In addition to a small mountain of jewelry, many of the gifts I received were books. They were the kind of books you give a bat mitzvah girl regardless of whether she loves to read: hefty ones about big subjects, books of history and tradition conveying weighty life lessons. They were about Israel and Strong Jewish Women, mostly. Had it been published in time for my bat mitzvah instead of just this month, Today I Am a Woman: Stories of Bat Mitzvah Around the World would probably have been among them.

Edited by Barbara Vinick and Shulamit Reinharz of the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute, the book would have been given to me to communicate the richness of Jewish tradition, and to make the point that my bat mitzvah was not an isolated experience. I would have already understood those truths; understood, too, that this was an occasion to underline them. Actually reading such a book would have been almost redundant. I might have leafed through it, but otherwise I would have resigned it to the high-up shelf in my bedroom where I put the rest of the well-meaning, impressive-looking books I was given. They were daunting, grown-up volumes, books that signaled a certain kind of responsibility. I knew even then that I might never actually sit down to read them, but that I’d never really be able to get rid of them either.

I vividly pictured all this as I read Today I Am a Woman. Even with no official coming of age bearing down, I figured my reaction to it would hew pretty close to the one I projected on my teenage self. Maybe it had something to do with the absence of the kind of existential pressure that comes along with a bat mitzvah, but reading it curled up on my couch on a cozy fall afternoon earlier this month, I found the book to be a genuinely moving read beneath its academic gloss. Organized by region, each country introduced with a brief description of its Jewish community, the volume includes a story or two from girls who had their bat mitzvahs in those places (or in some cases, the parents of those girls). The editors aimed for variety, gathering anecdotes from Kazakhstan to Colombia, India to New Zealand, Canada to Libya. Some of them are straightforward accounts of a familiar kind of service, while other contributors explain that they didn’t have a formal ceremony or ritual at the usual age but figured out how to lay claim to their Jewish identity in their own way. For Gina Malaka Waldman, born in Tripoli in 1948, leaving her country of origin was the most profound rite of passage. When she arrived in Switzerland to pursue her education, it was “the first time in my life I could say I was Jewish and not be afraid,” she writes. “It was at that moment that I became a bat mitzvah. I had come of age by making a commitment to my people.”

The first bat mitzvah in the United States dates to 1922, when Judith Kaplan (daughter of Mordecai Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement) read from the chumash during a Shabbat morning service. Pinning down the very earliest bat mitzvah in the world is trickier; in her introduction, Barbara Vinick cites the writings of “nineteenth-century sage” Joseph Hayyim ben Elijah al-Hakam of Baghdad, which contain “the first indisputable mention of girls’ public coming-of-age.” But tracking the earliest roots of the ritual is kind of beside the point, as it took many (many!) years for bat mitzvahs to be seen as having any kind of equivalence to bar mitzvahs—and some communities still resist allowing girls to engage in the same level of preparation and participation as boys. A bar mitzvah, by contrast, has changed relatively little over its long history.

Today I Am a Woman is light on stories from kids who had the kind of over-the-top parties that make rabbis shudder. Instead, the accounts in these pages tend to come from families that care deeply about marking their daughters’ coming of age and who often had to think creatively about what that would involve—whether because they were part of communities without a clear tradition or a rabbi on hand, or ones in which women are forbidden from reading Torah. Some took part in group bat mitzvahs that felt a little minor-league compared to the rituals their brothers participated in and were bothered by the difference. Still others found meaning in their ceremonies anyway.

While there’s certainly plenty of immediate significance for a girl to find in this ritual in which she “becomes a woman,” there’s a reason a bat mitzvah is something one becomes—the verb suggesting a process rather than a singular occasion. In the moment, high-minded ideals about responsibility and adulthood and Jewish identity may be mere buzz words, eclipsed by more urgent matters like nervousness and excitement and lipstick (carefully applied to a girl’s own lips on this grown-up occasion, and also smudged on her cheeks from the kisses of doting aunties). That’s not to say the meaning is lost—no matter the extravagance of the party, months of study and preparation make a bat mitzvah’s gravity hard to deflect. But the meaning can take time to soak in. And inevitably—necessarily—it changes and grows along with the girl-turned-woman herself.

So, it’s not surprising that most of these stories come from women who are some distance from the occasion of their own bat mitzvah. There are many poignant reflections from parents. Monica Pastorok Cohen of Lexington, Mass., writes: “As [my daughter] Jocelyn began preparing for her bat mitzvah, I realized that it was the first time that she was doing something that I had not done, and with which I could not help her.” And there are plenty of stories in which a bat mitzvah takes on historical weight: Giorgina Vitale, who became a bat mitzvah in Turin, Italy, in 1937, describes bringing along her bat mitzvah album when her family went into hiding from the Nazis not long after.

Many of the bat mitzvah girls here explain that their ceremonies were meaningful largely because of what they made of them, rather than because of any predetermined part of the ritual. Because the specifics of a bat mitzvah are not constrained, what began as frustrating limitations (and in some places remain so) have become opportunities for girls and their families to craft rituals that have personal and spiritual resonance regardless of what those rituals are “supposed” to include. These can range from outfitting groups of bat mitzvah girls in identical dresses to involving them in social-action projects. In the process, those girls begin to understand that “coming of age” is not just about accepting tradition as it’s handed to them but about creating their own meaning. That’s an insight that can benefit boys, too, and in some communities already has.

At least, that’s the hopeful take-away from the wide-ranging set of experiences in this collection. A girl is an impossibly young 12 or 13 years old when she becomes a bat mitzvah. She has the rest of her life to reckon with what it means, to mull over her experience in relation to the generations of women before her, and to craft the story she wants to tell about it—whether she shares that story publicly (perhaps in a serious book destined to be a bat mitzvah gift) or just whispers it to herself.

It’s unnerving, on a gut level, the juxtaposition of these accounts of survival (and, inevitably, also some stories of not surviving) with recipes for comfort food. Recipes Remembered includes traditional preparations of foods like kreplach, noodle kugel, and gefilte fish; dishes that were family favorites (Romanian survivor Gita Rothman contributed a sour cream strudel with loukoum filling), and recipes from lost homelands. Some of the foods featured became unforgettable because the people consuming them were starving; others didn’t become staples until long after the war.

From Hersh’s description of Polish survivor Regina Schmidt Finer’s recipe for kluskies, or potato dumplings, as “the little black dress of potato dishes” to former New York City Mayor Ed Koch’s blurb extolling, “All the recipes in this book are wonderful!” Recipes Remembered is characterized by a kind of generic uplift, familiar from other earnest attempts to balance the horrors of history with survivors’ astonishing fortitude and to translate that into hope for the future.

Hersh’s book is not the first to explicitly tie recipes to Holocaust remembrance. In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin, edited by Cara de Silva, came out in 1996, and Holocaust Survivor Cookbook: Collected From Around the World, which Joanne Caras self-published, came in 2007. Both books turn to recipes as authentic artifacts from the same painful chapter, and they champion them as a means of remembrance and testaments to survival. De Silva contributed her own laudatory blurb to Recipes Remembered, while Caras has argued for the superior authenticity of her own book, which she describes as “a world mitzvah project.” (Like with Hersh’s Recipes Remembered the proceeds from Caras’ book went to Jewish charities.)

Hersh’s version certainly has the greatest reach, and its popularity is a sign that, amid no shortage of carefully packaged ways to Never Forget, people are hungry for something that offers tangible insight into the experience of Holocaust survival and fresh ways to consider their own relationship to it. And in some ways Recipes Remembered is a fitting tribute, making the point that memories live on through the senses and imbuing the storied experience of Holocaust survival with relatable specifics: Meeting a future spouse in a displaced persons camp. Being sheltered and ultimately saved by a kind priest. Poppyseed cookies. As Hersh explains in the introduction, putting together the book was a process of discovery. “They became ‘my’ survivors,” she writes, noting that she spoke to every contributor, creating “my connection to the past and my reason to optimistically embrace the future.” She explains that her project was driven by curiosity and a general desire to pay tribute to the survivor community, rather than a specific personal connection to the Holocaust.

There’s no question that there’s awkwardness to a book that celebrates food against the backdrop of a historical trauma in which millions of people were starving. But as I paged through it, I found the specific source of my discomfort harder to pin down. It’s certainly not that I’m worried about ruined appetites. Some of the meals we remember most vividly may not have been remarkable in and of themselves; it’s the experience of them that resonates and turns even basic flavors into the kernels of indelible memories. If anything, struggle sharpens one’s senses, and hardship, or even just stories about it, can actually make certain foods more palatable, deepening our experience of eating. Here, though, it’s hard to pay attention to the recipes in light of the heartbreaking stories being presented with them. In this complicated cookbook, is the food supposed to be beside the point?

Here’s Hersh, introducing a story of survival from Hanna Kleiner Wechsler, a preface to her recipe for strawberry-filled blintzes:

Those willing to share their stories have an amazing spirit, an outlook on life that inspires and a perspective we can all benefit from. Hanna began our conversation by saying, “If you overcome this, you can do anything. There are seven wonders in the world, I consider my survival the eighth.” After speaking with her, and getting to know her well, I would have to agree!

It’s also a little strange to find that the survivors’ stories, as Hersh imparts them, feel like recipes themselves. They follow a formula, each starting by taking stock of where a person has come from, moving on to account for his or her losses, and then concluding with a tally of how many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren have resulted from that one survival. “From this sorrow that I went through,” says Polish survivor Sonya Oshman, leading into a recipe for spaghetti with onion and tomato sauce, “God compensated me with two wonderful children and four beautiful grandchildren.” It’s clear from these standard finishes that Hersh asked for that tally, which is poignant by definition, but frustrating in its blanket use as a happy ending to a rather grim equation. The aura of optimism here is genuine, and arguably necessary to make the pairing of stories and recipes at all palatable. But as an editorial voice, the life-affirming tone makes the book feel a little canned—and evasive.

