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Five Books We’re Excited About in 2025

Jewish writers and stories to add to your reading list

Hey GOLDA gang!

Stephanie here. It’s been a bit since we dropped into your inbox. We’ve been hard at work behind the scenes at GOLDA creating the best (and most fun!) Jewish lifestyle site.

The first step is our fancy new newsletter platform, which lets you comment and engage with each other, and keeps all of our content accessible and sharable online. We’ve been building out our editorial calendar as well, and have a lot of great stuff coming your way. (Also, we’re looking for someone to help with social media. If that’s you or someone you know, email me at [email protected].) 

This week, I asked Naomi Firestone-Teeter, CEO of the Jewish Book Council and one of my favorite people, to share a few of her favorite books coming out in 2025. As it turns out, she’s been busy. Last week, the Jewish Book Council announced the winners of the 74th Jewish Book Awards, and they just published the latest issue of their literary journal, Paper Brigade

It’s a challenging moment for Jewish writers and Jewish topics in the publishing industry. “It’s never felt more important to support Jewish books, authors, and ideas,” Naomi says. Jewish authors need you. You are their audience. This is your chance to play one of the most important roles in our Jewish literary world: Be their reader.”

With that in mind, here are 5 books that Naomi—and GOLDA—can’t wait for you to read in 2025.

Eli Zuzovsky is an Israeli-Italian Harvard alum, Rhodes scholar, playwright, filmmaker, and now: novelist. Mazeltov tells the story of Adam Weizmann’s bar mitzvah party at a banquet hall in Israel, with the country on the brink of war and Adam on the brink of manhood. His personal angst—a mixture of queer lust and shame—collides with his family’s mishegas and the country’s combustibility. 

Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen calls the book “a sweet, sly, mournful, and horny coming of age, written with heart-on-the-sleeve and politics in the pants.

Pre-order it here. I’ll be in conversation with Zuzovsky on Thursday, Feb. 20 at 7 p.m. Eastern as part of the Unpacking the Book series I host with the Jewish Book Council and The Jewish Museum. It’s virtual! You can register here.

Tova Mirvis’s latest novel is inspired by a shonda-filled true story, but she makes the story all her own, exploring the question of just how far a family will go for each other. As it turns out, pretty far: There’s a contentious divorce and custody battle, an overly involved set of in-laws, and a shocking murder-for-hire that brings a respected South Florida Jewish family to its knees. We Would Never is gripping and provocative and makes you squirm while also being impossible to put down.  

Pre-order it here. I’ll be in conversation with Mirvis on Thursday, March 31 at 7 p.m. Eastern, also part of the Unpacking the Book series, this time at The Jewish Museum in New York City; register here.

It took 40 years of dogged detective work to get Sons and Daughters, by the late Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade, published in English. And not a moment too soon: literary critic Adam Kirsch, who wrote the introduction to Rose Waldman’s translation, says it’s “quite possibly the last great Yiddish novel.” 

Set in Jewish pre-war Poland and Lithuania as modernity threatens tradition within the Katzenellenbogen family—and everything is beginning to threaten the Jews—it’s a rich and captivating look at a world we know will soon be lost entirely. 

Pre-order it here

Iddo Gefen’s debut short story collection, Jerusalem Beach, won the 2023 Sami Rohr Prize (basically the Jewish Pulitzer) and announced Gefen as a sharp and darkly funny Israeli writer in the vein of Etgar Keret. Gefen is back with his first novel, Mrs. Lilienblum’s Cloud Factory, about a tech startup that turns sand into rain clouds, run by a quirky family that operates a hostel on the edge of a crater in the Israeli desert. Need I say more? 

It’s an endlessly entertaining send-up of startup culture as well as a story about families, love, and secrets.  

Pre-order it here. I’ll be in conversation with Gefen on Thursday, May 8 in New York City at The Jewish Museum; register here

GOLDA fairy godmother Jill Kargman dubbed Esther Chehebar “a Jewish Jane Austen,” and the moniker couldn’t be more apt. In her savvy and heartwarming debut novel, Sisters of Fortune, Chehebar follows three Syrian Jewish sisters in a tight-knit Brooklyn community as they look for love—and themselves—while navigating the dueling pulls of tradition and modernity. 

Pre-order it here.

All the book links above will take you to our Bookshop.org shop. Your purchase there supports GOLDA. 

Happy reading! And reply or let us know in the comments what other books you’re loving lately.

Stay GOLDA,

Stephanie

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