Today's American Jewish Writers and Readers: A Conversation with Naomi Firestone-Teeter and Lauren Wein
Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen
Credit: Kurt Hoffman
Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen is the host of the podcast The Five Books: Jewish Authors on the Books that Shaped Them.
Naomi Firestone-Teeter is the CEO of Jewish Book Council.
Lauren Wein is Editor-in-Chief of Avid Reader Press, an imprint of Simon and Schuster.
If the Jews are the people of the book, one might argue that American Jews are the people of the short story and the novel. In the early 20th century, Tillie Olsen, Mary Antin, Henry Roth and others wrote works of fiction that captured the promise and disappointment of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant experience. In the mid-twentieth century, writers including Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, and Philip Roth defined a new style of Jewish writing in works expressing ambivalence about both the obligations of Jewishness and the potential for American success. Roth’s at times scathing portrayals of American Jewish life earned him in particular both accolades and condemnations from American Jews who simultaneously saw themselves in his work and fretted about how it might impact the way non-Jewish Americans saw them.
Today, many describe those post-war years as the beginning of American Jewry’s Golden Age—and our moment (particularly since 10/7) as the end of that age. Given this shift, what do we find in today’s Jewish American literature, and what does it tell us about ourselves? Sources asked Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen of the podcast Five Books: Jewish Authors on the Books that Shape Them to explore this question with Jewish Book Council’s Naomi Firestone-Teeter and Avid Reader’s Lauren Wein. They are all three lovers of American Jewish literature, and they all also work in different ways to support American Jewish writers and readers. Their conversation highlights the uniqueness of this moment for writers and their work and also places them within a larger literary history. They talk about both writing and reading fiction as ways of bearing witness; of expressing anxiety; and of learning about other cultures.
You’ll find a list of the books they mention that you can bring to your local library or bookstore at the end of the piece.
Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen: You both sit in particular vantage points between writers and readers and between the literary world and Jewish life. American Jewish literature has long been a running conversation about all kinds of things: identity, belonging, assimilation, family, faith, God, what it means to live as a Jew in a particular historical moment. This moment feels particularly charged as we face questions around Jewish identity and public Jewishness; Zionism and its representation; the limits of the big tent. All of these things have become newly urgent and fraught. And at the same time, there's been extraordinary growth in the genre of Jewish books. I'm excited to think together with you about the kinds of questions American Jewish writers are asking. What are readers hungry for? What are the kinds of stories that are not being told? Let’s start with what feels most alive or urgent right now.
Naomi Firestone-Teeter: I'm hearing such variety from writers in terms of the stories that they want to write. They are most concerned about not finding their readers. Making sure they have the confidence they need to write the stories they need to write, whatever they might be—that feels to me most urgent right now. But for me just the fact that there is a burning desire to write makes this time incredibly exciting. Writers are not shutting themselves down and retreating to their corners. They do want to tell their stories. They do want to make sure that their ideas have a place in this world.
I remember writing to authors after October 7 to tell them that Jewish Book Council was creating a platform for Israeli writers. We heard back right away from many of them who were appreciative but then asked: How could they possibly write right then? They were in a shelter with their children, trying to make sense of chaos around them. But within 24 more hours, pieces started coming in. They realized that writing was actually exactly what they needed to do. They needed to make sure that they were creating testimony, making sure that the moment was documented and archived, and that there were readers across the world, in America and beyond, who were engaging with what Israelis were experiencing at that time. I see that sense of an urgency to write among Jewish writers outside Israel as well, an urgency to write and connect.
Lauren Wein: I remember a friend telling me that she was pregnant in October 2001. And I thought, my God, when you got pregnant, it was before 9-11. The whole world has changed. The world you're bringing your child into is different than the one you thought you were bringing him into. I had a similar experience around October 7 in that way.
Long before that day, I had all these books signed up that were very much about Jewish life, about different histories, different approaches, different lenses, all authors doing something new and different. After October 7, I found myself asking: Will this affect how we publish these books or how they are received? I went from asking how can we share all of our amazing stories with the world to asking are we Jews the only ones who are going to read these books?
But I do think there’s a cycle in Jewish culture and Jewish literature. There are times where we have to face in, and there are times that we can face out. We’ve turned inward in the last couple of years.
Tali: I'm thinking about Benjamin Resnick's book, Next Stop, which imagines a future in which Israel has been swallowed by a black hole. I think you had acquired it before October 7? Can you tell us a little bit about how October 7 changed that book?
