My most Jewish book

How a YA novel shaped my spiritual journey

My synagogue recently hosted a talk by Rabbi Adam Chalom about how to define a Jewish book, exploring a wide variety of frameworks. Some were discarded as too broad—for example, defining any book by a Jewish author as a Jewish book reduces people to a certain aspect of their identity in a way that borders on antisemitism. Considering any book about Judaism and/or Jewish people to be a Jewish book brings hate speech into the canon.

But narrow definitions have their own problems. If we require a Jewish book to be written in a Jewish language like Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino, or Judeo-Arabic, that leaves out whole swaths of Jews who write in English, French, Spanish, and so on. Only considering the Torah and the Talmud to be Jewish books means that we miss out on profound works of philosophy and literature.

Ultimately, the definition that Rabbi Chalom settled on was defining a Jewish book as a book that you respond to Jewishly, which could include the biblical Book of Exodus, a compilation of Ashkenazi recipes, or Elie Wiesel's Holocaust memoir Night. Furthermore, a book can be "Jewish and," fitting into multiple categories simultaneously—for instance, Jewish and French literature, a Jewish and LGBTQ novel, an Indian Jewish cookbook.

There are plenty of books I've responded to Jewishly in the past few years: the Book of Ruth, which inspired my Hebrew name; Adam Mansbach's The Golem of Brooklyn, a funny and fantastical road trip tale; and On Repentance and Repair, in which Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg applies a 12th century Jewish framework of repentance to modern Western culture. But my most Jewish book, the book that has stuck with me the longest and has changed me the most, is a book that I read long before I was actually Jewish or in the process of converting. It's the YA historical novel Dreams in the Golden Country: The Diary of Zipporah Feldman, which was published as part of Scholastic's Dear America series.

If you were a U.S. adolescent girl in the late 1990s and early 2000s, you probably came across the Dear America series in book orders, at book fairs, and at your school library. The series was published from 1996-2004 (it was eventually relaunched in 2010), and each novel was written in the form of a diary by a girl who lived through a specific event or historical time period. The original books were hardcover, with a ribbon bookmark sewn into the cover, and there was a cover portrait taken from a period-appropriate painting or photograph.

As an avid reader and budding history buff, I absolutely loved the Dear America books. Based on this Wikipedia list, it looks I read (and often owned and re-read) the first 16 books in the series, from the A Journey to the New World: The Diary of Remember Patience Whipple, Mayflower, 1620 through The Girl Who Chased Away Sorrow: The Diary of Sarah Nita, a Navajo Girl, New Mexico, 1864.

My favorite, the one I read again and again and again, was Dreams in the Golden Country. The story is told from the perspective of Zipporah Feldman, a Russian-Jewish immigrant to New York City's Lower East Side in the early 1900s. I loved the feisty and determined characters—Zipporah learns English and dreams of becoming an actress, her sister Tovah joins the labor and women's rights movements, and her sister Miriam marries an Irish Catholic against her family's wishes. But what resonated with me the most were the descriptions of Jewish cultural and religious life, which I still remember over 25 years later—Zipporah and her sisters building a sukkah on the fire escape; the family going to the synagogue and hearing the shofar; and descriptions of Shabbat dinner. It was completely foreign to me as a kid growing up Catholic in Minnesota in the 1990s and yet it was also deeply comforting. Through the lens of YA historical fiction, Judaism was touching something within me, even though I didn't recognize that at the time.

I kept seeking out Jewish books throughout my adolescence. I read several novels by the late Chaim Potok, a Conservative rabbi whose fiction writing explored Jewish religious practice and identity. I read non-fiction books about the role of Jewish labor activists the 1909 New York shirtwaist strike. I remember checking out the script of Fiddler on the Roof from my high school library (why on earth did my school have that available as a hardcover book?) and eventually saw the film and stage versions.

It wasn't just books—when I was learning how to bake bread, one of the first recipes I made was challah from my Betty Crocker cookbook. I remember my first Jewish deli meal at Minneapolis' Rye Delicatessen (now closed) in the early 2010s, and my trips to New York in 2015 and 2018 included bagels, babka, and trips to Russ & Daughters. Randomly, I spent a lot of time on the internet researching Jewish holidays and the ins and outs of keeping kosher.

I was very obviously interested in Judaism as a religion and culture, so why did it take me until my mid-30s to actually start the process of converting? Mostly due to misinformation—in my mid-20s someone who seemed like they knew what they were talking about told me you couldn't convert to Judaism. This is a popular misconception among both non-Jews and Jews. In reality, people have been converting to Judaism for as long as Judaism has existed, and one in six American Jews is a convert.

Eventually (and very fortunately) I discovered that it was, in fact, possible to convert to Judaism. Interviewing a baker about how her Jewish values informed her social justice work inspired me to finally engage with the religious aspect of Judaism by attending a "Intro to Judaism" Zoom session and Passover seder at a local synagogue.

I think that religious converts often feel like we need to have a compelling, cohesive story about what drew us to a particular faith—perhaps, to use a Christian reference, something in the vein of Paul's conversion on the Road to Damascus, or maybe something related to an intense personal experience of trauma, grief, or self-discovery.

But I believe that for many of us, conversion is more of a slow burn. While not as narratively exciting, a slow burn conversion is perfectly valid. (And, I suspect, much more common than dramatic strikes of inspiration—especially with a non-proselytizing religion like Judaism in the Christian-dominated United States.) Conversion stories that unfold over decades—and that start with watching Fiddler on the Roof, Googling "Passover seder," or reading a YA novel about early 1900s Jewish life on the Lower East Side—are worth celebrating.

If Zipporah Feldman's diary taught me anything, it's that those sorts of everyday stories matter most all.