Jewish American Heritage Month: A Booklist for Middle and High School Students

Imani knows exactly what she wants as her big bat mitzvah gift: to find her birth parents. She loves her family and her Jewish community in Baltimore, but she has always wondered where she came from, especially since she's Black and almost everyone she knows is white. Then her mom's grandmother—Imani's great-grandma Anna—passes away, and Imani discovers an old journal among her books.

Alma's life is a series of halves: She's half-Chinese, half-Jewish; her parents spend half the time fighting, and the other half silent; and she's halfway through becoming a woman. But as long as she can hang out with her friends on the stoops of Greenwich Village and ride her bike around the streets of New York, it feels like everything will be all right. Then comes the year when everything changes.

Growing up in an affluent suburb of New York City, 16-year-old Nevaeh Levitz never thought much about her biracial roots. When her Black mom and Jewish dad split up, she relocates to her mom's family home in Harlem and is forced to confront her identity for the first time.

Spunky, strong-willed 11-year-old Mirka Herschberg isn’t interested in knitting lessons from her stepmother, or how-to-find-a-husband advice from her sister, or you-better-not warnings from her brother. There’s only one thing she does want: to fight dragons! Granted, no dragons have been breathing fire around Hereville, the Orthodox Jewish community where Mirka lives, but that doesn’t stop the plucky girl from honing her skills.

This is a compelling, tender story about friendship and community, grief and healing, and one indomitable girl who somehow manages to connect them all.

Inspired by a real-life incident, this riveting novel explores the dangerous impact discrimination and antisemitism have on one community when a school assignment goes terribly wrong.

In 1893, Alter Rosen sees Chicago as a land of opportunity where he dreams of earning enough money to bring his mother and sisters to the city, freeing them from the oppression they face in his native Romania.

Hoodie Rosen's life isn't that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie's world hasn't changed that much. He's got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren’t happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in at once, but that’s not Hoodie’s problem.

Convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage for the Soviet Union against the United States, the author shares the story of Rosenberg’s beliefs, loves, secrets, betrayals and injustices in this compelling young adult novel in verse.

Voices4 Founder and LGBTQIA+ activist Adam Eli offers a candid and compassionate introduction to queer responsibility. Eli calls on his Jewish faith to underline how kindness and support within the queer community can lead to a stronger global consciousness.

In this wide-ranging series of essays, at turns irreverent, insightful, urgent and iconoclastic, Greene considers what might loosely be termed “the modern Jewish experience,” and asks what it means to be anything in a world obsessed with the self and the other.

Sent to stay with her aunt in Prague and witness the humble life of an artist, Ilana Lopez—a biracial Jewish girl—finds herself torn between her dream of becoming a violinist and her immigrant parents’ desire for her to pursue a more stable career. When she discovers a forgotten Jewish cemetery behind her aunt’s cottage, she meets the ghost of a kindhearted boy named Benjamin, who died over a century ago. As Ilana restores Benjamin’s grave, he introduces her to the enchanted side of Prague, where ghosts walk the streets and their kisses have warmth.

Before Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Elizabeth Warren or Hillary Clinton, there was New York’s Bella Abzug. With a fiery rhetorical style forged in the 1960s antiwar movement, Abzug vigorously promoted gender parity, economic justice and the need to “bring Congress back to the people.”

In 1940s Brooklyn, an accident throws Reuven Malther and Danny Saunders together. Despite their differences, the young men form a deep friendship. Together, they negotiate adolescence, family conflicts, the crisis of faith engendered when Holocaust stories begin to emerge in the U.S., loss, love and the journey to adulthood. The intellectual and spiritual clashes between fathers, between each son and his own father and between the two young men provide a unique backdrop for this exploration of fathers, sons, faith, loyalty and, ultimately, the power of love.

This is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that follows two Jewish cousins as they navigate the world of comic books during the Golden Age of comics.

Daniel has escaped Nazi Germany with nothing but a desperate dream that he might one day find his parents again. But that golden land called New York has turned away his ship full of refugees, and Daniel finds himself in Cuba.

Taken from his Czechoslovakian home at age 15 and transported to the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz with his family, he was separated forever from his parents, sisters and baby brother. Greenfield remembers his desperation and fear as a teenager alone in the death camp and how a Schutzstaffel (SS) soldier's shirt dramatically altered the course of his life. He learned how to sew and when he began wearing the shirt under his prisoner uniform, he learned that clothes possess great power and could even help save his life.