Jews book series in reading order

by Medora Sale

by Bodie & Brock Thoene

by Heather Morris

Isaac Bashevis Singer

54 books• 1 series

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) was a Polish-born Jewish American novelist, short story writer and essayist who wrote in Yiddish and then translated his own work into English. Singer received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978 and stood among the leading figures of the Yiddish literary movement. This catalogue holds 54 titles dated 1950 to 2024, opening with The Family Moskat (1950) and taking in Satan in Goray (1955), Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Magician of Lublin (1959) and The Slave (1962). The newest entry is A Letter to Mama and Other Uncollected Stories (2024).

Elie Wiesel

47 books• 3 series

Elie Wiesel (September 30, 1928 – July 2, 2016), born Eliezer Wiesel in Romania, was an American writer, professor, political activist, Nobel laureate and Holocaust survivor. Night (1956), the first title in the catalogue, draws on Wiesel's imprisonment as a Jew at Auschwitz and Buchenwald. Wiesel wrote 57 books, mainly in French and English, and the catalogue lists 47 books, including Dawn (1960), Day (1961), The Town Beyond the Wall (1962) and A Beggar in Jerusalem (1968). Filled with Fire and Light (2021) is the latest. The Holocaust, Judaism and Hasidism are recurring subjects.

Bodie & Brock Thoene write Christian historical fiction, with catalogue subjects covering the Bible, Jesus Christ, Jewish history, the Holocaust, the Second World War and the Israel-Arab War of 1948-1949. The joint catalogue holds 80 books listed between 1979 and 2026, and includes the Zion Chronicles, Zion Covenant, Zion Legacy, A.D. Chronicles, Elijah Chronicles, Galway Chronicles, Shiloh Legacy and Legends of the West sequences, plus non-fiction. Chuck Roberson shares the credit on the 1979 title The Fall Guy: 30 Years as the Duke's Double.

Chaim Potok

17 books• 2 series

Chaim Potok (1929-2002) was an American novelist, playwright, editor and rabbi. The Chosen (1966) opens the catalogue, spent 39 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than 3.4 million copies by 2002 and reached the screen as a feature film in 1981. Potok wrote two linked sequences, the Reuven Malther books and the Asher Lev novels, which begin with My Name Is Asher Lev (1972). Jewish family life, rabbis, artists, fathers and sons, and New York carry the fiction. Seventeen titles are catalogued, ending at The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok (2018).

Guardians of Ga'Hoole is one of the series by Kathryn Lasky, an American children's writer born June 24, 1944, who writes for adults as Kathryn Lasky Knight and E. L. Swann. Lasky's children's work also includes Dear America and The Royal Diaries books, Wolves of the Beyond, Sugaring Time and The Night Journey, and honours include a Newbery Honor, the National Jewish Book Award and the Anne V. Zarrow Award for Young Readers' Literature. The catalogue holds 159 books from I Have Four Names for My Grandfather (1976) to Sacred Light (2026), including Tugboats Never Sleep (1977), The Weaver's Gift (1980) and Beyond the Divide (1983). Horses Of The Dawn, Bears Of The Ice and Camp Princess are further series, and subjects name owls, wolves, diaries and Jews.

Philip Roth

38 books• 3 series

Philip Roth wrote American fiction about Jewish men, academics and the country they lived in. The Conversion of the Jews (1958) opens the catalogue, Goodbye, Columbus followed in 1959, and Portnoy's Complaint arrived in 1969. Nathan Zuckerman, David Kepesh and the American Trilogy are the recurring structures. Thirty-eight titles are catalogued, ending with Why Write? in 2017.

David Liss

29 books• 5 series

David Liss, born March 16, 1966 in New Jersey, is an American writer of novels, essays, short fiction and comic books. Liss grew up in South Florida and studied at Syracuse University, Georgia State University and Columbia University, then left postgraduate study of 18th-century British literature, dissertation unfinished, to write full-time. The 29 catalogued books start with A Conspiracy of Paper (2000) and include The Coffee Trader (2003) and The Whiskey Rebels (2008). Series are Benjamin Weaver and Randoms. Liss lives in San Antonio, Texas, and The Death and Birth of Iliana Marek (2026) is the newest title.

Naomi Ragen

15 books

Naomi Ragen is an American-Israeli novelist and playwright who lives in Jerusalem and writes in English. Injustice against women in the Haredi community is the recurring theme of her fiction, from Jephte's Daughter (1988) through Sotah (1992) and The Sacrifice of Tamar (1994). Ragen has also been the subject of lawsuits alleging plagiarism. The catalogue holds 15 titles, the most recent being The Enemy Beside Me (2023).