Despite the book’s cheerfulness, it’s clear that the pleasure of its recipes is meant to be derived largely from their difficulty—not the level of skill required to prepare them, but the fraught histories that cling to them. As delicious as these dishes may be, they’re meant to be appreciated because of what the people who prepared them lived through. That readers will synthesize these threads of cooking and remembering is the not-so-subtle hope behind all the warm sentiment.

It’s hard to imagine an uplifting cookbook coming out of other historical traumas, ones perhaps less well digested by the culture at large. I suspect that a “Holocaust cookbook” (as I perhaps inevitably began to refer to Recipes Remembered) is only permissible after enough years have passed and we’ve moved through more straightforward kinds of reckoning and commemoration. But while the format of this act of remembrance is novel, its tone is not. The book’s earnestness makes me want to roll my eyes, not because I think we’re past the point of needing a push to remember the Holocaust but because we still need one badly, and Recipes Remembered seems to promise a kind of complexity that it doesn’t deliver.

Regardless of how carefully we outline the narratives for others, we don’t have full control over the stories and facts that stick to our treasured dishes, or the recollections that surface as we prepare and share and savor them. Though all of us survive in some way because of food, the stories that live on do so because we choose to keep telling them. And unlike the care and precision required to bake a perfect honey cake, those stories tend to hit harder when they don’t follow a recipe.

CORRECTION, October 18: In Memory’s Kitchen: A Legacy From the Women of Terezin was published in 1996, not 2006. This error has been corrected.

Steinem’s life has been full of glamour and intrigue and controversy and historical weight. Here, though, she’s reduced to a generic person of interest, someone whose life has yielded anecdotes featuring other notable figures, including Richard Nixon, George Burns, and Helen Gurley Brown, bits of quotable wisdom, and lots of photographic evidence of her presence at important events while wearing era-appropriate outfits. The film covers Steinem’s famous undercover Playboy Bunny piece, her ambivalent relationship with her mother, her feminist “click” when she realized that the abortion she had at 22 was more than just a personal experience, her fierce independence, her breast cancer, and her tap-dancing skills.

Despite this encyclopedic approach, Gloria never alludes to the fairly well-known fact that Steinem—like many other prominent second-wave feminists, including Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, and Andrea Dworkin—is Jewish. The concentration of Jewish women in the movement has been variously attributed to Jewish women’s tendency to embrace progressive causes, our inherent love of arguing, and our relative comfort with being seen as outsiders. As Steinem herself told the Jewish Standard last year, “I think the emphasis on social justice … has probably created a situation where Jewish women may be disproportionately represented in the women’s movement.”

Liberal Judaism and feminism have always seemed obviously wedded to me: Both emphasize asking questions and taking responsibility for the state of the world. In different ways, they both involve having faith. And if you want to be reductive about it, sure, Jews and feminists are stereotypically loud and opinionated. In my experience, they’re identities that complement more than complicate each other. I’d call them inextricable, except that while I can’t imagine being Jewish without being a feminist—or being compelled by a form of Judaism that wasn’t feminist-flavored—it’s less of a stretch to think of things the other way around.

Maybe this is because feminism is the broader of these two worldviews. It’s more flexible, with fewer rules. It’s also an identity that people choose rather than inherit (though there’s undoubtedly a hereditary element—my copy of Steinem’s book Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions was handed down from my bubbe, who along with her sister was involved in a Jewish feminist study group they irreverently called the “Minyan of Crones”).

Though Gloria is not particularly nuanced—nor concerned at all with Judaism—there’s a moment in the documentary that suggests a more subtle parallel between Judaism and feminism is possible. It comes not from Steinem but in her quoting of a non-Jewish icon of an even earlier feminist wave, Susan B. Anthony. Anthony, Steinem paraphrases, “said our job is not to make young women grateful; it’s to make them ungrateful, so they keep going.” It’s a line that distills something essential about feminism and Judaism: their shared commitment to remembering their history, as well as a dedication to moving beyond it.

Anthony was calling for young women to continue the work of their mothers, to push on to accomplish what the older women couldn’t. But the line also points to the fact that feminists’ goal all along has been for their daughters’ lives to look different—less burdened—than they’d had to fight to achieve. Speaking “in her own words,” Steinem is happy to talk about the past, but she looks determinedly to the future. She insists on the importance of trusting younger generations, of passing down knowledge and experience but not resenting your children for not making your experiences the center of their own.

Jews and feminists alike care about remembering because they know there is danger in forgetting. If we don’t take careful stock of why things are different today and how we got here, we risk returning to a past that we worked so hard to get beyond. And yet to never forget, to be constantly remembering and re-remembering, can be a kind of paralysis.

This is not at all the point of Gloria, even though it’s probably one of feminism’s prevailing themes, and it’s admittedly something of a stretch to zero in on it amid what is otherwise a general, well-meaning overview of Steinem’s life and legacy. But without some extrapolating, the film risks putting you to sleep. This is partly due to the filmmaker’s apparent uncertainty about who he thinks will be watching: On one hand, Kunhardt seems to presume a certain familiarity with the basic facts of feminist history, because they are glossed over. At the same time, the film never really moves beyond those basics, failing to capture the urgency of second-wave feminism and the spirit of the women, including Steinem, who helped lead it. It’s a soothing, feel-good portrait that is likely to be celebrated by the same people who celebrate Steinem off screen—who know she’s got more dimensions than she’s allowed to show in this film but will be gratified to see her getting her due.

Given the complexity of all that Steinem represents, that means Gloria is a missed opportunity. But there’s also something honest about it. Steinem is 77 years old, and her legacy is coalescing. Though she’s still vocal and visible and shows no sign of slowing down, the history in which she played such an important role is receding, and this documentary is part of an understandable—and worthwhile—attempt to solidify her significance.

But significance and boilerplate are easily confused. Steinem continues to be relevant despite efforts to pin her down and praise her, to write her eulogy and feminism’s along with it. In recent years, she’s shown a determination to be part of feminist debate without defining it, to let her ideas evolve, and to acknowledge the relevance of feminism beyond her own generation in ways that many of her peers have been unwilling to. In 2004, she cheered the overwhelming turnout by young women at the March for Women’s Lives in Washington, and, to its credit, the film does include a clip of this. During the 2008 presidential election, she weighed in on the blazing debate over whether a white woman or a black man was more “electable.” She contributed an essay to an anthology of women’s writings about getting their first period. Just last week, she called for a boycott of the upcoming NBC drama The Playboy Club—frustrated by the way it romanticizes a job she knows firsthand was anything but glamorous—and published an op-ed about the militarization of Jeju Island, South Korea.

I wish that this standard-issue film about the life of one of our great heroines had been better, juicier, truer to the spirit of the movement she helped lead—and to which she continues to be a model of ingenuity, grace, and perhaps most important, a much-needed provider of perspective. I wish it could have been a rallying cry, something more than a validating if disappointing hour of programming for people who already know how important she is. Luckily, Gloria will not be the last word on Gloria Steinem.

The award-winning and widely exhibited feminist artist Elisabeth Subrin is Jewish, as is Shulamith Firestone, the focus of Subrin’s 1997 film Shulie, on view at the Jewish Museum through the end of this month. (Full disclosure: Subrin is also the sister of Tablet Magazine’s Julie Subrin.) And though Firestone’s specific Jewish credentials are nothing to sniff at, it turns out that in this most Jewish of museum settings, Jewish identity is not the most Jewish thing about the film.

Subrin’s Shulie is a shot-by-shot, identically titled remake of a little-seen documentary made in 1967. That year, a group of four male film students shot a 37-minute, 16mm film about Firestone, one of a few they produced about the lives of the so-called “Now Generation.” At the time, Firestone was a 22-year-old art student in Chicago, not yet the influential feminist activist and thinker she would soon become. After moving to New York not long after the film was shot, she co-founded more than one radical organization and wrote the second-wave classic The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, published when she was only 25.

Shot on grainy film stock, Subrin’s Shulie is defiantly true to the original. It feels like a period film, but our expectations of what that means are occasionally disrupted by a sly and subtly jarring marker of more contemporary times (a Starbucks cup, a Jansport logo, a flier warning against sexual harassment). A bewigged actress (Kim Soss) embodies Firestone with an uncanny sense of timelessness. We watch as this Shulie waits for a train, sorts mail in the Post Office where she works, paints a young man’s portrait, undergoes a grueling critique of her artwork—and confronts the camera directly, musing over an unseen interviewer’s questions about her daily life, her ambitions, and her impressions of the world.

The original Shulie was less interested in plumbing the depths of Firestone’s burgeoning politics—the word feminism is never mentioned—than in creating a portrait of her as someone symbolic of her generation. We can see the thoughts and tendencies that informed the ideas she would shortly champion: “I just generally identify with minority groups,” she says, claiming to relate to them more than “the homogenous masses.” She worries about what it would mean to live out what she calls a “meaningless life.” As she tells her interviewer, “I care about the now. … It’s just that it’s not enough for me to live in the now. I hate every day that I haven’t made some kind of landmark because it just goes by so fast. … I hate the shapelessness of it.” When the interviewer urges her to connect this to her generation, Firestone explains that the larger point is, “To live in the now. Don’t worry about today. Don’t worry about yesterday.”

