Gwen Tucker
Just in time for end-of-year reading and Hanukkah gift-giving, we’ve compiled this comprehensive list of some of our favorite reads of 2023 – perfect for Jewish feminists of all ages!
Eighteen Books Lilith Loved This Year
Tag: historical fiction
The Jewish Queen of Makeup
Yona Zeldis McDonough
Renée Rosen talks to Lilith about the ways in which she adhered to the facts—and the important reasons why she didn’t in her novel about the life of Estée Lauder.
“Cradles of the Reich” Examines Complicity
Yona Zeldis McDonough
The setting: a Nazi breeding home in Bavaria.
A Moving Fictional Account of the Spanish Civil War
Eleanor J. Bader
An 82 year-old writer takes up historical fiction, penning a novel about the Spanish Civil War.
Louise Fein on The Hidden Child: Eugenics, Epilepsy, and Women’s Roles
Yona Zeldis McDonough
The new novel, “The Hidden Child”, set in Britain in the years between the two world wars, exposes—and challenges— pernicious ideas about epilepsy and sheds a more benevolent light on the disorder.
A Twelve-Year Old Fleeing the Pograms
Arielle Silver-Willner
[T]he way that the woodcarvers of Eastern Europe, hounded out of their homes, were able to reinvent themselves here, well, that’s very inspiring..I wanted to shine a light on that story, and then to give a feminist twist.
The Fraught and Frayed Bonds of Sisterhood
Yona Zeldis McDonough
I wanted the characters in The Wartime Sisters to be imperfect and layered, to make good and bad choices, to be difficult, to fail, and also to grow. It’s important to me that people recognize pieces of themselves and their family members when they read about Ruth and Millie.
One Book, Three Protagonists…and Three Authors!
Yona Zeldis McDonough
A novel with three main protagonists and three different time periods is not so uncommon. But when that book is written by three different authors, that’s pretty unusual.