Poetry

"Shabbat arrives as usual,
dressed in silk
with her hair and make-up
beautifully arranged."


So begins The Sabbath Bee by Wilhelmina Gottschalk, which updates the millenia-old genre of Jewish Sabbath poetry for today's world.

"Torah, say our sages, has seventy faces. As these prose poems reveal, so too does Shabbat. Here we meet Shabbat as familiar housemate, as the child whose presence transforms a family (sometimes in ways that outsiders can't understand), as a spreading tree, as an annoying friend who insists on being celebrated, as a child throwing water balloons, as a woman, as a man, as a bee, as the ocean... Through the lens of these deft, surprising, moving prose poems, all seventy of Shabbat's faces shine."

Rachel Barenblat, author, The Velveteen Rabbi's Haggadah and Texts to the Holy

This collection of books featuring Jewish main characters is decidedly non-comprehensive. As we come across books that are described as having Jewish main characters, we add them to this database. The creators of the Jewish Genre Reading Challenge have not read all (or even most) of the books in this database. We have gathered information from many sources and not all may be accurate. Inclusion of a book in our database does not imply endorsement or approval. There is always the possibility that antisemitism may be present in a book, either written into a character's experience or through malicious or ignorant caricature or stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters and culture. Please take care of yourselves as you read.

 

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