Lauren Wein: I hadn’t yet acquired that book, but it had been submitted a week before 10/7. When I read the description when it first appeared in my inbox, I thought, I don't want to read a book about Israel disappearing and what happens to Jews around the world afterwards. It sounds so dark. And then on October 8th, I thought, this story that's happening right now, this terrible thing that's happening right now—I think it's in my inbox. Then I read the manuscript and it felt so eerie and uncanny that I felt compelled to publish it. It was a way that I could engage with what was happening in the world with literature. I always want to engage with what's happening in the world in a literary way, and it kind of helped me do that. But it’s a book that is hard to share outwardly. We’ve found that people outside of the Jewish community don't quite know what to make of it or what to do with it.
I also gave the book to a friend who said, “I'm so sorry, I had to put that book in my freezer. At some point I'll come back to it, but right now it feels radioactive.” That was a powerful reaction.
Tali: Books can pull out what's going on in the world and throw it back in a different way. But I also want to ask: Where do you find the continuity between our moment and the history of American Jewish literature?
Naomi: A lot of the books that have really touched me in the last year have been about memory, about intergenerational family life, about the frictions and evolutions of all the things that make up being—and being a Jew.
I’ve also been reading books exploring global Jewry, stories of immigration and migration, how Jewishness appears in different families at different points. People who keep coming back around to the same questions, keep going back to their Jewishness. They can't shake it; it's there. Even if the specifics that new books navigate are particular to this exact moment in time, this is what I was interested in before October 7.
Tali: I'm thinking of a class I took in college on American Jewish literature. We read Philip Roth and Saul Bellow and Henry Roth—the classics that people think of as American Jewish literature. But actually, they were from one particular time period. There were American Jewish writers before them, also writing American Jewish stories, and writers since then.
Lauren Wein: My daughter just read Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and I was explaining to her how controversial he was early in his career, and how his work was so problematic for Jewish readers. How could you portray us like this? How could you betray us? But I love that he just took it on. I love that Jewish instinct to look at something from all angles and not necessarily worry about how it is perceived. I think Taffy Brodesser-Akner's most recent novel, Long Island Compromise, follows in the lineage of Roth’s American Pastoral. I loved how it showed trauma and also culture through the generations. And it's funny! It helped me understand something new about myself and about Jewish literature and what it could do. The central drama of that novel is that the patriarch of a wealthy family is kidnapped and ransomed. Everybody tells him, okay, this happened to your body, but it didn't happen to you. Just get over it. But you realize that his kids are completely traumatized.
I realized that this is what inherited trauma is like. Even when you reject or deny the trauma, it keeps going. But the combination of humor and trauma in that book—that is so much a part of Jewish literature. The good and the bad, the life force and the death drive, all of it.
Naomi: One book like that, that has just really stuck with me over the years, is Rebecca Goldstein's Mind-Body Problem. Reconciling and wrestling with one’s many selves and where and how they show up. I also keep thinking about the “private versus public Jew,” being a Jew for myself versus a Jew in public—a Jew out there in the world. I've never felt that tension as sharply as I have in the last few years or wrestled with it as urgently. I’ve always thought about it, considered it intellectually, but now it feels like life or death in terms of my own Jewishness and what I'm going transmit to my daughter, who's three. I am much more aware of the decisions I will have to make. And every book I'm reading is reshaping how I consider this—what is my responsibility?
Tali: I’m also thinking about books where authors are going back to their grandparents, telling their grandparents’ stories, and finding their way into their grandparents' histories. I have in mind Jordan Salama’s Stranger in the Desert and Elizabeth Graver’s Kantika.
Naomi: Or Daniella Gerson’s The Wanderers.
Lauren: Going back to the stories of the Jewish past first felt new to me when I read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything is Illuminated. I've been thinking about Holocaust survivors my entire life, I’m third generation. But when I read that book, it felt like he was approaching this issue in a very fresh, new, literary way. That was the moment where I realized that yes, you can tell this story in a way that is really fresh and different and kind of risky. I know that was already 25 years ago.
Tali: Do writers feel more pressure now to depict Jewishness on the page in a certain way?
Lauren: There was always a layer of self-consciousness that I don’t think will ever go away; it wasn’t foregrounded quite as much five years ago as it is today. There was an assumption that Jewishness is a great thing to explore and confront. And now there's a higher level of self-consciousness leading writers to ask: What am I saying? Who am I saying this to? Who's going to be reading this? Who's listening?
Tali: In your role as an editor, how are you guiding writers? What's the advice you give them?
Lauren: I never tell a writer what to do or what not to do, and my advice is always: You need to write what you need to write. I will be realistic and explain that there are people who will go near a book and people who won't, just because they don't understand. But some writers do worry that what they’re writing might be problematic and try to steer clear of it.
