It’s May, and that means it's Jewish American Heritage Month, a time to commemorate Jewish Americans past and present. The story of Jewish American Heritage Month began in May of 2004 with a ceremony marking 350 years of Jewish American history. Two years later, after years of support from the Jewish Museum of Florida, Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida and Sen. Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania introduced a resolution to establish a month to recognize Jewish Americans. In April 2006, President George W. Bush proclaimed that May was Jewish American Heritage Month.
Although Jewish Europeans arrived in the New World as early as the 1580s, the first Jewish community in North America was founded in 1654 by a group of Brazilian Jews fleeing persecution. In New Amsterdam, these refugees established the Congregation Shearith Israel, the oldest Jewish Congregation in North America. Since then, America’s Jewish community has grown to an estimated 7.5 million. Generations of Jewish Americans have made lasting contributions to the arts, sciences, industry, and politics.
Celebrate Jewish American Heritage Month by checking out these books from your favorite Alachua County Library District branch. Or learn Hebrew with Transparent Language or one of the language learning books in our collection.
Check out some great reads from our collection.
- Children's Books
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Hershel and the Hanukkah Goblins by Eric Kimmel
On the first night of Hanukkah, a weary traveler named Hershel of Ostropol eagerly approaches a village, where plenty of latkes and merriment should warm him. But when he arrives not a single candle is lit. A band of frightful goblins has taken over the synagogue, and the villagers cannot celebrate at all! Hershel vows to help them. Using his wits, the clever trickster faces down one goblin after the next, night after night. But can one man alone save Hanukkah and live to tell the tale?Image
Golem by David Wisniewski
A saintly rabbi miraculously brings to life a clay giant who helps him watch over the Jews of sixteenth-century Prague.Image
The Cats in Krasinski Square by Karen Hesse
Two Jewish sisters, escapees of the infamous Warsaw ghetto, devise a plan to thwart an attempt by the Gestapo to intercept food bound for starving people behind the dark Wall.Image
Across the Alley by Richard Michelson
Jewish Abe's grandfather wants him to be a violinist while African-American Wille's father plans for him to be a great baseball pitcher, but it turns out that the two boys are more talented when they switch hobbies.Image
Ketzel, the cat who composed by Leslea Newman
Moshe Cotel was a composer who lived in a noisy building on a noisy street in a noisy city. But Moshe didn't mind. Everything he heard was music to his ears. One day, while out for a walk, he heard a small, sad sound that he'd never heard before. It was a tiny kitten! "Come on, little Ketzel," Moshe said, "I will take you home and we will make beautiful music together." And they did--in a most surprising way. Inspired by a true story, Lesléa Newman and Amy June Bates craft an engaging tale of a creative man and the beloved cat who brings unexpected sweet notes his way.Image
Queen of the Hanukkah Dosas by Pamela Ehrenberg
A boy is worried that his little sister's climbing will spoil the first night of Hanukkah, when his family combines his father's Jewish traditions with his mother's East Indian cooking.
- Adult Books
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The Plot Against America by Philip Roth
When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but, upon taking office as the thirty-third president of the United States, he negotiated a cordial "understanding" with Adolf Hitler, whose conquest of Europe and whose virulent anti-Semitic policies he appeared to accept without difficulty. What followed in America is the historical setting for this startling new book by Pulitzer Prize winner Philip Roth.Image
Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer
With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man—also named Jonathan Safran Foer—sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.Image
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon
For sixty years Jewish refugees and their descendants have prospered in the Federal District of Sitka, a "temporary" safe haven created in the wake of the Holocaust and the shocking 1948 collapse of the fledgling state of Israel. The Jews of the Sitka District have created their own little world in the Alaskan panhandle, a vibrant and complex frontier city that moves to the music of Yiddish. But now the District is set to revert to Alaskan control, and their dream is coming to an end.Image
People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks
A fictionalized account of the turbulent history of the Sarajevo Haggadah, an illuminated manuscript which has survived into the twentieth century thanks to people of various faiths who risked their lives to safeguard it. Hanna Heath, a manuscript conservator hired to restore the manuscript in 1996 Sarajevo, finds and pursues clues to crucial moments in the book's history.Image
The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman
In 70 CE, 900 Jews held out against armies of Romans on a mountain in Masada. According to an ancient historian, two women and five children survived. Based on this tragic event, Hoffman weaves a tale of four bold, resourceful, and sensuous women, each of whom has come to Masada by a different path.Image
Love & Treasure by Ayelet Waldman
A tale inspired by the World War II Hungarian Gold Train follows the 1945 American capture of a locomotive filled with riches and the efforts of a Jewish-American lieutenant's granddaughter to track down a mysterious woman 70 years later.Image
Forest Dark by Nicole Krauss
Jules Epstein, a man whose drive, avidity, and outsized personality have, for sixty-eight years, been a force to be reckoned with, is undergoing a metamorphosis. In the wake of his parents' deaths, his divorce from his wife of more than thirty years, and his retirement from the New York law firm where he was a partner, he has felt an irresistible need to give away his possessions, alarming his children and perplexing the executor of his estate. With the last of his wealth he travels to Israel, with a nebulous plan to do something to honor his parents.