50 Books in 50 Years
Jewish books that shaped the last half-century.
To construct a list like this—of books that made a difference in American Jewish life between 1975 and 2025—is to be reminded that however deeply you ponder what to include, the exercise’s main value is as a conversation-starter. My entry point was a long, joyful dive into the Moment archives, particularly those of the book section that I have edited since 2018. Nearly all the books on this list were reviewed or mentioned in Moment or reflect recurrent preoccupations of its writers (not to mention my own).
There are gaps in the chronology, but I tried to pick books that in their time sent ripples through the culture, were made into movies, sparked long-running arguments. In fiction, I tried to keep to American writers, if only because Israeli literature in translation is a continent of its own, full of its own dreams and nightmares. For novelists with a vast body of work, I confined myself to one book—oh, the temptation to include three different Philip Roths!—and tried, in close cases, to favor the book that constituted the most striking arrival on the scene, which often, though not always, meant the writer’s first.
Still, mysteries abound. Why lead with Saul Bellow, whose greatest works are mid-20th-century—except that in 1976 he won the Nobel Prize? Why include Joseph Brodsky, another Nobel laureate (1987), who first came to prominence writing in his native Russian—except that his work rocketed across the American poetry scene when he was exiled to the United States? Cynthia Ozick’s first big success, The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories, was too early for our time frame, but each of her subsequent books hit the landscape just as dramatically. When it comes right down to it, to quote one of my literature professors in college, “This course has a fancy name, but it’s really just a bunch of books I like.” It’s all about the conversation: What would you pick? Write to editor@momentmag.com and tell us!
—Amy E. Schwartz
Fiction and Poetry
→ 1999
Yosl Rakover Talks to God
by Zvi Kolitz
→ 2000
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon
→ 2002
Everything Is Illuminated
by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Russian Debutante’s Handbook
by Gary Shteyngart
→ 2004
The Plot Against America
by Philip Roth
→ 2012
What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank
by Nathan Englander
→ 2017
Forest Dark
by Nicole Krauss
→ 2021
The Netanyahus
by Joshua Cohen
→ 2023
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store
by James McBride
Nonfiction
→ 1976
World of Our Fathers
by Irving Howe
→ 1979
When Memory Comes
by Saul Friedländer
→ 1982
Seasons of Our Joy: A Modern Guide to the Jewish Holidays
by Arthur Waskow
An Orphan in History
by Paul Cowan
→ 1983
Halakhic Man
by Joseph P. Soloveitchik
→ 1988
The Drowned and the Saved
by Primo Levi
Fear No Evil
by Natan Sharansky
→ 1990
Standing Again at Sinai
by Judith Plaskow
→ 1994
The Jew in the Lotus
by Rodger Kamenetz
→ 1995
Genesis: The Beginning of Desire
by Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
→ 1996
Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust
by Daniel Goldhagen
→ 1997
The Kidnapping of Edgardo Mortara
by David I. Kertzer
→ 1998
Engendering Judaism
by Rachel Adler
Kaddish
by Leon Wieseltier
→ 2003
And the Dead Shall Rise: The Murder of Mary Phagan and the Lynching of Leo Frank
by Steve Oney
→ 2005
The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission
and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton
by Jerome Karabel
History on Trial: My Day in Court with a Holocaust Denier
by Deborah E. Lipstadt
→ 2018
Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor
by Yossi Klein Halevi
Hunting the Truth: Memoirs
by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld
The Hebrew Bible in Translation
by Robert Alter
→ 2020
The Light of Days: The Untold Story of Women Resistance Fighters in the Warsaw Ghetto
by Judy Batalion
→ 2021
People Love Dead Jews: Reports from a Haunted Present
by Dara Horn
→ 2024
The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands
by Amir Tibon
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