Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Practice Finalist for the 2021 Kirkus Prize in Nonfiction. A startling and profound exploration of how Jewish history is exploited to comfort the living.

Renowned and beloved as a prizewinning novelist, Dara Horn has also been publishing penetrating essays since she was a teenager. Often asked by major publications to write on subjects related to Jewish culture―and increasingly in response to a recent wave of deadly antisemitic attacks―Horn was troubled to realize what all of these assignments had in common: she was being asked to write about dead Jews, never about living ones. In these essays, Horn reflects on subjects as far-flung as the international veneration of Anne Frank, the mythology that Jewish family names were changed at Ellis Island, the blockbuster traveling exhibition Auschwitz, the marketing of the Jewish history of Harbin, China, and the little-known life of the "righteous Gentile" Varian Fry. Throughout, she challenges us to confront the reasons why there might be so much fascination with Jewish deaths, and so little respect for Jewish lives unfolding in the present.

Horn draws upon her travels, her research, and also her own family life―trying to explain Shakespeare’s Shylock to a curious ten-year-old, her anger when swastikas are drawn on desks in her children’s school, the profound perspective offered by traditional religious practice and study―to assert the vitality, complexity, and depth of Jewish life against an antisemitism that, far from being disarmed by the mantra of "Never forget," is on the rise. As Horn explores the (not so) shocking attacks on the American Jewish community in recent years, she reveals the subtler dehumanization built into the public piety that surrounds the Jewish past―making the radical argument that the benign reverence we give to past horrors is itself a profound affront to human dignity.

A million-dollar Chagall is stolen from a museum during a singles' cocktail hour. The unlikely thief, former child prodigy Benjamin Ziskind, is convinced that the painting once hung in his parents' living room. This work of art opens a door through which we discover his family's startling history from an orphanage in Soviet Russia where Chagall taught to suburban New Jersey and the jungles of Vietnam."

Rachel's current troubles are only the latest in a litany spanning dozens of countries, scores of marriages, hundreds of children and 2,000 years. Only one person shares her immortality: an illicit lover who pursues her through the ages. But when her children develop technologies that could change her fate, Rachel must find a way out. From ancient religion to the scientific frontier, Dara Horn pits our efforts to make life last against the deeper challenge of making life worth living.

Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is abducted leaving Judith free to take over Josie s life at home, including her husband and daughter, while Josie s talent for preserving memories becomes a surprising test of her empathy and her only means of escape.

A century earlier, another traveler arrives in Egypt: Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor hunting for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue. Both he and Josie are haunted by the work of the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, a doctor and rationalist who sought to reconcile faith and science, destiny and free will. But what Schechter finds, as he tracks down the remnants of a thousand-year-old community s once-vibrant life, will reveal the power and perils of what Josie s ingenious work brings into being: a world where nothing is ever forgotten.

An engrossing adventure that intertwines stories from Genesis, medieval philosophy, and the digital frontier, A Guide for the Perplexed is a novel of profound inner meaning and astonishing imagination."

A young woman's coming of age, a romantic love story, and a spiritual journey—each infused with the lessons of history.

In the Image is an extraordinary first novel illuminated by spiritual exploration, one that remembers "a language, a literature, a held hand, an entire world lived and breathed in the image of God."

Bill Landsmann, an elderly Jewish refugee in a New Jersey suburb with a passion for travel, is obsessed with building his slide collection of images from the Bible that he finds scattered throughout the world. The novel begins when he crosses paths with his granddaughter's friend, Leora, and continues by moving forward through her life and backward through his, revealing the unexpected links between his family's past and her family's future.

Not just a first novel but a cultural event—a wedding of secular and religious forms of literature—In the Image neither lives in the past nor seeks to escape it, but rather assimilates it, in the best sense of the word, honoring what is lost and finding, among the lost things, the treasures that can renew the present. Reading group guide included.

"A gripping story told with learning and passion. It does not just use Jewish sources, it breathes them, and breathes into them the breath of life."—Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Be Jewish?

