Books for Jewish American Heritage Month

By Coll Rowe | May 2 2023 | Jewish American Heritage Month

For Jewish American Heritage Month in May, Penguin Random House Education is celebrating the generations of Jewish Americans who have made up the fabric of American society. We have provided a collection of titles by and about Jewish Americans that includes fiction, memoir, Jewish history, and key issues in current events. The authors share their own personal experiences, their family history and culture, and stories about being Jewish American that enlighten and educate.

A Memoir
9780525560111
"An instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times MIT psychologist and bestselling author of RECLAIMING CONVERSATION and ALONE TOGETHER, Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work
$18.00 US
Mar 01, 2022
Paperback
384 Pages
Penguin Books

A Survivor's Tale
9780679406419
On the occasion of the twenty-fifth anniversary of its first publication, here is the definitive edition of the book acclaimed as “the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” (Wall Street Journal) and “the first masterpiece in comic book history” (The New Yorker).
$35.00 US
Nov 19, 1996
Hardcover
296 Pages
Pantheon

Reflections on Grief, Gratitude, and Happiness
9780525512486
A “profound and beautiful” (Marilynne Robinson) account of joy and sorrow from one of the great writers of our time, The New Yorker’s Kathryn Schulz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize
$19.00 US
Nov 22, 2022
Paperback
272 Pages
Random House Trade Paperbacks

A True Story of Family Fiction
9780735216433
New York Times bestselling author Julie Klam's funny and moving story of the Morris sisters, distant relations with mysterious pasts.
$16.00 US
Aug 09, 2022
Paperback
288 Pages
Riverhead Books

A True (As Told to Me) Story
9780525563822
Even after she left home for Hollywood, Emmy-nominated TV writer Bess Kalb saved every voicemail her grandmother Bobby Bell ever left her. Bobby was a force—irrepressible, glamorous, unapologetically opinionated. Bobby doted on Bess; Bess adored Bobby. Then, at ninety, Bobby died. But in this debut memoir, Bobby is speaking to Bess once more, in a voice as passionate as it ever was in life.
$18.00 US
Apr 20, 2021
Paperback
224 Pages
Vintage

Power, Privilege, and the Rise of an American Dynasty
9781400068852
An “epic and intimate” (David M. Kennedy) portrait of four generations of the Morgenthau family, a dynasty of power brokers and public officials with an outsize—and previously unmapped—influence extending from daily life in New York City to the shaping of the American Century
$45.00 US
Oct 11, 2022
Hardcover
1072 Pages
Random House

A Journey into the Heart of the Twentieth Century
9780143125891
“What a story! The Family is the twentieth-century history of the Jews writ small.” —Jonathan D. Sarna, Joseph H. and Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University
$24.00 US
Sep 02, 2014
Paperback
400 Pages
Penguin Books

A novel
9780525434054
When his father dies, it falls to Larry—the secular son in a family of Orthodox Brooklyn Jews—to recite the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, every day for eleven months. But to the horror and dismay of his sister, Larry refuses, imperiling the fate of his father’s soul. To appease her, he hires a stranger through a website called kaddish.com to say the prayer instead—a decision that will have profound, and very personal, repercussions. Irreverent and hilarious, Nathan Englander’s tale of a son who makes a diabolical compromise brilliantly captures the tensions between tradition and modernity.
$16.00 US
Feb 11, 2020
Paperback
224 Pages
Vintage

A Post-Holocaust Memoir
9780525575993
A woman unearths family secrets and gives voice to things unspoken in this poignant memoir that traces her parents' escape from the Holocaust.
$17.00 US
Mar 30, 2021
Paperback
272 Pages
Crown

9780805242195
From the award-winning author of Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer and The Jew of New York: a unique history of a beloved New York culinary institution that emerged in the late 19th century and had all but disappeared by the end of the 20th.
$29.95 US
Mar 10, 2020
Hardcover
496 Pages
Pantheon

9780525562757
The acclaimed and now-classic biographical novel of Walter Benjamin's last days--adapted into screenplay by Jay Parini.
$16.95 US
Feb 09, 2021
Paperback
416 Pages
Anchor

The Tree of Life Synagogue Shooting and the Soul of a Neighborhood
9780525657194
Squirrel Hill is a piercing portrait of the struggles and triumphs of one of America’s renowned Jewish neighborhoods in the wake of unspeakable tragedy that highlights the hopes, fears, and tensions all Americans must confront on the road to healing.
$30.00 US
Oct 05, 2021
Hardcover
320 Pages
Knopf

9780593312766
In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of events in 1949.
$16.00 US
Mar 01, 2022
Paperback
272 Pages
Vintage