Firestone’s words echo differently when spoken by the real person in 1967, and by the actress playing her 30 years later. As depicted in the original film, Firestone was of course unaware of the changes heading her way (as well as her own role in them), and she articulates her ideal of “living in the now” with an innocence that feels sweet and a little sad from our vantage point. However precisely Kim Soss mimics Firestone, her interpretation is naturally informed by her understanding of a history that Firestone couldn’t have known, because it was still ahead of her. Today, after this repetition has had another dozen or so years to marinate, Firestone’s sentiments have gained another few layers of complexity.

Subrin’s film asks us to reflect on why we preserve the things we do, why we’re inclined toward some slices of history and dismissive of others. The differences between the memories we personally have, what we’re obliged to remember, and the actual time we live in are easily confused, and it’s not always clear what actually counts as “the past.” For Jews, the past is a constant argument, frustratingly elusive even as we feel a sense of responsibility to know it well and remember it right. In a tradition that has made remembering something of an art, playing with memory has a more than a little gravity. That’s the trick of literally, physically putting a work like Shulie in a Jewish context: It helps tease out resonances that might otherwise stay latent, even as there’s the danger of encouraging viewers to make more of them than actually adds up.

Much of Subrin’s work has focused on repetition and recreation (her recent retrospective at the Sue Scott Gallery was titled, fittingly, “Her Compulsion to Repeat”). Shulie was an irresistible subject for her—a sort of time capsule that depicted a notable figure before she became notable, in a moment on a historical precipice. Subrin was just 2 years old when the original film was shot, and upon discovering it years later (she recalls in a 2006 essay on the work called “Trashing Shulie”), “I yearned to inhabit her reality, to feel this moment of pre-1968, before the haunting political and social revelations of her era, to say nothing of my own.” She’s far from the only artist to root her work in this kind of reproduction. But in the Jewish Museum, it’s an artistic strategy that resonates—conveniently, though not artificially—as intensely Jewish, as well as indelibly feminist.

“The year 1967 can only exist as myth to me,” Subrin writes in “Trashing Shulie.” Her version of Shulie shows how difficult it can be to distinguish that myth from the real thing, and how easy it is to confuse or conflate them. As both 1967 and 1997 recede further, the difference between those years—and the almost visually indistinguishable if conceptually distinct films made in them—will only get trickier to tease out. Both films will become synonymous with the blurry “past,” and their specific differences will start to matter less than the simple fact that they’re behind us.

The film itself is dedicated “To Shulamith Firestone, who has endured.” It’s true that her radical feminist philosophy has remained prescient even as it’s inevitably gotten somewhat dated. Firestone’s political activism more or less ended with the publication of The Dialectic of Sex, after which she withdrew into painting and later, mental illness (the latter is recounted in her 1998 memoir Airless Spaces; today she lives in New York and was mostly uncooperative with the 2003 reissue of her first book). She endures through her own work as well as through the ways others have built on it, likely not always in ways she agrees with. And so endurance seems less like a matter of heroism than a fact of life, of what happens as the years march on and we persist in trying to make sense of memories and experiences that are both our own and not. Over 37 minutes at the Jewish Museum, that starts to feel a lot like a Jewish virtue.

“Shulie: Films and Stills by Elisabeth Subrin” is on view at the Jewish Museum through January 30th.

I’m not exactly sure how this happened. I’ve been a book nerd all my life, having grown up in a household full of crowded shelves, where the most appropriate Shabbat afternoon ritual was a trip to the library. My grandparents’ homes were full of books by the Major Jewish Writers—Bellow, Malamud, Singer, Roth—but my parents (though they both work in the Jewish world) were less interested in them.

As I got older and started writing about books professionally, Roth’s supremacy was unavoidable: He was always collecting awards, making everyone’s top-10 lists, serving as a reference point for critics talking about sex in literature, Jewish identity, misogyny, and New Jersey—all things I ostensibly cared about. His face regularly peered out from articles in newspapers and magazines, and his unsmiling face with its graying orbit of hair was familiar in a way that made me look past it and on to articles about new writers, whose books were so often positioned as rebuttals or complements to Roth’s legacy.

Not having read any Philip Roth felt alternately reprehensible and like a point of pride. Could I actually appreciate the landscape of contemporary fiction without him? On the other hand, we all have to build our own canons, and everyone’s education has its gaps, intentionally or not. (I knew I couldn’t be alone in this aspect of my under-education; there had to be plenty of well-read people who had their own reasons for having avoided him, too.) And I’ve always been skeptical whenever a author is hailed as the savior of literature, the Great American Novelist, or the embodiment of all we could hope for in a writer—whether that writer is Philip Roth or Jonathan Franzen or Zadie Smith or Roberto Bolaño. Slowly, though, the fact that I didn’t know Roth’s work started to feel like an opportunity, a rare chance to approach something with relatively few preconceptions. Sure, I knew the basics: Roth was prolific, Jewish, aging, cranky, and venerated. But how did his books read? Would I like them?

With his 31st book, Nemesis, arriving this month, catching up on him completely was a daunting and not entirely pleasant prospect. And I didn’t really want to try. After all, if I wanted to fully understand Roth and his intimidating oeuvre, I would read all 31 of those books, along with critical biographies and anthologies and interviews that detailed the experience of reading him from just about every possible perspective, along with Claire Bloom’s scathing memoir of their relationship, Leaving a Doll’s House. I would read through hundreds of reviews and consult the experts at the Philip Roth Society. Instead, I just wanted to find out what it was like to persist on a Philip Roth diet for a few weeks, to see what it would feel like and if it would tell me anything about the way I read. I wanted to know if Roth was a writer it was even possible to get a general sense of, by dipping my toes into a few supposedly exemplary novels. So, I didn’t read 31 books. I read eight.

The way I chose those books was far from scientific, based on casual suggestions and availability as much as the specifics of Roth’s bibliography. His first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959), was an obvious choice, and as the novel that made him famous (and both exalted and reviled), so was Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). Someone told me they thought I’d like The Counterlife (1986), which seemed as good a tip as any, and I took home The Plot Against America (2004) both because I’d heard great things about it, and because it was already at the library instead of needing to be transferred in. I added Everyman (2006) to my pile for the same reason (and also because it was nice and slim when compared to most of the others, as well as relatively recent), and The Breast (1972) because, well, it’s about a man who turns into a giant boob. I knew I wanted to read American Pastoral (1997) because it won Roth the Pulitzer Prize, and Patrimony (1991) because I figured a memoir would offer a different angle on the author. Skipping around seemed legitimate, since I wasn’t trying to understand Roth’s evolution as a writer in any kind of comprehensive way, but to see what came of ploughing through a stack of his books in a concentrated amount of time.

Even if I wasn’t sure what I would actually find in these hundreds of pages, I knew what I was supposed to find. The promotional copy on many of the books was comically over the top: It seemed like each one was hailed as Roth’s greatest triumph, the one boasting his most indelible characters, the rawest emotion and deepest cultural relevance, and the author glared out from his photo as if daring anyone to contradict the superlatives. The aura of undisputed greatness triggered competing impulses in me: On one hand, it’s reassuring to read books that have already been vetted and generally agreed to be excellent. Another part of me, though, was annoyed that adoring Roth should be a foregone conclusion.

Portnoy’s Complaint, I realized just a few pages in, is a book you really need to immerse yourself in—it should be read in as few sittings as possible. With very few section breaks and a careening narrative (the whole thing is truly a relentless, exhausting complaint), the best strategy is to get into the groove of Alex Portnoy’s voice and let it pull you along. And with little to hang on to in the way of structure, it’s the characters and small stories that stick: Alex’s account of his young cousin’s suicide, his ambivalence about his girlfriend (whose serious sex appeal can’t make up for what he thinks of as her unrepentant stupidity), another cousin who almost married a goy and then died in the war, the horror movie (and indelible, odious archetype) that is his mother. Portnoy’s life is one long, sickening Jewish joke; Roth is trying so hard to repel and frustrate us that reading becomes a sort of test of will.

I knew the book by reputation, of course, but the repulsive, repressive Jewishness at its core was still extreme enough to be jarring. It’s certainly to Roth’s credit that the book still shocks more than 40 years after it was published, especially considering that at a certain point, its literary value became inseparable from its cultural cachet. That’s the challenge of reading a book that’s become shorthand to such an extent that The Daily Show jokingly called it “the Jewish manual” on the same night I finished it. Somehow, though, Portnoy’s Complaint still stands on its own.

After that, reading The Plot Against America was a relatively soothing experience, and something of a stylistic shock. The historically complex novel is impeccably structured and straightforwardly told and makes Portnoy look like a sheer cathartic exercise in comparison. On a basic level, The Plot Against America is just a great read: It’s accessible and vivid and suspenseful along with being a smart, sly history lesson. Reading Roth’s alternative history of the period preceding America’s intervention in World War II and knowing this is not what happened to American Jews in the 1940’s (but could have, given some choice unfortunate events) makes you want to know more about what actually did. Something about tracing the divergence of history and fiction fixes the facts in your head better than the usual accounting of them and made me think the book would be an inspired way to teach anyone from high-school students to forgetful adults about the period. In a different way, Goodbye, Columbus also felt to me like it belonged on a syllabus, so much so that I was hearing reading comprehension questions in my head as I was reading: things like, why does Neil care so much about the kid in the library? Why does he insist that Brenda get a diaphragm? What does the title actually suggest? The Breast was similarly ripe for essay questions. It also just works: It’s short, funny, and disturbing, with the blend of comedy and pathos that defines absurdity.