Naomi: I have some writers who are like, let me have at it, I am empowered by this moment to say all the things I've always wanted to say. Maybe I censored myself before but now I feel a responsibility to tell this story. But I have others who are really guarded and self-conscious, wondering if maybe they should take out that character or change that setting or maybe even put that book to the side right now for a different book. But every author, even those who are feeling confident, worries about finding their readers. How are you going to ensure that your story has the platform it needs, regardless of how comfortable you feel writing Jewishness?
But the pipeline needs to continue. Jews are big readers, and Jewish books are a critical vehicle for engaging in whatever we’re struggling with.
That’s the work of Jewish Book Council, serving as a partner to help authors find their readers. It’s critical to me that there are mechanisms ensuring that conversations are happening around whatever ideas authors think are most compelling.
Tali: What do you think makes a book a Jewish book?
Naomi: People always ask me what makes a book Jewish. Does it have to have Jewish themes? Does it need a Jewish author? I used to think I would figure that out the longer I had been at Jewish Book Council. But now I’ve been at Jewish Book Council for 20 years, and I have still not figured it out. It’s about people who want to be in the Jewish community and talk about their Jewishness or talk about the Jewish themes of their book or speak to a Jewish audience. That defines the mosaic of what Jewish literature is.
Lauren Wein: I think of myself as similar to Michael Walzer’s idea of the “connected critic,” who he describes as someone “whose distance is measured in inches but who is highly critical nevertheless.” Sometimes I feel more connected to the Jewish world and sometimes I feel more critical of it, and the books that I am drawn to kind of vacillate between those things. They’re loving and embracing and celebrating all aspects of Jewish culture, and there’s also a lot to wrestle and struggle with and criticize. I think Jewish books do all of those things.
Tali: From your vantage point as a publisher, what makes a book a Jewish book? Does it have to do more with who the reader is going to be or what the book itself is?
Lauren Wein: The book One Hundred Saturdays by Michael Frank, with beautiful illustrations by Maira Kalman, is a good example. I remember reading the proposal during the heart of lockdown. I felt dead to the world; I couldn't read anything. But then I read this proposal and thought, hmm, this is a story I've never heard before. The Jews of Rhodes? This lady, this friendship? This is fascinating. I thought its readership would be Ashkenazi Jews and Sephardic Jews. And then when I launched it, all these people on my sales force, not Jewish at all, were like, I love this book, I can't wait to sell this book to all of our customers. I was so pleasantly surprised that the audience, from the beginning, was so far beyond what I had expected.
Tali: What do you think it was about that book?
Lauren Wein: It really brought to life a culture that people hadn't necessarily encountered before. It made people think about their own cultures and their own histories and the people in their own lives. It’s definitely a very Jewish book to me, but it's not only a Jewish book.
Naomi: There's something so optimistic about that book, despite it portraying the Holocaust in the Sephardic world. We're always craving books that can help us understand the history and the trauma of world events. But a book that does that, and also leaves you with a dose of inspiration and optimism, helps you put one foot ahead of the other again.
Lauren: I’m also thinking about the book, Sisters ofFortune, by Esther Chehabar. It resonated so much for me because a whole side of my family is Syrian Jews from Brooklyn. It brought that particular Jewish culture to life and gave me so much context for their world. I had been tangentially connected to it, but never quite understood it from the inside. Now, if you had never met a Syrian Jew in your life and had never been to Flatbush, I don't think it would resonate in the same way. But could you have access to it? It's hard for me to gauge how much of it is “inside baseball,” or to know how much of the humor lands, but it could be an introduction to a totally new culture for a reader like that.
Tali: Is there anything that can make a Jewish book inaccessible to a wider community?
Naomi: I don’t think it’s much about it being inaccessible. It's more that outside readers won’t understand the book completely. They won’t get the full experience. But maybe part of the experience is enough.
Tali: I feel that way when I'm reading books about other cultures, too—I so appreciate the encounters, but I'm sure someone else of that background would be reading it in a totally different way. But I want to go back to talking about the last two-and-a-half years since October 7. Naomi, you started us off speaking so beautifully about feeling a deep need to connect readers and writers. How has October 7 impacted your mission at Jewish Book Council and how you feel about getting books into readers' hands?