Karen S. Hesse, born August 29, 1952, is an American author of children's literature and literature for young adults, often set in the past. Out of the Dust (1997) took the Newbery Medal. The catalogue lists 26 books from Wish on a Unicorn (1991) to Granny and Bean (2022), among them Letters from Rifka (1992), Phoenix Rising (1994), A Time of Angels (1995) and The Music of Dolphins (1996). Subjects name children's fiction, family life, diaries, sisters and cousins. The books run to a median of 161 pages, and the catalogue marks the run dormant.

Mordecai Richler was a Montreal writer, born in 1931, who died in 2001. Richler's novels about the city's Jewish community include The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1959) and Barney's Version (1997). Booker Prize nominations went to St. Urbain's Horseman and Solomon Gursky Was Here. Richler also wrote the Jacob Two-Two children's series and worked as a journalist. The catalogue holds 26 books, from The Acrobats (1954) to Dispatches from the Sporting Life (2002).

Joseph Telushkin

20 books• 3 series

Joseph Telushkin, born 1948, is an American rabbi and writer. Telushkin's 20 catalogued books run from Nine Questions People Ask About Judaism (1981) to Rebbe (2014), a title that reached the New York Times bestseller list on release. Subjects across the listing cover Jewish ethics, Jewish literacy, the Jewish way of life, rabbis, history and quotations. Telushkin also wrote the Rabbi Daniel Winter Mysteries; the catalogue records Daniel Winter as a fictitious character.

Medora Sale was the pen name for detective novels by Caroline Medora Sale Roe (1943 to November 7, 2021), a Canadian novelist who wrote historical mysteries as Caroline Roe. Born in Windsor, Ontario, Roe earned a BA and a PhD in Medieval Studies at the University of Toronto. Before writing full time, Roe taught at Branksome Hall and worked in advertising. Murder in Focus (1989) opens the catalogue of 15 books, and the series are John Sanders and Harriet Jeffries and Chronicles Of Isaac Of Girona.

Morris Gleitzman

52 books• 8 series

Morris Gleitzman is an Australian children's and young adult novelist. Two Weeks with the Queen (1990) drew attention to AIDS in children's fiction. Gleitzman co-wrote several series with Paul Jennings, among them Wicked!, which became an animated series in 2000, and he has collected three volumes of his newspaper columns for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald as books for adults. Earlier still, Gleitzman wrote for the Norman Gunston Show. The subject tags name the Second World War, Jews, stepfamilies and humorous stories, and the catalogue holds 52 titles ending with Always (2021).

Lynne Reid Banks (31 July 1929 to 4 April 2024) was a British author who wrote for both children and adults. The Indian in the Cupboard sold more than 15 million copies and became a film. The L-Shaped Room, the 1960 debut novel, was a best seller, was filmed, and gained two sequels, The Backward Shadow and Two is Lonely. Banks also wrote Dark Quartet, about the Brontë family, and Path to the Silent Country, about Charlotte Brontë. The catalogue lists 50 books from 1960 to The Red Red Dragon (2022), including the Harry the Poisonous Centipede series.

Daniel Kalla is a Canadian physician and novelist who writes medical thrillers and historical fiction. Born in Vancouver in 1966, Kalla studied mathematics and then medicine at the University of British Columbia, took a screenwriting course at Simon Fraser University, and served as director of Emergency Medicine at St. Paul's Hospital in Vancouver. His father and grandfather practised medicine before him, and his grandfather left Czechoslovakia weeks before the Nazi annexation of 1939. Sixteen catalogued books run from Pandemic (2005) to The Deepest Fake (2025), the Adler Family and Dr. Noah Haldane series among them.

Amos Oz

34 books• 1 series

Amos Oz, born Amos Klausner on 4 May 1939 and dead on 28 December 2018, was an Israeli writer, novelist, journalist and intellectual, and a professor of Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. From 1967 onward Oz argued publicly for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forty books carry the name, across novels, short story collections, children's books and essays, and the work has been published in 45 languages, more than that of any other Israeli writer. This listing holds 34 of them, from Where the Jackals Howl (1965) to What Makes an Apple? (2022), with Fania Oz-Salzberger sharing the credit on one title.