I found The Counterlife harder to get lost in, though I know that’s part of the point of the book’s structure—its multiple “lives” and shifts in perspective are meant to be disorienting, each chapter set in a new time and place that forces a reader to start from square one each time. That idea appeals to me, as does Roth’s fascination (very much on display in these pages) with calling his readers’ attention to the way a story is constructed. Still, there was just so much speechifying here, so much yelling about who was right and wrong, and the stakes never engaged me.

But I thought American Pastoral, which also had some meta qualities (and which I was similarly primed to think was genius), was staggeringly good. I loved how Roth built the saga of his main character, Swede Levov, out of the memories of his own alter-ego, Nathan Zuckerman, so that Zuckerman’s personal reflections drive nearly the whole first quarter of the book, before the character smoothly shifts his attention to imagining the Swede’s story. In these layers of authorship and invention, it’s not just Roth writing the book, but Zuckerman building it out of his own memories and feelings about the past, fiction upon fiction. There’s a lot going on here—high-school sports, family tensions, political violence, sex, cattle-breeding, embattled optimism, blackmail, urban ruin, the bizarrely fascinating specifics of how to manufacture women’s dress gloves—but the entire book is riveting and deeply sad, revolving around lost dreams and ideals and an underlying question of “why me?” that one might call biblical if it didn’t instead resonate as distinctly, terribly American. It’s that rare novel that kept me reading long past the point when I planned to go to bed, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it since.

The day after I finished American Pastoral, I read Patrimony in three hours. Roth’s memoir of his elderly father’s decline was harrowing, lovely, and impossible to put down, its ending inevitable but the exact path to it heartbreakingly uncertain. Lucid and forlorn, he’s writing about the experience of memory here as much as he’s recounting specific ones, and they’re memories that actually belong to him, rather than ones he’s ascribing to his various fictional stand-ins. After reading so much that represented a meeting of his life and fiction, the Roth who is writing here seemed strikingly exposed. There’s nothing sexy or glorified, just shit smeared all over the walls and a son tasked with cleaning up the mess.

This felt like a reasonable, tidy way to conclude my reading spree. But Everyman—the first of Roth’s recent cycle of short novels—was still sitting at the top of the pile next to my coffee table, taunting me with its brevity.

For all its slimness, Everyman struck me as one of the bleakest books I’d ever read. It’s not merely depressing, but insistently, painfully grim. The book is a fairly concise chronicle of an aging man consumed by his mistakes, and it makes growing old sound like the hardest, loneliest, and most desperate situation a person can be in, to the point where it seems to have been written from a place of utter fear and despair. A few of the plot points were drawn directly from the pages of Patrimony: the severe heart trouble Roth recognized just in time to save his life, how he made a wrong turn on the way to visit his father and ended up at the crumbling cemetery where his mother was buried. In Patrimony, Roth writes that while that accidental detour offered him no comfort, it nonetheless left him satisfied because it felt “narratively right.” It was an apt way to describe the broader relationship between his life and work, and it was strangely gratifying to see so clearly how he’d translated that particular experience into fiction—15 years after he described it in a memoir.

Everyman left me so despondent that I worried it would color my feelings about Roth’s other books. But that might have happened had I finished with any of the others, too (albeit with a different aftertaste). And in the end, my Philip Roth binge made it hard for me to think of any one of his books as an individual work. Read together, they left behind a web of allusions and cross-references and authorial obsessions and outbursts and reflections that I’m happy to leave all tangled together in my head, letting the Nathan Zuckerman of American Pastoral touch base with his younger self from The Counterlife, having Swede Levov explain his familial knowledge of glove-making to the nameless protagonist of Everyman (who himself has some expertise in the fine jewelry trade), and letting Alex Portnoy and Goodbye, Columbus’ Neil Klugman swap stories—while all the female romantic interests get together to compare their own notes on this group of tortured Jewish men. Read on a bender like this, the connections between stories and characters and themes all but broadcast themselves, and I got a better sense of the man behind them than I would have had I read American Pastoral by itself, in installments the length of a subway ride.

We read, I think, to confirm things we assumed, as well as to be surprised by what we didn’t know. And timing matters. All of us remember books we’ve read at the wrong point in our lives—too soon, or too late—or in a moment that felt almost overwhelmingly perfect. There are books whose specifics drifted away soon after we finished the last page and others that we think about often, for reasons we don’t always understand. Maybe if I’d read different books by Roth, or the same ones in a different situation, my opinion of them would be less favorable. Maybe if I added just one more book to the stack, I would have gotten too sick of him to have anything positive to say.

Or maybe not. Discovering Philip Roth this way was totally unnatural, but it felt totally right. And, hey—now I’ve read Philip Roth.

But her new memoir, The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee, which arrived in bookstores last week, has pushed me over the edge into genuine fandom. And although I’d prefer to let the fact of Silverman’s religion exist in the background, passively enhancing my enjoyment of her bits on sex and “scatological matters” (her phrase), she makes a pretty good case in The Bedwetter for considering her in a less superficial way.

Silverman is known for telling jokes that make Jewishness (among other not-so-sacred cows) a punch line, and I expected The Bedwetter—a comedian’s memoir, after all, that was in the first place someone else’s idea to write—to be as blithely self-deprecating in this regard as she tends to be elsewhere. I figured it would be a breezy read, with text just slightly larger than what’s found in the average book, some gratuitous photos, a digression or two (or 20), and a few genuinely hilarious moments. I was right about all of that. She describes her career highs and lows with humor that is predictably off the wall and cheerfully rehashes the humiliations of her youth with just enough solemnity to let you know that while it may be a scream for her to title her probable bestseller after a problem that killed her self-esteem until she was 16—she’s nearly 40 and has her own show on Comedy Central—at the time, it was miserable. Silverman is a professional funny person, and it’s plain entertaining to read about her teenage traumas, her experiences as a struggling comic in New York, and the shenanigans of various writers’ rooms—even if what she tells us (and for the most part, how she tells us) isn’t surprising.

What is surprising is to find that Silverman is at her best when she’s dropping some version of the word “Jewish” into an otherwise unrelated conversation, as she does relentlessly throughout the book. It’s so frequent it’s unsettling, and that’s refreshing. In a recent email to the first guy she ever slept with (which she wrote as a way to fact-check her own memory of the event) she nonchalantly uses “I’m Jewish” as a sign-off. She explains that when she first moved to New York, people assumed she grew up here because she was outspoken and visibly Jewish. (“My dark features and name both scream ‘Jew’ like an air-raid siren,” she writes, and made her stand out in the place she actually grew up, small-town New Hampshire.) She says she really wanted to call her book “Tales of a Horse-Faced Jew Monkey.” (To say that her publisher was underwhelmed by this idea, she writes, “would be like saying that Hitler was underwhelmed by the Jews.”) She describes herself, accurately, as a “Jewy comedian reputed to have an unhealthy obsession with penises, vaginas and farts.” In total, she drops variations on the word “Jewish” 151 times in 240 pages, plus the jacket flap. (I counted.)

Given this, the final chapter—which contains the bulk of those 151 mentions and is titled, simply and unambiguously, “Jew”—feels like what the whole book has been building, or at least meandering, toward. “To be honest,” Silverman writes,” I would like to go about my life exploiting the subject of Jewishness for comedy, and not be saddled with the responsibility to actually represent, defend, or advance the cause of the Jewish people.” It’s an honest desire, and an understandable one—and she openly wrestles with it for the following 15 or so pages (amid jokes about her parents’ divorce and her belief that the Vatican should be sold to feed the hungry, of course).

Judaism is a pretty good religion, she concedes; she approves of how Jews don’t nag other people about their religion, that they “don’t make a habit of sexually violating their youngest and most vulnerable congregants,” that women can be rabbis (as one of her three sisters is), and that they don’t believe in hell. Still, she writes, “I talk about being Jewish in my act more than I’m really entitled to, considering that I’m an agnostic at best who has no background of participation in Jewish traditions other than nausea.”

Over the years, though, Silverman developed what she came to understand as “a mutually beneficial relationship” with Judaism. For a comedian, having an identity to play with like this can be a real gift, and she welcomed it. She appreciates how her Jewishness translates to a disarming “differentness,” which she can then use to make fans shift in their seats. She knows the feeling of awkward reassurance that comes with seeing a Jew in an unusual place: “When the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal broke, I wasn’t happy that our president had an affair, but I was kind of tickled to bits that it was with this sassy, chubby Jewess.” And she accepts that Jews embrace her because of the simple fact of her own surface-y Jewishness. “I have been deemed ‘good for the Jews,’ and from that there seems to be no going back,” she writes with some bewilderment, reflecting on the 2008 video she filmed to encourage young people to go down to Florida and convince their reluctant grandparents to vote for Barack Obama.

That video, for The Great Schlep, isn’t straightforwardly “pro-Jew,” she points out, since she was bluntly taking older Jews to task for their hypocritical prejudices (notably, as only an insider can). The many Jews who loved it may have gotten the message, but, she figures, they “ate it up because what they saw was a visibly Jewish, somewhat familiar woman saying words like ‘schlep’ and ‘Jew’ and ‘grandparent’ in a loving manner.” Silverman’s Jewish identity may not involve any of its more traditional elements, but she understands how the game is played. She knows how to strategically deploy Jewishness to make a point, to play off the idealized picture many Jews have of themselves, and to provoke them—sometimes all at once.

It’s no shock to learn that Silverman has spent time thinking about the identity that she makes the butt of so many jokes. But she’s crafted a remarkably earnest little essay about it here—essentially, a stream of consciousness rant about how being Jewish has affected her life and career, which I suspect a talented editor or two then shaped into coherence—embedded in a book that ostensibly cares more about the comic potential of genitalia. These final pages (they’re followed only by an afterword, purported to be written by God, and her acknowledgments) feel cathartic—both for the woman who wrote them and for admirers. I didn’t realize I wanted her to say these things until I was reading them, nodding along in agreement, and laughing so hard I risked having even more in common with her than I’d like.

