The most recommended books on Judaism

Sarah Birnbach’s beautiful memoir, A Daughter’s Kaddish, is an inspiring story of deep love and respect—of a daughter for her father. 

I’m Christian and opened this book with a basic understanding of Judaism. As the story unfolded, I learned the meaning behind unfamiliar Jewish traditions, like the Kaddish. Birnbach writes of her challenging journey to push the boundaries of her own grief and gender biases to tirelessly honor her father and their faith. She writes from the heart with honesty and warmth, her prose is lyrical, and her descriptions imaginative.

As someone who lost her father prematurely, I’ve always wondered if my dad is looking down at me, nodding, grimacing, smiling, laughing, scowling, cheering. If such is the case with Sarah’s father, he’s beaming with pride. If you’ve loved and lost someone, A Daughter’s Kaddish will warm your heart and uplift your soul with cherished memories.

This eloquent autobiography was written in the mid-1930s while the author was jailed by the British. It offers a detailed and convincing account of the experience of India’s people under the regime of British imperialism, and is relevant to other countries under foreign occupation, but also to US society because of its emphasis on religious conflict.

What I love about this book is that it proves the old saying that there is nothing new under the sun to be wrong. Mark Horn’s Tarot and the Gates of Light blends together two traditions already closely linked; Tarot and Kabbalah. While it is Hermetic Qabalah that is mostly applied to Tarot, Mark Horn introduces a unique way to use the Tarot to practice Counting the Omer. This will be the most unique tarot book to have on the shelf as it offers you a rare transformative practice. 

Rabbi Dayle Friedman’s wisdom about aging can be appreciated by people of all religions and no religion. Her honest engagement with some of the most difficult issues aging persons face leaves readers with hope rather than despair. Her many years as a chaplain for people living in long-term care with dementia undergird her suggestions on how to make sense of what she calls “dementia’s brokenness”. She concludes each chapter with a spiritual practice readers can employ to engage more deeply with the chapter’s topics, and also at the end of each chapter, she offers readers a blessing for their own efforts to flourish as they age.  

This is a book about the Jewish movement called “Musar” – devoted to turning well-meaning but clumsy humans into upright, caring adults with a positive impact on all who know them.

Morinis is particularly good at helping the reader determine where in his/her personality the most attention is needed. And Morinis’s consideration of “the inner adversary” – the impulse that tempts us to mitigate our goodness every time we think of expressing it – is masterful.

The next time you decide to do a good deed – and then suddenly find reasons not to do it – you’ll remember Morinis and Musar. And you might do the good deed after all. 

Too often “Black-Jewish relations” focuses on Jewish engagement in the Black civil rights struggle, a largely one-sided political narrative. This book broadens that horizon in two ways. First, it focuses on the Black experience and encounter with the other, rather than the Jewish one. Second, it explores the religious dimension that political discussions often ignore – that the Black experience with Jews and Judaism is as much rooted in religion as in politics.

Daniel Schroeter’s The Sultan’s Jew focuses on the colorful life of Me'ir Macnin (d. 1835), an ambassador-at-large for two successive Moroccan sultans. Schroeter uses Macnin’s life to discuss three main topics: the relationship between Jews and Muslims in Morocco; the relationship between Moroccan Jews and the Sephardic world beyond; and Morocco’s relationship with Europe. Macnin’s ambassadorial stint in London, which eventually saw him become the president of the city’s main synagogue, also allows Schroeter to talk about the complexities of Jewish life in Britain and of Sephardic/Ashkenazic rivalries. The power of Schroeter’s work is in presenting a sophisticated political and socio-economic study through the lens of a gripping biography.

In the current search for spirituality, many people inside and outside of the Jewish community are looking for the Jewish path to spirituality.

This is a powerful introduction to the various practices in Judaism that offer such a spiritual path for the seeker. The book contains a vehicle to enhancing one’s connection to the Divine or finding it for the first time. I found it helpful on a personal level. 

“In an earlier life,” Miller writes, “I was a baker, in a bakery on a cobblestoned street.” It takes Miller just one single paragraph to tell this whole tale—how she proofed yeast, how she scraped her spoon, how she made loaves for children: “It was my only kindness.” In every successive chapter—most all of them short, many of them formally inventive—Miller deconstructs her life and soul—the roots of her unease, the startling incidents of loss, her learning to sleep, and her learning to live with the person she becomes. Miller is a stellar choreographer, knowing just where to place which expertly fashioned scene and knowing, always, what to leave out.

I’ve read every major history of the Jewish people, but Goodman’s A History of Judaism proved to be one of the best. I found it revelatory. The way Goodman uses the evolution of Jewish religious thought and practice as a vehicle to tell the story of a people deepened my understanding of both Jewish experience and thought.

I found it powerfully dramatic and deeply enriching. After listening, I read the book. Then I listened again. Each time, it gave me more. In this way, the history book was as generous as a work of art.