning in life.
Set in Montreal’s Mile End — a neighborhood of hipsters and Hassids — “Mystics” looks at the lives of David, a professor of Jewish mysticism, and his two teenage children. The narrative is energized by a format that gives each of the three main characters the chance to tell their own story from a first-person perspective.
For readers hungering for an entertaining academic treatise on the evolution of a distinctly Jewish and American phenomenon, “Pastrami on Rye” (NYU Press) probes the history of the New York Jewish deli. Ted Merwin’s tasty exploration of deli cuisine and culture also tracks larger shifts in the American Jewish experience, particularly in the post-World War II period when delis upstaged shuls as Jewish gathering places. The book tells how delis faced a period of decline only to rise again in recent years as an iconic cultural symbol.
What? More food? “Falafel Nation” (University of Nebraska Press) considers the role food has played in the evolution of Zionism and the State of Israel. Yael Raviv’s thought-provoking book delves into the power struggles, moral dilemmas and religious, ideological and ethnic affiliations that shape the character of modern Israelis — and how that relates to the region’s diverse cuisine.
Raviv, who runs New York’s biannual Umami Food and Art Festival, gives us quite a bit of intellectual fare to digest.
“The Pawnbroker” (Fig Tree Books), originally published in 1961 and made into an acclaimed film in 1964, was one of the first American works of fiction to deal with the trauma of the Holocaust from the perspective of a character who lived through it. This reissued edition of Edward Lewis Wallant’s novel — about a former Polish university professor and concentration camp survivor in East Harlem — has a new foreword by novelist Dara Horn (“A Guide for the Perplexed”).
The Kickstarter campaign that funded Seth Kushner’s “Schmuck” (Alternative Comics) described it as “a semi-autobiographic novel anthology about one schmuck’s quest for love and the meaning of life in New York City.”
Fair enough, but the description doesn’t begin to capture the hilarity and poignancy that emerges when this collection of 22 comics — all short stories by Kushner, each with a different, talented illustrator — is taken as a whole. “Schmuck” paints a portrait of a nebbish whose openness to sharing life’s foibles makes his character quite likable. (In a heartbreaking twist, Kushner passed away earlier this year and wasn’t able to see his fine book in print.)
Izzy Edel, the protagonist of Ben Nadler’s “The Sea Beach Line” (Fig Tree Books), is the best kind of hero: interesting and deeply flawed.
Having been booted from Oberlin College for drug use, the 20-something drifter returns to “post-Giuliani” New York City, where he attempts to track down his estranged father, who is missing and possibly dead. In the process of seeking answers, he takes over his father’s outdoor bookselling business and discovers a world of hustlers, gangsters and religious characters. Oh, yes — he also meets the girl of his dreams.
Rife with references to Jewish folktales and the Talmud, Nadler’s tale is part mystery, part love story and part tribute to Jewish customs and curiosities.
Prominent litigator Roberta Kaplan weaves legal drama with personal narrative in “Then Comes Marriage: United States v. Windsor and the Defeat of DOMA” (W.W. Norton & Co.). Kaplan is the architect of the 2013 Supreme Court case that brought down the Defense of Marriage Act and compelled the federal government to recognize same-sex marriages.
Beyond the account of the Jewish couple at the center of the case — widow Edie Windsor, whose 40-plus-year relationship with her late wife entitled her to zero spousal rights in the government’s eyes — Kaplan delves into her own story, from her fears that coming out as a gay woman would distance her from her Jewish community, to creating a loving, Jewish family with her wife, Rachel.