Pam Jenoff is an American novelist, lawyer and law professor at Rutgers University who lives in New Jersey. Jenoff writes love stories and historical novels, many of them bestsellers and some nominated for awards. The Second World War, Jews and Poland recur in the subject tags. The catalogue holds 19 books, starting with The Kommandant's Girl (2007) and The Diplomat's Wife (2008). Last Twilight in Paris (2025) is the most recent release, and The Society of Forgotten Wives is scheduled for 2027. Series listed are Kommandant's Girl, Jordan Weiss and Winter Guest, next to titles such as The Other Girl (2014) and The Last Summer at Chelsea Beach (2015).

Jane Yolen

237 books• 22 series

Jane Yolen (Jane Hyatt Yolen, February 11, 1939 to June 11, 2026) was an American author of fantasy, science fiction and children's books. The Devil's Arithmetic, a Holocaust novella, is the best-known Yolen work, and Owl Moon and The Emperor and the Kite are among the others. The short works Sister Emily's Lightship and Lost Girls both won Nebula Awards. The catalogue counts 237 books from The Witch Who Wasn't (1964) to Daddy Plays a Mean Guitar (2026). Series include Commander Toad, How Do Dinosaurs...?, Pit Dragons, the Young Merlin Trilogy, Books of the Great Alta and Tartan Magic. Yolen worked as an editor, collaborated most often with Adam Stemple, and in 2012 became the first woman to give the Andrew Lang lecture.

Howard Fast

90 books• 6 series

Howard Fast (November 11, 1914 - March 12, 2003) was an American author and television writer who also published as E.V. Cunningham, Behn Boruch and Walter Ericson. Across almost seven decades Fast wrote historical novels and noir, along with short stories, poems, plays and non-fiction. Spartacus (1951), April Morning (1961) and The Immigrants (1977) are among the best-known works, and Stanley Kubrick filmed Spartacus in 1960. The catalogue holds 90 books from Two Valleys (1933) to Collected Stories of Fantasy and Science Fiction (2018), with Masao Masuto and Lavette Family as named series.

Anita Diamant

21 books• 1 series

Anita Diamant is an American journalist and author of fiction and nonfiction, born June 27, 1951. The Red Tent (1997) became a best seller and a book club favourite, and The Boston Girl, the most recent of five Diamant novels, reached the New York Times best seller list. Diamant has also written six guides to contemporary Jewish practice, such as Living a Jewish Life, plus the essay collection Pitching My Tent. The catalogue lists 21 books from How to Find and Work with a Literary Agent (1986) to Period. End of Sentence (2021), with tags for Judaism, Jewish weddings and baby names.

Noah Gordon

10 books• 1 series

Ten catalogued books carry Noah Gordon's name, from Night Ward (1960) to The Winemaker (2006). Physicians and healers run through the work in The Death Committee (1969), The Physician (1986) and Shaman (1992), and the Cole Family Trilogy is his one catalogued series. Jewish history supplies the other strand, in The Rabbi (1965), The Jerusalem Diamond (1979) and The Last Jew (1999), with rabbis and the Inquisition among the recorded subjects. Gordon, an American novelist, was born in 1926 and died in 2021.

Julius Lester

48 books• 2 series

To Be a Slave (1968) opens the catalogue of Julius Lester, an American writer for both children and adults who was also a civil rights activist, a photographer and a musician with two recorded albums of folk music and original songs. Lester taught at the University of Massachusetts Amherst for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003. The 48 listed titles run to The Girl Who Saved Yesterday (2016) and return to African American history, slavery, folktales and race relations. Lester lived from 1939 to 2018.

Novels, short stories and essays make up the work of Cynthia Ozick, an American writer born on April 17, 1928. Her 27 catalogued books span 1966 to 2025, opening with the novel Trust and closing with In a Yellow Wood. Jewish life and American literature are recurring subjects. The Pagan Rabbi and Other Stories (1971), Levitation (1982) and The Messiah of Stockholm (1987) sit in the middle of the run.

Bernard Malamud

18 books

Bernard Malamud (26 April 1914 – 18 March 1986) was an American novelist and short story writer, counted among the best-known American Jewish authors of the 20th century. The Natural, a Malamud novel about baseball, became a 1984 film with Robert Redford. The Fixer (1966), set against antisemitism in the Russian Empire, won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize and was also filmed. The catalogue lists 18 books, including The Magic Barrel, The Assistant (1957), A New Life (1961) and Pictures of Fidelman (1969), through The Complete Stories (1997).