The OZ Monthly Book Club meets monthly and welcomes adult readers. Book selections are determined by the group, with topics that are related to Jewish themes and concepts. Join these casual discussions about the book from 8pm – 9pm via Zoom.
To learn more, contact Adult Ed here.
January 8, 2026
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love by Dani Shapiro
The author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets—a real-time In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA for analysis, Dani Shapiro received the stunning news that her father was not her biological father. She woke up one morning and her entire history—the life she had lived—crumbled beneath her.
February 12, 2026
Refugee by Alan Gratz (novel OR graphic novel)
JOSEF is a Jewish boy living in 1930s Nazi Germany. With the threat of concentration camps looming, he and his family board a ship bound for the other side of the world . . .ISABEL is a Cuban girl in 1994. With riots and unrest plaguing her country, she and her family set out on a raft, hoping to find safety in America . . .MAHMOUD is a Syrian boy in 2015. With his homeland torn apart by violence and destruction, he and his family begin a long trek toward Europe . . .All three kids go on harrowing journeys in search of refuge. All will face unimaginable dangers — from drownings to bombings to betrayals. But there is always the hope of tomorrow. And although Josef, Isabel, and Mahmoud are separated by continents and decades, shocking connections will tie their stories together in the end.This action-packed novel tackles topics both timely and courage, survival, and the quest for home.
March 12, 2026
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker
Chava is a golem, a creature made of clay, brought to life by a disgraced rabbi who dabbles in dark Kabbalistic magic, created to be the wife of a man who dies at sea on the voyage from Poland. Chava is unmoored and adrift as the ship arrives in New York harbor in 1899.
Ahmad is a jinni, a being of fire born in the ancient Syrian desert, trapped in an old copper flask, and released in New York City, though still not entirely free.
Ahmad and Chava become unlikely friends and soul mates with a mystical connection. Marvelous and compulsively readable, Helene Wecker’s debut novel The Golem and the Jinni weaves strands of Yiddish and Middle Eastern literature, historical fiction and magical fable, into a wondrously inventive and unforgettable tale.
April 9, 2026
Goyhood by Reuven Fenton
Funny, poignant, and revelatory while plumbing the emotional depths of the relationship between estranged brothers, Goyhood examines what happens when one becomes unmoored from a comfortable, spiritual existence and must decide whether coincidence is in fact destiny.
When Mayer (née Marty) Belkin fled small town Georgia for Brooklyn nearly thirty years ago, he thought he’d left his wasted youth behind. Now he’s a Talmud scholar married into one of the greatest rabbinical families in the world – a dirt poor country boy reinvented in the image of God.
But his mother’s untimely death brings a shocking Mayer and his ne’er-do-well twin brother David aren’t, in fact, Jewish. Traumatized and spiritually bereft, Mayer’s only recourse is to convert to Judaism. But the earliest date he can get is a week from now. What are two estranged brothers to do in the interim?
So begins the Belkins’ Rumspringa through America’s Deep South with Mom’s ashes in tow, plus two an insightful Instagram influencer named Charlayne Valentine and Popeye, a one-eyed dog. As the crew gets tangled up in a series of increasingly surreal adventures, Mayer grapples with a God who betrayed him and an emotionally withdrawn wife in Brooklyn who has yet to learn her husband is a counterfeit Jew.
May 14, 2026
One Little Goat: A Passover Catastrophe by Dara Horn
A lost Afikomen, a time-traveling talking goat, and a never-ending seder illuminate the meaning of Passover in Dara Horn’s dryly funny graphic novel.
A family sits at the table, ready to start their Passover seder. There’s Grandpa, who’s attempting to lead; anxious dad and pregnant mom; Cool Cousin and Uncool Cousin; 98-year-old great-grandma who survived the Warsaw Ghetto; our narrator, Wise Child, and his siblings—one of whom has lost the Afikomen. Without it, this seder can never end. Accompanied by a wisecracking, irreverent little goat who shows up at the front door, Wise Child takes a journey through time and all the Passovers past to retrieve the Afikomen, end the seder, and understand his family, his faith, and his history along the way.
Complemented by Theo Ellsworth’s fantastical artwork, Dara Horn’s first graphic novel is a delightfully bizarre exploration of the meaning of Passover, layered with joy, humor, and magic.