Growing up in a kosher home, I always took for granted that I’d be confronting a limited menu, though the way my family practiced kashrut was a lot less restrictive than the way some other families did. We had two sets of dishes, of course, and never mixed milk and meat. We never ate a huge amount of meat anyway, but what we did consume was kosher. Anything on the list of forbidden animals (from the obvious—pig, shellfish—to the less intuitive, like catfish) was verboten. We ate in restaurants pretty often, which wouldn’t have been possible if we were limiting ourselves to kosher ones; in public, we were vegetarians by default. Perhaps owing something to the fact that my father is a Reform rabbi, we were practically the only family I knew who kept kosher, but our version of things made sense to me and was what I’d always known.

It was so ingrained in me that that’s what kashrut was—basic vigilance, and some manageable rules that were foreign to most people—that I was shocked to discover that more observant Jews made kashrut look like obsessive-compulsiveness. For them, kashrut meant they couldn’t eat in non-kosher restaurants or in the homes of friends who didn’t keep kosher. Everything they bought—from chicken to cereal to chocolate—needed to be certified by a solemn rabbinic authority. Conscious consumption was one thing, but it seemed strange to me to take such fanatical caution with absolutely everything you ate. The fundamental rules of kashrut, as I understood them, were about there being things you could eat and things you couldn’t. Cheese pizza, Goldfish crackers, and unfrosted Poptarts might not have a hecksher, but what could possibly be un-kosher about them?

I might have gone on to decide that an illicit cheeseburger was the perfect act of teenage heresy. Instead, I became a vegetarian. It just made sense: I was hanging around with a bunch of vigilant animal-rights types, and at 14, in a small town north of New York City, taking that kind of stand was invigorating. Although I flirted with militancy, the decision was more instinctive than ideological. I didn’t even really like burgers. And though I had come to believe that all meat consumption was wrong, it was some comfort to know (as I digested some very convincing propaganda: horrifying undercover footage of blood-clogged slaughterhouses, and pamphlets that graphically detailed the injustices of jam-packed feed lots), that I’d never really been implicated in any of it. Those particular slaughterhouses weren’t where kosher meat came from; surely those would look different. For all of kashrut’s strange rules, the ethics had always been what really spoke to my family. My dad liked to say that keeping kosher was the next best thing to being a vegetarian; since keeping kosher meant animals suffered less, your meat supposedly arrived on your plate with less baggage. By choosing to keep kosher, I reasoned, Jews could opt out of the particularly appalling practices of the mainstream meat industry. I could rag on my parents for their occasional steaks and barbecued chicken, but compared to the rest of the world, they were less culpable.

By becoming a vegetarian, I was conveniently exempting myself from the specifics of kosher laws, But I was also building on those principles as my family practiced them, taking certain ethics to their logical conclusion. Being a vegetarian just meant I didn’t have to understand any of it in Jewish terms. Not surprisingly, I wasn’t thinking about that at the time.

Over the years, people would ask me why I shunned meat and fish: was it because of health issues? Moral ones? Did I think I’d eat this way forever? I’d shrug and say I didn’t know, and explain that it was hard to picture myself doing otherwise. Every once in awhile I’d find veganism seductive, and would tell myself that if I really cared about animal welfare, I wouldn’t eat eggs and milk products, either. Somewhere along the way, though, any dogma that once motivated my diet fell away. I started to remember that I’d made a choice. “We do what we can,” I began rationalizing, the handy slogan equal parts truth, consolation, and evasion.

I won’t try to explain my shift, because I can’t necessarily defend it. Let’s just say that my Food Network infatuation and habit of binging on food criticism took their toll: for the first time, I’m finding I want to taste prosciutto-wrapped figs, crab cakes, and southern fried chicken from the place down the street. I want to explore mysterious, possibly gross, yet fascinating foods like raw oysters. There’s a delicious novelty to eating certain things for the very first time in my late twenties, like I’m starting from scratch.

At least in theory—I haven’t quite gotten there yet. Some subconscious limits are hard to overcome. That redfish was one thing, but when I see shrimp or crab on a menu, my eye instinctively glosses over them. I’m daunted: it’s not my food. We don’t eat that, says a voice in my head. Theoretically, I may be eager to eat adventurously, but my childhood eating habits are having an unexpected influence on what I can stomach. Though I’ve never felt strongly about keeping kosher, I can’t deny the hold its basic rules have on me, more than a dozen years after I last ate anything they specifically sanctioned. It’s a reflex, really—a blocked nerve.

When I was growing up, my family’s diet reinforced the fact that we were different, at a time when that was the last thing I needed to be reminded of. When my mom was a kid, her family didn’t keep kosher outside their house in any way. And my dad’s family didn’t keep kosher at all. “I certainly don’t feel commanded to do it,” my mom told me recently. Jewishness is ingrained in me in ways I can’t always explain, and one of the places it’s hunkered down seems to be my palate. But I don’t want to relate to it by way of restrictions on things I’ve never experienced. Left up to me, Judaism isn’t about what I can’t have, or won’t try. For that, there’s always vegetarianism.

Joel and Leda started dating soon after they met outside a movie theater (at the time, Leda was wearing two buttons: “Castrate Rapists” and “He’s Cute, But Can He Type?”). They fell in love, lost their virginities to one another with tenderness but without excessive drama, fought a bit, and agonized about where to go to college. Then Leda found out she was pregnant, and the young couple had the following exchange:

“Do you think I should have the baby?” Leda asked in a very low voice, looking down at her lap.

“No.”

“There aren’t very many Jewish babies,” she said, sniffing, trying to smile. “There’d be nine million people who’d want it. I could probably sell it for a year’s tuition at Yale.”

Reading this passage today, many years after poring over the book for the first time, I was taken aback. Of course I remembered the sex and the abortion and the nipples (and the radical feminism!), but the pervasive Jewishness of the novel was a revelation. Though Klein’s books loom large in my memory, that memory is apparently incomplete—whether a result of hasty reading, inattentiveness, or just the passage of time. These books, I figured, were worth revisiting both for what I remembered and what I might, in my voraciousness, have missed.

Norma Klein wrote some 30 books for adults and young adults from 1972 until her untimely death in 1989, at age 50. (They’re all now out of print.) I first discovered them when I was 11 or 12, during my ritual weekend pillaging of our public library’s YA section, where her many novels lived on a plastic revolving rack in un-alphabetized disarray, their warped paperback husks pressed up against those by Paul Zindel, Lois Duncan, and Norma Fox Mazer. As a category, YA was and remains vague; in my experience it tended to attract kids whose ages and bodies hadn’t yet caught up with their fascinations, and who would move on to the grown-up stuff by the time they turned 13.

In Klein’s stories, everyone lives or ends up in New York, a city populated by secular Jews who keep yellowing back issues of the New York Review of Books stacked on their coffee tables (and where Klein herself was born and lived for most of her life). The parents are often professors or writers, friendly, progressive types who love their children but insist on having their own lives, too. They all own The Joy of Sex and are happy to discuss its contents with their precocious, introspective offspring, but those kids would rather study it furtively on their own. There are affairs, divorces, abortions, ardent feminists, gay characters, and lots of sex—all portrayed with Klein’s distinctive casualness and honesty, at a time when nearly all of those things were destined to stir up controversy. Predictably, her signature candor attracted critics: several of her books were banned from libraries, and her 1985 novel Family Secrets is on the American Library Association’s list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books.

For Klein, sex was a natural part of life, no more or less complicated than anything else. Like where to go to college, where to stand politically, and how to feel about your parents, romance and sex were things to be figured out—not before you were ready, to be sure, but why wait to get started? Some of Klein’s critics argued that she arrived too easily at happy endings, an occasional casualty of her determination to show that sexual liberation could actually be, well, liberating. To her, sexuality was about selfhood. Surrounded by books, art, politics, and family, it became a lot less scary, and a lot more real.

As a kid, I plunged straight into the deep end with That’s My Baby (1988), in which high school senior and aspiring playwright Paul Gold has an affair with a married 22-year-old named Zoe Bernstein. I read No More Saturday Nights (1988), the story of a nice, small town guy who gets his classmate pregnant; when she decides to give the baby up for adoption, he resolves to raise the child himself while attending Columbia University. I read Domestic Arrangements (1981), which finds 14-year-old fledgling starlet Tatiana Engelberg nonchalantly detailing her sexual awakening (“[Daddy] takes everything very hard, which is probably why he got so hysterical last night when he found Joshua and me fucking in the bathroom at four in the morning”).

Growing up, Klein attended New York’s progressive Dalton and Elizabeth Irwin schools, where seemingly everyone came from a family of “extremely liberal left wing Jews,” as she explained in a 1989 autobiographical sketch published in an anthology about YA authors. Her father was a psychoanalyst, and in their home, “Freud had replaced the God in whom my father had decided early on he didn’t believe.” Klein graduated from Barnard in 1960, where she majored in Russian, and earned a master’s degree in Slavic languages from Columbia in 1963. That same year, she married Erwin Fleissner, a Rhodes Scholar and biochemist, who—despite a name sounding Jewish enough that it may have led Life magazine to reject him as the subject of a 1957 article on the ideal American college student (at least according to a 1998 history of the Rhodes program)—was not Jewish. Her marriage, she writes, taught her that the “wry, Woody Allen-ish sensibility based on a mocking inner commentary,” which she’d thought universal, was in fact not.

