101 Great Jewish Books: Works That Shape the Jewish Mind in America Today

Before we explain what the list is, we should tell you what it’s not: It’s not a list of “The Greatest Jewish Books of All Time,” an undertaking that would involve sifting through thousands of texts in dozens of languages produced over the course of millennia and that could only result in either a Cecil B. DeMille-like cast of thousands or a list with one entry: the Bible. What we wanted to create was a library of works that have actually moved us and shaped the way we understand ourselves as Jewish human beings in the world. We read some of these books as children; some we read under our covers as teenagers; some we got off college syllabi; some we discovered, with wonder and awe and surprise, as adults. But all are books of supreme importance in shaping our lives and our understanding of the different ways one might be a Jew in the world—whether the authors are religious Jews, or secular Jews, or not Jewish by your definition or someone else’s definition, or by any definition at all.

Appetites

• Portnoy’s Complaint, Philip Roth (1969)

• The Savage Mind, Claude Lévi-Strauss (1962)

• Satan in Goray, Isaac Bashevis Singer (1955)

• The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer (1968)

• The Dialectic of Sex, Shulamith Firestone (1970)

• The Power Broker, Robert Caro (1974)

• Fear of Flying, Erica Jong (1973)

• Where the Wild Things Are, Maurice Sendak (1963)

• Justine, Lawrence Durrell (1957)

• Dr. Ruth’s Guide to Good Sex, Dr. Ruth Westheimer (1983)

• What Makes Sammy Run?, Budd Schulberg (1941)

• Auto-da-Fé, Elias Canetti (1935)

• The Mind-Body Problem, Rebecca Goldstein (1993)

• The Passion According to GH, Clarice Lispector (1964)

Authenticity & Experimentation

• The Counterlife, Philip Roth (1986)

• The Rise of David Levinsky, Abraham Cahan (1917)

• The Diary of Anne Frank, Anne Frank (1947)

• Call It Sleep, Henry Roth (1934)

• Two Concepts of Liberty, Isaiah Berlin (1958)

• The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon (2000)

• The Memoir of Glückel of Hamelin, Glückel of Hamelin (1700)

• Correspondence, Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (1992)

• Making It, Norman Podhoretz (1967)

• The Adventures of K’Ton Ton, Sadie Rose Weilerstein (1935)

• Exodus, Leon Uris (1958)

• Altneuland, Theodor Herzl (1902)

• The Chosen, Chaim Potok (1967)

• In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, Delmore Schwartz (1938)

• Really the Blues, Mezz Mezzrow (1946)

• Only Yesterday, S.Y. Agnon (1945)

• Adventures in the Screen Trade, William Goldman (1983)

• Marjorie Morningstar, Herman Wouk (1955)

Laughing & Complaining

• Herzog, Saul Bellow (1964)

• The Feminine Mystique, Betty Friedan (1963)

• Auto-Emancipation, Leo Pinsker (1882)

• Without Feathers, Woody Allen (1975)

• Das Kapital, Karl Marx (1867)

• Adam Resurrected, Yoram Kaniuk (1971)

• The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom (1973)

• Ethics, Baruch Spinoza (1677)

• Catch-22, Joseph Heller (1961)

• Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953)

• Breakdown and Bereavement, Joseph Haim Brenner (1920)

• The Street of Crocodiles, Bruno Schulz (1934)

• Hungry Hearts, Anzia Yezierska (1920)

The Jew in the World

• The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by M.H. Abrams (1962)

• All-of-a-Kind Family, Sydney Taylor (1951)

• Ulysses, James Joyce (1922)

• Red Cavalry, Isaac Babel (1920s)

• Swann’s Way, Marcel Proust (1913)

• Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (1900)

• Foundation Series, Isaac Asimov (1951)

• History of the Jews, Heinrich Graetz (1891)

• Beginning to See the Light, Ellen Willis (1981)

• Samson the Nazerite, Ze’ev Jabotinsky (1927)

• The Puttermesser Papers, Cynthia Ozick (1997)

• Daniel Deronda, George Eliot (1876)

• The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn (1972)

• On Photography, Susan Sontag (1977)

• Eichmann in Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt (1963)

• Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret, Judy Blume (1970)

• A Walker in the City, Alfred Kazin (1951)

• Writing and Difference, Jacques Derrida (1967)

• Later the Same Day, Grace Paley (1985)

The Old Country

• Tevye, Sholem Aleichem (1914)

• The Fixer, Bernard Malamud (1966)

• The Dybbuk, S. Ansky (1914)

• The Family Mashber, Der Nister (1939)

• World of Our Fathers, Irving Howe (1976)

• The Jewish Government, Lamed Shapiro (1919)

• The Yeshiva, Chaim Grade (1968)

• Folk-Style Stories, I.L. Peretz (1908)

Suffering & Loss

• Ringelblum Archive (1944)

• A Tale of Love and Darkness, Amos Oz (2002)

• The Destruction of the European Jews, Raul Hilberg (1961)

• Life and Fate, Vasily Grossman (1959)

• Survival in Auschwitz, Primo Levi (1947)

• The Jewish War, Flavius Josephus (75)

• King of the Jews, Leslie Epstein (1979)

• The Ghetto Fights, Marek Edelman (1945)

• The Trial, Franz Kafka (1915)

• Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl (1946)

• Night, Elie Wiesel (1960)

• Dolly City, Orly Castel-Bloom (1992)

• The Garden of the Finzi-Continis, Giorgio Bassani (1962)

• Maus, Art Spiegelman (1991)

• Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, Jacobo Timerman (1981)

• Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler (1940)

• The Iron Tracks, Aharon Appelfeld (1998)

What is Judaism?

• The Bible

• Babylonian Talmud (770)

• Birnbaum Siddur, Philip Birnbaum (1977)

• Tsene-Rene (1590s)

• Kaddish, Leon Wieseltier (1998)

• Commentary, Rashi (11th c.)

• Sefer Hasidim, Rabbi Judah of Regensburg (early 13th c.)

• From There Shall You Seek, Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1978)

• Sipurei Masiyos, Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1816)

• Guide for the Perplexed, Maimonides (12th c.)

• Shulchan Aruch, Yosef Karo (1565)

• Man Is Not Alone, Abraham Joshua Heschel (1951)