June 11, 2026
Heart of a Stranger by Angela Buchdahl
Angela Buchdahl was born in Seoul, the daughter of a Korean Buddhist mother and Jewish American father. Profoundly spiritual from a young age, by sixteen she felt the first stirrings to become a rabbi. Despite the naysayers and periods of self-doubt—Would a mixed-race woman ever be seen as authentically Jewish or chosen to lead a congregation?—she stayed the course, which took her first to Yale, then to rabbinical school, and finally to the pulpit of one of the largest, most influential congregations in the world.
July 9, 2026
Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer
From esteemed journalist Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in.
Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future.
Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the arrival of his great-grandmother Bessie from a shtetl in Belarus and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then reports on the state of today’s burning Jewish issues. We meet millennial Jewish racial justice organizers, Orthodox political activists, young liberal rabbis looking to “queer” the Torah through exegesis, Haredi men learning full-time at the world’s largest yeshiva, progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism, and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews.
As it traverses today’s Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, Tablets Shattered also charts the universal quest to build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture.
August 13, 2026
The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud by Gila Fine
Women in the Talmud are generally marginal and almost always anonymous – the daughters, sisters, and wives of prominent rabbis. The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic explores the stories of the exceptions, the six named heroines of the Talmud: Yalta the shrew, Homa the femme fatale, Marta the prima donna, Heruta the madonna/whore, Beruria the overreacherix, and Ima Shalom the angel in the house. As their epithets suggest, every one of these women appears to embody an antifeminist archetype. Yet in each case, a careful rereading reveals that there is a lot more to the story than initially meets the eye; that the heroine is far more complex than she first seems; and that the rabbis had rather surprising – so as not to say proto-feminist – views of marriage, sex, childbirth, and what it means to be a woman in the world. In presenting us with archetypes that systematically break down, the Talmud imparts profound moral teachings about how to read the characters of a text and, ultimately, how to regard the people in our lives.
September 10, 2026
From Sun to Sun by Kenneth Wishnia
From Sun to Sun presents two parallel stories separated by 25 centuries. The first is set in modern New York City, featuring a hard-working smart-mouthed Latina investigator, Felicity Ortega Pérez, as she hunts for a missing person who holds the clue to an ancient mystery.
The ancient story is a radical revision of the biblical Book of Ruth. When her husband dies under strange circumstances, Ruth must join the exiles returning to Jerusalem to rebuild the Temple in order to secure a future for herself and her grieving mother-in-law, Naomi. Unfortunately, the returning exiles include religious leaders who plan to “purify” the land by expelling all the foreign women.
October 8, 2026
Jewish Noir II by Kenneth Wishnia
Jewish Noir II is unique collection of twenty-three all-new stories (and one reprint) by Jewish and non-Jewish literary and genre writers, including numerous award-winning authors such as Gabriela Alemán, Doug Allyn, Rita Lakin, Rabbi Ilene Schneider, E.J. Wagner, and Kenneth Wishnia, with a foreword by MWA Grand Master Lawrence Block. The stories explore such issues as the perpetual challenge of confronting resurgent anti-Semitism in the US, the enduring legacy of regional warfare in the land of Israel since biblical times, how the “entitled” behavior of certain ultra-Orthodox communities can fuel anti-Semitic attitudes, Jewish support of the civil rights movement, greedy Jewish businessmen who reinforce negative ethnic stereotypes, the excesses of “golden ghetto” American Jews, the appeal of “tough” Israeli-Jewish soldiers and mercenaries, how real estate fortunes are made, and the consequences of political corruption that feed into an exploitive system, how obsession can lead “good” people to do “bad” things. The stories in this collection include many “teachable moments” about the history of prejudice, and the contradictions of ethnic identity and assimilation into American society.
November 12, 2026
The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt: A Tyranny of Truth by Ken Krimstein
One of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth century and a hero of political thought, the largely unsung and often misunderstood Hannah Arendt is best known for her landmark 1951 book on openness in political life, The Origins of Totalitarianism, which, with its powerful and timely lessons for today, has become newly relevant.
December 10, 2026
I Made It Out of Clay by Beth Kander
With her younger sister’s wedding rapidly approaching, Eve is on the verge of panic. She can’t bear to attend the event alone. That’s when she recalls a strange story her Yiddish grandmother once told her, about a protector forged of desperation…and Eve, to her own shock, manages to create a golem.