Yet in nearly all of her books, a protagonist pauses to offer a relaxed aside that testifies to his or her Jewish background—something Klein’s characters tend to embrace ambivalently and question constantly. Brett, the main character in Klein’s first novel, Mom, the Wolf Man and Me (1972), confides, “It’s odd: Grandma, Grandpa and Mom are Jewish, but they never talk about it or do anything about it except make jokes sometimes. But [my friend] Andrew’s family really talks about it all the time. They think it’s strange that I don’t know anything about it.” Caroline, a shy high school senior who falls in love with her chemistry teacher in Love is One of the Choices (1978), “wasn’t Jewish herself, although almost everyone in the school was, and she was utterly unable to tell who was and who wasn’t the way Maggie, who was, could at a glance.” In Klein’s 1976 adult novel, Girls Turn Wives (a women’s-lib relic with a cover declaring it “The novel women won’t tell their husbands about!”), Levi King gets an offer to be a visiting scientist at a lab in Tel Aviv, and explains that he wants to go partly because “It’s really important to me as a Jew, to find my roots.” When his wife Hannah protests, pointing out that he never goes to synagogue, he says, “That’s different. Here it’s a farce.”

In Klein’s books, Jewishness is a basic fact and a reference point, something for her characters to define themselves in accordance with, or, more frequently, against. Characters speculate about the effect their Jewishness has on their appearance, opinions, and appetites. In Taking Sides, Klein’s 1983 novel about divorce, 13-year-old Nell relates, “Daddy always says it’s because of his Jewish genes—his mother was Jewish—that he likes terribly rich things.” My Life as a Body, from 1987, is the story of smart, gawky Augie Lloyd falling in love with a wheelchair-bound former athlete named Sam Feldman. Augie describes Sam’s mother as “A Jewish Mary Tyler Moore.… By which I mean [she has] a sense of style, of restraint, a touch more warmth, but a professional kind of warmth.” Her own mother is not Jewish, while her father is—mixed marriages are common throughout Klein’s body of work.

Though it was the forthright sexuality I remember most from reading Klein as a kid, it’s clear upon rereading that her consideration of Jewish identity is not unrelated. In 1977’s It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me, 17-year-old Jody Epstein suggests to her boyfriend’s Catholic sister, Renee, that she take care of her unwanted pregnancy by having an abortion. Renee is appalled. “Who is this Jewish atheist kid who has seduced my poor innocent baby brother?” Jody imagines her thinking. Hannah, in Girls Turn Wives, looks back on how she first charmed her husband with a mix of pride and embarrassment: “He had enjoyed it, but it hadn’t seemed quite kosher—a Jewish girl tumbling so easily into bed and enjoying it to boot.”

Klein’s Jews are the mainstream, but they’re still wary of others drawing conclusions from their religious orientation. Tellingly, they tend to be skeptical about all religions—though Judaism is cast in the better light than most, as a faith (or here, really a cultural allegiance) that offers multiple interpretations and levels of commitment, perfect for characters who are figuring out their place in the world. It’s OK If You Don’t Love Me is Klein’s rare book to deal with the idea that Jews might be seen as somehow different. Jody Epstein gets involved with Lyle Alexander, “a real non-New Yorker” (to her, this means he’s a virgin and doesn’t know any Jews). Early in their relationship, Jody meets some of Lyle’s family, and out of the blue, his brother-in-law starts talking about Israel. “It took me awhile to catch on to the fact that he was saying all this because he’d heard I was Jewish and he wanted to make me feel at ease,” Jody considers.

“It’s sort of ironical, considering how everyone in our family is supposedly a raving atheist. But I didn’t exactly feel I could say ‘Look, folks, cool the Jewish thing,’ because basically they were just trying to be polite…. At the same time I kept wondering what Lyle had said to them. Had he said, ‘I met this girl and she’s Jewish,’ as though that was the most important thing ever about me?”

Jody also has her share of hang-ups about what being Jewish is supposed to mean. She’s always really liked sports, even though she’s “read in all these magazines that Jewish girls aren’t supposed to be interested in sports, that they’re afraid they’ll get their hair messed up, stupid stereotypes like that.” When Lyle beats her at tennis and claims he doesn’t really care about his victory, Jody does some pigeonholing of her own: “Maybe that’s because you’re not Jewish. Jews always want to win, to be the best.”

When I first read these books, I was living inside my own Jewish bubble, some 50 miles north of Klein’s New York City. Both my parents worked in the liberal Jewish world—my father as a Reform rabbi, my mother as an educator—and my life was suffused with Judaism in a way that didn’t require much thought or effort on my part. The world of freethinking, secular Jews was Klein’s comfort zone, and it was mine, too.

So maybe it just seemed obvious to me that the characters I identified with would be Jews: though I read books about people of all ethnicities and religions, Jewish kids and teens figured prominently into enough of them that Klein’s didn’t feel like an exception to me then. Readers of all ages are always latching onto fictional characters because of what they have in common, so it makes sense that I would have related to Jody, Augie, and Leda based on what we shared.

As an ultra-receptive preteen, though, I wasn’t reading to confirm what I already knew. It was these characters’ differences from me—their fledgling adulthood, their trysts and experiments—that really held promise, and kept me skimming for the dirty parts.

I’ve never been able to resist the thrill of a well-worn, hopelessly dated volume: I’m irrationally attached to a 1949 Baby Book from Better Homes and Gardens which I salvaged from a Maine junk barn. It is full of dubious advice (“If you have a job, you’ll want to know what to do about quitting work”), and made priceless by the lock of fine, blonde hair taped in and labeled “Cynthia, 14 months.” I’m a sucker for other people’s memories, and A Treasure for My Daughter appeals to my hunger for hidden stories. In my grandmother’s copy, a spread of Passover recipes (including ones for fried veal chops, potato puffs, coconut fruit pudding, and chicken fricassee) is spattered with cooking grease. The corner of page 161 is dogeared, suggesting her fancy was struck by either chocolate cream layer or chocolate fudge cake. The inside back cover bulges from the small pile of recipes—some clipped from magazines, others written in her languid script—stuck inside.

In Montreal, where my grandmother grew up, the book was ubiquitous; every bride-to-be was given a copy as a symbolic badge of Jewish womanhood. Aside from the occasional gastronomic shocker (the recipe for “Brain Latkes” begins, “Scald one pair brains”), the real novelty are the instructional texts, presented as prim, stilted conversations between a shadowy “Mother” and her daughter—appropriately named Hadassah—who is about to be married. Here, the two of them have a heart-to-heart:

Hadassah: “We were fortunate in procuring the synagogue for our ceremony.”

Mother: “Yes, the synagogue is the favorite place because of its sacredness.”

Hadassah: “Mother, I would like to know your ideas about the Jewish laws on marriage.”

Mother: “Marriage, Hadassah, is a divine institution, a holy estate in which man lives his true and complete life…. The affectionate consideration shown to the Jewish wife, as well as the domestic purity and the devotion that are the glory of the Jewish womanhood, are largely the fruit of our Torah.”

Hadassah is, necessarily, portrayed as something of a blank slate, and her role in these chats is mostly to offer a chorus of affirmations—“How dreadful, Mother! What trials we Jews have had to go through!”—and simple, frequently hilarious, queries like, “Isn’t it a strange coincidence that both my name and that of our organization should be ‘Hadassah’?” This model daughter was clearly the concoction of a group of cunning, hopeful mothers (their bylines uniformly formatted: Mrs. S. Schwartz, Mrs. H. Freeman, Mrs. R. Weinrauch) who could only dream that their own offspring would be so obedient and enthusiastic.

These sorts of pre-feminist guides were everywhere at the time, but it’s the specific collision of this brand of womanhood and a triumphalist sort of Judaism—the style and tone of the Better Homes guide brought to bear on faith in a fraught post-war culture—that draws me in. Surely given with the best of intentions, the book offered a clear-cut set of guidelines for my grandmother’s generation—rules for their lives as Jews, and as women, but more explicitly as Jewish women, with each element of that identity bound by the limits of the other. Instilling Jewish identity in future generations was decidedly a woman’s job, something children were expected to learn from watching their mothers in the home. A Treasure for my Daughter was designed to help women fulfill that responsibility.

Andrea Eidinger, a doctoral student at the University of Victoria in British Columbia writing her dissertation on Jewish identity and domesticity, filled me in on the book’s history. A Treasure for My Daughter was the brainchild of Bessie Batist, who immigrated to Canada from Odessa around 1905, and later worked with immigrants at the Montreal Y, where she found herself on the receiving end of questions from young women about how to keep a Jewish home. She thought it would be useful for them to have a guide they could readily consult—and that selling it would be a great opportunity for her Hadassah chapter to raise money for Israel. After the book was compiled, the committee combed through newspapers for announcements of engagements and weddings, and then called the mothers of the brides-to-be to suggest it as the perfect gift for their daughters or daughters-in-law.

My grandmother’s own mother died when she was 14, and so her copy was, quite unusually, a gift from her father and stepmother. I can only guess that in this case, he stepped into the role her mother ordinarily would have filled, giving her something he realized had become necessary in their community. A dedication is inscribed on the inside cover: To: Norma & Justin: With love and may you enjoy using this book. But neither my great-grandfather nor the book’s authors could actually have meant for it to be shared by husband and wife. Aside from the explicitly gendered title, the content isn’t something any husband in the early 1950s would ever have been expected to explore.