Naomi: There is a Jewish literary ecosystem that balances everything so that authors can write, publishers can publish, readers can discover new books, and communities can create conversations around them. And over the last hundred-ish years of Jewish Book Council’s existence, we have had to balance our efforts in these different parts of the ecosystem in different ways. Since October 7, we’ve had to expand and deepen our engagement within the industry itself. It has also lit a fire under us to expand our readership, educate them about how their support of authors impacts their ability to publish Jewish books, and create more portals into Jewish life using literature as a tool. For people who were already engaged with Jewish community and life, reading Jewish books is natural. But I have many people in my life who were really not engaged with Jewish community and life but are newly activated and interested. They are looking for a way in, and that way in is literature. It is giving them tools to navigate this moment and to think about their Jewish life beyond this moment. This is an opportunity for us to be more visible and direct with them about why our work matters.
Tali: Lauren, have you felt feel differently about publishing Jewish books in the last two-and-a-half years?
Lauren: I always see my mission as publishing books that I believe should cut through the noise. These are the terms that I use as I consider what I want to take on or what I'm looking for. I don't have to agree with every single thing in a book that I publish, but I do have to believe that it should be part of the conversation. The nature of the noise has changed in the last two-and-a-half years and so the things that cut through the noise have also changed.
Tali: As you think about identifying the noise of the moment, how do you think the demands that Jewish writers be either explicitly Zionist or anti-Zionist are affecting what's being written and what's being published?
Lauren: There has been a siloing effect in recent years so that a lot of the noise right now comes from people who are speaking in their own echo chambers. I always hoped that the books I was publishing could and would reach readers beyond the expected audience. I think there are voices that reach beyond politics and points of view. I think literature can humanize experience in a way that few mediums can. That has changed in recent years, because I think a lot of readers won’t pick up books by people who they perceive as being from a different camp. That goes for Zionist and anti-Zionist writers and for others, too. I guess I don't know if it's impacting what's being written, but I think there is a lack of respect and openness from one group to another that is really silencing and problematic.
Naomi: There is also a lot noise about this writer is this or that writer is that. I want to reject that. The majority of writers I'm talking to are just writing their books. There are complicated feelings about Israel, and proud feelings about Israel, just like there's pride in American Jewish life and criticism of American Jewish life and everything in between. I'm continuing to see writers wrestling with all of it all at once. Jews are not a monolith. Their books are not a monolith. There's no one Jewish book that tells the Jewish story.
Tali: What are the kinds of stories that you feel like are still missing or underexplored in American Jewish literature?
Lauren Wein: This is the kind of thing I don't know until I see it. I don't know what I'm missing.
Naomi: You know Lauren, I feel the same way. I think One Hundred Saturdays, which you mentioned before, is a great example of a book we absolutely needed but didn’t know we needed until you published it. Now, I can't stop recommending it to people and can't imagine a world in which that story doesn't exist. This is why I'm so grateful to writers for telling me what I need to know and continuing to expand my thinking about Jewish life and the world at large and humanity.
Lauren: I have my dark days, but for the most part, I think everything is cyclical. That’s one thing we know as Jews—we have our hard times and our very devastatingly dark times, and then we have our bright times. That’s just how it is. And there are hard times now, but we also have a lot of opportunities and there's a lot we can try to do to make it better. We just need to do our part.
Tali: To end, picking up on some of the things that we've been talking about, how would you articulate the value of Jewish books, both for a Jewish reader and for the world of literature?
Naomi: Storytelling is an inherent part of our tradition along with Jewish text and commentary and Jewish ideas. We're playing the long game here as Jews. Jewish texts put us in conversation with the past—our ancestors and beyond. It helps us understand that we are all part of the same (ongoing) story. I think that's just so powerful. I turn to the books to make sense of it all. Even in the darkest point of the cycle, we stay in conversation.
Lauren: At the risk of sounding grandiose, I always think about how the Jews receive the Torah in the story that the Torah itself is telling. It's very postmodern—someone hands you a book, and the book is about you being handed that same book! And now today, we continue to live the story and tell the story at the same time.
Tali: I think writers can bring people together. They create conversations not only on the page, but within the reader, through the experience of meeting characters, cultures, and perspectives they might never otherwise encounter. Bringing books to readers, and bringing those conversations into the world, feels especially meaningful right now. Thank you both for sharing your perspectives with me today.
Reading List
Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Long Island Compromise (2024)
Esther Chehabar, Sisters ofFortune (2025)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (2002)
Michael Frank with illustrations by Maira Kalman, One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World (2022)
Daniella Gerson, The Wanderers (2026)
Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (1983)
Elizabeth Graver, Kantika (2023)
Benjamin Resnick, Next Stop (2024)
Philip Roth, American Pastoral (1997)
Jordan Salama, Stranger in the Desert (2024)
