Jewish Books to Read for the High Holidays 

The Jewish New Year is a time to pause, reflect and reconnect—with ourselves, with each other and with the traditions and ideas that have shaped us. 

And while the High Holidays come with their own rituals, sometimes connection can begin somewhere unexpected: in a novel, a memoir, a piece of history or an idea that makes us look at Jewish life differently. 

This year’s reading list brings together recently published books that explore Jewish identity from very different angles. There are writers wrestling with ancient texts and contemporary identities, stories of migration and belonging, explorations of food and tradition, and new perspectives on Jewish history and the world we live in now. 

Some come from the winners and finalists of the 2026 Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writer Awards. Others take us into Jewish writing from around the world. 

Whether your interests lie in fiction, history, culture, feminism, food or big ideas, consider this a place to start exploring. 

Late Blossoms by Merav Fima 

For readers interested in creativity, migration and Jewish life in Jerusalem 

Set in Jerusalem, Late Blossoms is a collection of linked stories following migrant women artists as they navigate creativity, relationships, belonging and place. 

Fima’s characters offer different ways into questions of identity and what it means to build a life somewhere new. Jerusalem is more than a backdrop: its cultures, communities and contradictions become part of the world these women are trying to make their own. 

Late Blossoms won The Szymon (Simon) Klitenik Award for Jewish Fiction at the 2026 Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writer Awards. 

For the High Holidays, it’s a chance to spend some time with a contemporary Jewish story about creativity, change and finding your place. 

When We’re Born We Forget Everything by Alicia Jo Rabins 

For readers interested in Jewish texts, feminism, queer identity and finding the sacred in unexpected places 

Alicia Jo Rabins’ journey into Jewish tradition doesn’t follow a particularly straight line. 

A self-described ’90s suburban high school weirdo, Rabins grew up in a secular Jewish family, played violin, smoked cigarettes behind the mall and quietly longed for a spiritual life she couldn’t quite name. 

That search eventually took her to Jerusalem to immerse herself in rabbinical texts and traditional Jewish observance. But it also took her on tour with a klezmer-punk band, through love and motherhood, into queer identity and feminist thought, and deeper into questions about mysticism, ritual and what it means to make ancient teachings your own. 

In When We’re Born We Forget Everything, Rabins weaves her own spiritual search together with the often-hidden stories of biblical women. Rather than treating Jewish tradition as something fixed, she enters into conversation with it—finding new meaning through feminist interpretation, creativity and lived experience. 

It’s an especially compelling High Holidays read for anyone interested in what happens when we approach Jewish wisdom with curiosity rather than certainty. 

Not simply: What does this tradition say? 

But: What might I find here that speaks to the Jewish life I’m living now? 

All Consuming: Germans, Jews, and the Meaning of Meat by John M. Efron 

For readers interested in Jewish food, history and the surprising stories behind everyday traditions 

What can meat tell us about Jewish history? 

Quite a lot, as it turns out. 

Historian John M. Efron uses food—and meat in particular—to explore encounters between Jews and Christians in Germany and the ways food became entangled with religion, identity, prejudice, assimilation and modernity. 

Drawing on sources ranging from cookbooks and photographs to scientific texts and propaganda, All Consuming takes something seemingly ordinary and reveals the layers of Jewish history underneath it. 

For readers drawn to Jewish food and culture, it’s an opportunity to go beyond recipes and explore how what we eat can carry stories about who we are, where we’ve come from and how Jewish practices have been understood by the societies around us. 

All Consuming won the Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Non-Fiction at the 2026 Shalom Collective Australian Jewish Writer Awards. 

It might also change the conversation around your High Holidays table. 

Ruptured: Jewish Women in Australia Reflect on Life Post-October 7 

Edited by Lee Kofman and Tamar Paluch 

For readers interested in contemporary Australian Jewish identity 

Ruptured brings together the voices of 36 Jewish women reflecting on how their lives in Australia changed after October 7. 

The collection explores identity, belonging, antisemitism, community and the complicated experience of being Jewish in Australia at this moment. 

There isn’t one Jewish response here—and that’s part of what makes the collection valuable. Instead, the essays create space for different experiences and perspectives within contemporary Australian Jewish life. 

For a High Holidays reading list, Ruptured offers something particularly close to home: an opportunity to listen to how other Australian Jews are making sense of who we are now. 

Tell Me I Belong by David Weill 

For readers interested in family history, faith and discovering your Jewish roots 

David Weill grew up with a Jewish father and Southern Baptist mother in a home where religion was rarely discussed. 

His memoir follows a search across faiths and generations as he begins to uncover his Jewish family history—including the story of his grandfather’s imprisonment in Buchenwald—and understand what that inheritance means for his own identity. 

Tell Me I Belong speaks to an experience that will feel familiar to many contemporary Jews: Jewish identity isn’t always something handed to us fully formed. Sometimes we find our way towards it through family stories, history, curiosity and the desire to understand where we came from. 

Fagin the Thief by Allison Epstein 

For readers interested in Jewish representation, literature and seeing familiar stories differently 

Most of us know Fagin. 

Or at least, we think we do. 

In Fagin the Thief, Allison Epstein takes the Jewish character from Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist—one of literature’s most enduring and troubling Jewish stereotypes—and gives him his own story. 

The result is more than a literary retelling. It creates an opportunity to think about how Jews have been represented in popular culture, who gets to tell Jewish stories and what happens when Jewish characters are given complexity and agency rather than reduced to caricature. 

Winner of a National Jewish Book Award for Fiction, it’s a smart choice for readers who like their Jewish history and identity explored through a good novel. 

The Holy and the Broken by Ittay Flescher 

For readers interested in Israel, dialogue and the possibilities of Jewish thinking 

Australian-Israeli educator and peacebuilder Ittay Flescher draws on history, lived experience and years of dialogue work to examine the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and ask what another future might look like. 

This isn’t light High Holidays reading, nor does it offer simple answers. 

Instead, The Holy and the Broken asks readers to engage with complexity—something Jewish tradition has never exactly shied away from. 

For those interested in Israel, Jewish peoplehood and the role that dialogue can play when perspectives feel irreconcilable, it offers a contemporary entry point into some of the most difficult conversations facing Jewish communities today. 

Reading our way into a new year 

The High Holidays give us an opportunity to process and start fresh again. 

We look back, we question, we remember. What will we choose to carry with us into the year ahead? 

A Jewish New Year doesn’t need to begin with a long list of resolutions. Perhaps one good question, and the time to sit with it, is enough. 

And sometimes a book can help us find the question.