While the book’s lessons now seem staggeringly retro, its value as a traditional gift is so deeply rooted that it eclipses the actual content. Eidinger tells me that it’s still regularly bestowed on engaged women in Montreal—in fact, her own mother recently gave her a copy. And we’re not talking about a radically revised edition. Though it’s been reissued throughout the years, A Treasure for my Daughter has never been significantly updated. While the order of the chapters has changed and the amount of shmaltz in the recipes has decreased, those wooden exchanges between mother and daughter have been preserved in their original form. A reader of the 2000 version (the most recent) will still find a general obliviousness to the existence of something called a bat mitzvah, and sentences that, amusingly, explain that the pilgrims developed Thanksgiving based on their knowledge of Sukkot.

But that might not matter. Throughout the years, it seems the book was far more important as an acknowledgement of a stage of life, and an emblem of inclusion, than it was as a user’s manual. “Mother” sheds some on light on this. “I think, Hadassah, that your development and the development of the family, when you become a homemaker, stand a better chance if you realize early in life your responsibility to your people as well as to your home,” she explains. “There is nothing so stimulating as that sense of belonging.” Eidinger says that of the 30 women she interviewed about the book, every single one knew about it, nearly all of them owned it, very few of them used the recipes, and none had read these instructional texts. It didn’t matter what was actually written in the book. Its message was clear.

Eryn Loeb is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine.

It was, but as Leora Tanenbaum outlines in her spirited new book, Taking Back God: American Women Rising Up for Religious Equality, women in any number of religions have been waiting much longer than that. The book announces its seriousness with an austere white cover and gothic lettering, contrasting with the defiantly girly designs of her two earlier books, Slut! Growing Up Female with a Bad Reputation and Catfight: Rivalries Among Women—from Diets to Dating, from the Boardroom to the Delivery Room (now mainstays of Women’s Studies bookshelves). Having become recognized as an authority on these thorny feminist issues, Tanenbaum has moved on to a subject that’s even more personally rooted.

Tanenbaum considers herself an observant Jew (Modern Orthodox, to be precise), an identity she divulges right off the bat, in a preface that feels equal parts honest and defensive. Her exploration of Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions is guided by a rigorous respect for each of them, but it’s a respect built on the belief that being faithful means challenging your religion when it veers off track. A non-religious person could have written this book persuasively, too, but Tanenbaum’s faith enriches it in some unexpected ways, raising questions about what it means to view any of these religions as an outsider, and what (if any) potential for unity exists among religious women from different backgrounds.

The book is a catalog of familiar, if astoundingly retro, attitudes—the Catholic Church’s hysterical refusal to ordain women in the face of a dire priest shortage, shoddy conditions in the women’s sections of mosques, the Artscroll Women’s Siddur‘s approving commentary that “even a silent recitation [of the Kaddish] by a woman is frowned upon”—threaded with “We Can Do It”-style affirmations. “We do not have to abandon our faith communities,” Tanenbaum writes. “We can stay and make them stronger. And for this to happen, we cannot be polite.” Ultimately, “the issue is not a matter of ‘if,’ but ‘when.’” Her case for equality is pretty basic—after all, the idea at the heart of this and similar struggles is heartbreakingly straightforward—even if the path to achieving it is a predictable minefield.

It’s worthwhile to read about restrictions in different religions side by side, as Tanenbaum positions them here; while there have been books about individual faiths dealing with gender issues (many directed at their respective lay populations), revealing parallels come through when they’re examined in relation to one another. Though Jewish, Christian, and Muslim women all bump up against their own unique obstacles, they experience many of the same limitations: women are second-class citizens, barred or actively discouraged from taking part in significant rituals, and physically separated from men in various ways. All are reckoning with texts that suggest—or say outright—that they’re unworthy.

So why should women continue to practice religions that seem intent on keeping them down? Women in some of the faiths Tanenbaum explores (namely, Judaism and Protestantism) have the option of moving between denominations if one is wildly out of step with their lives. Others don’t have that flexibility. Still others don’t want it: despite being profoundly angered and wounded by institutionalized sexism, many remain committed to traditional sects, which they see as the most authentic version of their religion. Tanenbaum, generally a fan of the Hebrew-heavy Orthodox service, counts herself among them, and explains, “It would be easier to withdraw from observant Judaism by aligning with a liberal denomination, but these women love their Orthodox tradition too much.” In order to stay within their religion, women like Tanenbaum choose to believe that patriarchal ideas about women’s roles are not what their traditions are really about; they come from a time and place that is outdated, and human fallibility (and willful misinterpretation) is responsible, not God.

Fair enough, but things get sticky when she and other religious activists urge women to work to transform sexist attitudes within their religions, while also assuring them (and anyone who might be listening in) that once this happens, those religions will be able to stay essentially the same. It’s a pragmatic line of reasoning, but doesn’t hold up. Tanenbaum maintains that sexism is not in fact integral to Jewish tradition, but other members of her devout community would say that by pushing for inclusivity, she’s asking for the kinds of reforms that would effectively transform Orthodoxy into a different (and by implication lesser) denomination. Even if we accept that these religions have no real basis for the restrictions they place on women, the leadership (and male members of the community, who “stand in the center of their world” while women “are told to move to the periphery”) have self-interested reasons to resist equality. If they don’t budge, religious women are basically left with two unappealing options: seek refuge in a community that aims for gender equality but offers less rigorous observance, or stay in one that’s spiritually fulfilling but stifling.

Tanenbaum quotes one Catholic woman explaining, “I don’t want another church. I just want to get this one right.” It’s sort of a semantic game: wouldn’t that in some ways mean making it another church? Despite the many bold efforts described in these pages, religious women are caught in a cycle of contradictions and multiple allegiances that are hard to resolve in any satisfying way. If you refuse to have blind faith when it comes to gender, for example, why should you have it about anything else? If your chosen religion silences and invalidates you in ways you can’t condone, what’s the point of following it?

The underlying impression is that religion is so worthwhile and enriching that damaging views about women—no matter how extreme—are less persuasive than the community and tradition it offers. On a gut level, these priorities feel appalling: if a fundamental denial of women as complete people isn’t compelling enough, what is the bottom line? On the other hand, as Tanenbaum poignantly quotes a middle-aged Catholic woman saying, “If I leave the church, I will crumble.” So much of her community and identity are bound up with it that she can’t conceive of cutting herself off.

For all its force and intelligence, it’s not always clear who Tanenbaum has written this book for: some explanations seem aimed at the unlikely readers who’ve never even heard of the concept of religious equality. At the same time, she’s uninterested in tempering her outrage. She airs some dirty laundry that people outside specific religious communities might otherwise never know about, and includes some distressing anecdotes: one Modern Orthodox woman’s rabbi forbade her from taking part in her son’s bar mitzvah, and when she objected, barred her from teaching at the synagogue school; a national organization of Presbyterian college women was intimidated by a hardline Christian publication for daring to discuss sexuality. Irshad Manji‘s calls for reform within Islam have been met with death threats. Some of Tanenbaum’s findings and observations are expressed with sarcastic disbelief, butting up—at times awkwardly, at others elegantly—against her attempts to justify her own adherence to particular traditions.

As so many recent books on and against religion have shown, it may be impossible to be truly balanced when it comes to writing about something so inherently personal. Either way, Tanenbaum will stay focused on this area for some time—her website notes that for her next book she’s looking into the discrimination faced by devout gay people. In Taking Back God, her optimism buoys what is in many ways a depressing survey, but it’s hard not to wonder if it can survive this next inquiry.

Eryn Loeb is a contributing editor for Tablet Magazine.

In many ways Shira’s story is a typical one of adolescent anxiety: she’s looking for love, fighting with her overbearing lawyer father, doing battle with snooty girls in her class. “I combine various forms of uncoolness,” Shira confesses, echoing so many beloved literary characters who never quite fit in. “Still,” she continues, “you wouldn’t think [sucking at sports] would matter so much at a Jewish high school.”

Token, written by Alisa Kwitney and illustrated by Jöelle Jones, is the final book published as part of D.C. Comics’ Minx line, which launched auspiciously in 2007, aiming to capture the teenage girl market with pithy, stylish graphic novels that were a clever hybrid of Young Adult fiction and comic books. This fall D.C. announced the line’s cancellation, in part because the genre-bending that made the books attractive also made them difficult to place in YA sections of major bookstores. Still, Minx titles were generally well reviewed, boasting feisty heroines involved in various levels of adventure (competing in a martial arts competition, joining up with a group of artistic renegades, heading out on a road trip) while navigating the troubled waters of adolescence, where there were plenty of crushes, parents, friends, and insecurities to contend with. With snappy dialogue and striking black and white illustrations, the graphic novel format made these standard tropes feel fresh. It also proved friendly to characters with a specific ethnic or cultural identity, those outside what Kwitney calls the “default, mainstream Christianized culture.”

In Token, much of Shira’s angst plays out in the context of her Jewishness, most dramatically as her father starts dating his non-Jewish secretary, Linda, and Shira herself gets involved with a Spanish guy named Rafael. The whole book is riddled with Jewish cultural shorthand. “Remember when we took that trip with Elderhostel?” Shira’s grandmother asks Minerva. “You couldn’t stop kvetching about being constipated!” Sitting on the beach, the two discuss whether the pastrami they’ve brought with them is spoiled, and—doing the stereotypical Jewish grandmother thing—note approvingly that the bathing suit-clad Shira has “a very nice shape. Very voluptuous.” The saleslady at Woolworth’s calls Shira “Maideleh.”

In visually representing these characters, Kwitney told me she was definitely not looking for “the Betty and Veronica thing, where they have the same body, but different hair.” The Shira she envisioned, and who Jones brought to life, is “large-breasted and short-waisted…she [did] not have legs up to her armpits.” Madison and Mallory, Shira’s bitchy classmates-cum-adversaries, are rendered more like classic, idealized comic book women: tall, with pouty lips and luxurious hair. Here, Shira’s specificity is directly tied to her Jewishness; it’s a way to make sure she stands out, both physically and otherwise.

