Judaism-- The Essential Books
Discover the essential books of Judaism with our curated list. Explore sacred texts, commentaries, and key works that define Jewish faith, tradition, and scholarship.
Book
The Devil and the Jews
by Joshua Trachtenberg
A JPS bestseller, this is the definitive work of scholarship on the medieval conception of the Jew as devil--literally and figuratively. Through documents, analysis, and illustrations, the book exposes the full spectrum of the Jew's demonization as devil, sorcerer, and ritual murderer. The author reveals how these myths, many with origins traced to Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages, still exist in transmuted form in the modern era.
Book
My Name Is Asher Lev
by Chaim Potok
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this modern classic from the National Book Award–nominated author of The Chosen, a young religious artist is compulsively driven to render the world he sees and feels, even when it leads him to blasphemy. “A novel of finely articulated tragic power .... Little short of a work of genius.”—The New York Times Book Review Asher Lev is a Ladover Hasid who keeps kosher, prays three times a day and believes in the Ribbono Shel Olom, the Master of the Universe. He grows up in a cloistered Hasidic community in postwar Brooklyn, a world suffused by ritual and revolving around a charismatic Rebbe. He is torn between two identities, the one consecrated to God, the other devoted only to art and his imagination, and in time, his artistic gift threatens to estrange him from that world and the parents he adores. As it follows his struggle, My Name Is Asher Lev becomes a luminous, visionary portrait of the artist, by turns heartbreaking and exultant.