"This is a lovely book that will give pleasure to many readers, and it signals the beginning of an interesting career."—Jay Parini, author of The Apprentice Lover

"[I]t may be the most ambitious and accomplished first novel I have ever read."—Melvin Jules Bukiet, author of Strange Fire

"I left the novel spellbound by the breadth of Horn's imagination and the generosity of her vision."—Andrew Furman, author of Contemporary Jewish American Writers and the Multicultural Dilemma

"A tender and touching story of vanished worlds and recovered lives."—Thane Rosenbaum, author of The Golems of Gotham

"[T]old with moral passion, vigor, humor, and an unflagging fascination with the coincidences, miseries, grotesqueries, and triumphs of life."—American Heritage, Richard Snow

"An enchanting, introspective and emotionally charged debut."—Publishers Weekly starred review

"A work of raw genius....With its enormous emotional range, its whirlwind of Hebrew legend, Yiddish folklore, modern tragedy, and tender romance, this is a book to press into other people's hands and pester them to finish so you can talk about it together."—Christian Science Monitor

"Stunning and absorbing....Mesmerizingly blends religious and family history with its protagonist's coming-of-age story."—San Francisco Chronicle

"Not merely a striking success as a whole but a technical tour de force."—Commentary, David Gelernter

"It is a novel that seems flooded with godly light."—Jay Parini, author of The Apprentice Lover

"A stunning example of how to thread the warp of Jewish history into the woof of contemporary American Jewish life."—Hadassah Magazine

"An ebullient and vibrant new voice."—Jewish Week

"Horn creates small worlds, beautifully detailed and textured, that ultimately fit together."—Jewish Woman Magazine

"Riveting—compulsive reading, authoritative from the first sentence. A fine book from a powerful new imagination."—PaknTreger Magazine

"[An] unsettling, otherworldly novel."—The Boston Globe

"Incredibly poignant ... with audacious appropriation of lines and themes from Jewish texts.... [Horn is] a writer with great self-confidence."—The Jerusalem Post

"Impressive...remarkable...All of the characters struggle for those gemlike qualities of passion, brilliance, clarity, fire."—The New Orleans Times-Picayune

Over the past four decades Ruth R. Wisse has been a leading scholar of Yiddish and Jewish literary studies in North America, and one of our most fearless public intellectuals on issues relating to Jewish society, culture, and politics. In this celebratory volume, edited by four of her former students, Wisse's colleagues take as a starting point her award-winning book "The Modern Jewish Canon" (2000) and explore an array of topics that touch on aspects of Yiddish, Hebrew, Israeli, American, European, and Holocaust literature. "Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon" brings together writers both seasoned and young, from both within and beyond the academy, to reflect the diversity of Wisse's areas of expertise and reading audiences. The volume also includes a translation of one of the first modern texts on the question of Jewish literature, penned in 1888 by Sholem Aleichem, as well as a comprehensive bibliography of Wisse's scholarship. In its richness and heft, "Arguing the Modern Jewish Canon" itself constitutes an important scholarly achievement in the field of modern Jewish literature.

Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When an Egyptian library invites her to visit as a consultant, her jealous sister Judith persuades her to go. But in Egypt s postrevolutionary chaos, Josie is abducted leaving Judith free to take over Josie s life at home, including her husband and daughter, while Josie s talent for preserving memories becomes a surprising test of her empathy and her only means of escape.

A century earlier, another traveler arrives in Egypt: Solomon Schechter, a Cambridge professor hunting for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue. Both he and Josie are haunted by the work of the medieval philosopher Moses Maimonides, a doctor and rationalist who sought to reconcile faith and science, destiny and free will. But what Schechter finds, as he tracks down the remnants of a thousand-year-old community s once-vibrant life, will reveal the power and perils of what Josie s ingenious work brings into being: a world where nothing is ever forgotten.

An engrossing adventure that intertwines stories from Genesis, medieval philosophy, and the digital frontier, A Guide for the Perplexed is a novel of profound inner meaning and astonishing imagination."