One night, trying hard to ingratiate herself, Linda prepares a special dinner for Shira and her father, Alan: chicken parmigiano. Shira bluntly informs her that cheese on top of meat is not kosher. “But the chicken is kosher,” Linda objects. “It said so on the package. I thought it was red meat that couldn’t be cooked with cheese.” She looks defeated. “I called up my old friend Naomi Hyman from high school! Naomi said it was just the red meat.” Alan steps in to reassure her, and says they’ll eat what she has cooked: “Sometimes you have to bend the rules a little.” Incredulous, Shira refuses, stirring up fury in her father. “You’ve eaten milk and meat together before,” he accuses. Hand on her hip, Shira returns fire. “I ate a pepperoni pizza once, four years ago. When I was 12. Since you’re sending me to a Jewish school, it seems to me that eating milk and meat together would be completely hypocritical.”

Shira wields her adherence to kosher laws as her own brand of rebellion, claiming the moral high ground for herself in the face of her father’s sudden ambivalence. But while she may have won this battle on principle, that’s not really the point. “I don’t really care that much about keeping kosher,” she reflects soon after the dinner incident. “But my dad always cared. And now he’s changing all the rules.” As if to reinforce it all, for Shira’s 16th birthday, her father gives her a Star of David pendant, the same night he presents Linda with an impressive engagement ring.

Even as she’s holding tight to this particular principle, Shira’s breaking some other rules by shoplifting and hanging out with Rafael. Both come with an intoxicating sense of risk, but what really draws Shira to Rafael is an equally classic aphrodisiac: his difference from her. One day on the beach, they talk about different ways to mark becoming an adult. Sixteenth birthdays aren’t a big deal in Ibiza, Rafael says, but at 15, you have a Quinceañera, which is “supposed to mark the end of childhood.” Hearing this, Shira perks up: “Like a bat mitzvah.” Rafael is confused. “That’s the big Jewish coming-of-age party,” she explains. “Although mine wasn’t really big. Or even much of a party. I just memorized a lot of prayers in Hebrew.” Rafael looks surprised and seems to begin to say he didn’t realize she was Jewish. But instead he changes the subject, and they make out in the surf.

Token’s 150 pages seem like scant space to develop a story of much depth or nuance, and it’s true that the plot’s various threads are tied up a bit too hastily. But in exchanges like these, Kwitney leaves her characters appealingly exposed, exploring complicated, bittersweet emotions with real sensitivity. There’s plenty of room for more stories that share this approach, and it’s a shame that Minx—the line of books designed to encourage this kind of storytelling—didn’t quite take off.

Eryn Loeb is associate editor of Nextbook.org.

Judith Katzir’s second novel, Dearest Anne—published in Israel in 2003 and newly available in English—is written in the form of letters from a young girl named Rivi Shenhar to Anne Frank. The letters are rife with intimate details of Rivi’s discoveries and indiscretions, as she navigates the eighth grade, reads voraciously, and explores her sexuality—notably through a passionate, scandalous love affair with her married literature teacher, Michaela. They’re also richly descriptive of the particulars of Israeli life in the 1970s.

Since her first book, a group of four novellas titled Closing the Sea, was published in Israel in 1990, when she was twenty-six, Katzir has been deliberately building on the relatively new tradition of women writing in Hebrew. Now with seven books to her name, she’s working on one based on the handwritten memoirs of her great-grandmother, who moved to Palestine from Russia in 1906, and eventually settled in Tel Aviv—where she lived in an unconventional communal arrangement with her husband, their five children, and her lover (a vegetarian fascinated by world religions who was nearly ten years her junior).

Katzir was born in Haifa and today lives in Tel Aviv, where she works as a literary editor and teaches creative writing.

Until about twenty years ago, Hebrew literature was pretty much dominated by men. How did you experience this, and how does it relate to your work?

When I was in school, we studied mostly male writers. Maybe we read two stories by women, and a few poems. We had the male canon, but I had to find my own subversive canon of women’s literature, translated from other languages. It was a strange concoction of high literature like Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Marguerite Duras, and things like Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying. Anne Frank was a very, very important model for me: She was not only a woman writer, she was a girl writer.

It was important for me not just to read about women’s experience, but to create a portrait of a female artist for myself. Even when I wrote my first stories, in my early twenties, there were very few women writers active in the literature scene here. There was the first book of Orly Castel-Bloom [the story collection Not Far From the Center of Town], and we studied Amalia Kahana-Carmon’s stories in school. In the ’80s, she said that if Hebrew literature is a synagogue, the part of the women is behind a curtain. But now I believe that women writers have built a parallel synagogue for themselves.

Since you didn’t really have female writers as role models, did you feel like you were doing something new?

Yes. Critics said Closing the Sea included the first description of female orgasm in Hebrew literature. I had new areas to explore, and I felt I was among the first to explore them: the feminine body, the aging body, sexuality, relationships between women, mothers and daughters, relationships between men and women. For me, it’s very important to be an insider witness for these topics that are quite new to Hebrew literature.

Was it shocking for people when that kind of writing by women first came out in Israel?

Feminism in the U.S. developed in the late ’60s, early ’70s. I think in Israel we’re about twenty years behind. A Room of One’s Own was translated in the beginning of the ’80s, along with Doris Lessing and a few others. But gender studies in universities started maybe less than ten years ago. So we are behind. But people were quite open to reading such literature. My first collection was a great bestseller here, which is very rare for a collection of stories, and for the first book of a very young woman.

That book was not feminist per se, though the four main characters are all women. They aren’t political stories; they deal with other subjects, like the memory of the Holocaust. The first novella is about two cousins, ages thirteen and fourteen, who spend their summer at their grandparents’ house in Haifa. Their grandparents are Holocaust survivors, and the cousins go to the attic and play “Anne Frank and Peter in Hiding.” Another one of my stories is about a mother and daughter; another about two friends from childhood, and what happens to their friendship when they are in their thirties.

Your work also brings to life historical women writers who haven’t gotten a lot of attention, like Dvora Baron. What attracted you to Baron, and made you decide to write a play about her?

I found her life story much more fascinating than her stories, actually. Her father was a rabbi, and he let her get an education like her brother. And at the age of sixteen, she moved with her brother from their tiny village to Minsk, and studied there, and started to write and publish stories in Yiddish and Hebrew. In 1911, she arrived in Palestine. She met the editor of one of the workers’ magazine—she edited the literature part of the magazine—and they got married and had one daughter. In 1920, she discovered that her brother Benjamin had died in Russia, and she decided not to leave the house anymore. For thirty-five years, until her last day, she was in the house, most of the time in bed. She wrote her stories in bed. Her daughter was an epileptic and never sent to school, and she became a kind of servant for her mother.

Baron was a very difficult personality, very clever and egocentric. The play is about the relationship between her and her daughter; the main character is actually the daughter. It takes place on the day of Baron’s death, and is based on the daughter’s flashbacks.

You mentioned that Anne Frank was an early influence on you, and she’s a very strong presence in your writing. How did you first come across her?

In the ’60s and ’70s, when I was a child, many of my friends’ parents were Holocaust survivors. My father’s parents arrived from Poland before the war, but many of their relatives were murdered in Auschwitz. I’m not a second-generation Israeli, but in many ways my generation is a second generation, because we knew many elderly people who had a blue number. But the subject was hushed. They were post-traumatic, and they wanted to protect the children by not telling them about what happened.

We experienced the Holocaust as a big secret, with many images that we didn’t understand. Every year there was a ceremony in school for Yom Hashoah, with the same speeches and the same songs. It was stiff, not personal. Now young people, when they are sixteen or seventeen, go to Poland to see the camps. But we didn’t; young people had to play macabre games in order to control their anxiety about the subject.

So my first real acquaintance with it was through Anne Frank’s diary. It’s a very good introduction to the Holocaust for young people, because she wrote about life in hiding, about the fear, the claustrophobia, but she never wrote about the hunger and disease and death in the camps. Most of the time, her point of view is very optimistic. But still, I knew she was murdered, so it gave me my first knowledge about life destroyed. For me personally, she was very important as an icon of a writing girl, and for all the victims she symbolized. But in Dearest Anne, it was important to take her off the pedestal and relate to her humanity.

The character of Rivi Shenhar appears in both Dearest Anne and your earlier novel Matisse Has the Sun in His Belly. How did she develop over the years?

The two novels are like two pillars of the same house. When I started to write Dearest Anne, I didn’t know it was going to be about the same Rivi. It was important to me that the reader experience the story from the perspective of the young character, without moral judgment. So I decided to write it in present tense, as a diary of what happened to this young girl every day. Then I thought about Anne Frank as an icon, an address for this character, who decides that she’s the fictional Kitty. Kitty doesn’t have a biography or a face, so every girl can decide that she’s Kitty. She’s only a silhouette. I started to see that this was the same soul as Rivi from my previous novel, and I decided it was going to be her, in a different part of her life. She’s a sort of alter ego, but there are differences as well.

In her afterword to the English translation of Dearest Anne, Hannah Ovnat-Tamir writes that the book reminded her of “growing up and coming of age in a time of great historical and national importance.” Was this something you had a sense of when you were growing up?

Yes, but in the book most of the important nation-building issues are in the background. What’s much more important to Rivi is her relationship to her family, and her relationship with Michaela. It’s an alternative way to look at Israeli history. What’s important for most people were issues like the peace process. But for a young girl, what’s important is her world.