As we begin 2025 with much uncertainty, there’s no better remedy than exploring new realms between the covers of a new book. These books enable readers to learn new things about Judaism or new ways of cooking delicious food, or to gain an appreciation of classic texts or empathy for the struggles of others who are not like you. Here are six books with manifold types of wisdom by Jewish women published this past year to carry you through the new one.
Shred Sisters by Betsy Lerner
Betsy Lerner, the author of two memoirs and a book of writing advice entitled The Forest for the Trees, has now written her first novel, Shred Sisters. In it, she chronicles a Jewish family whose oldest daughter Olivia lives with mental illness, and the book exhibits how her behavior impacts all four family members. The story is told from the perspective of the youngest sister, Amy, who is continually bewildered and enchanted by Olivia’s antics, such as the opening scene of Olivia’s crash through the living room picture window, about which she subsequently jokes that the shards of glass and bleeding make her look like “a giant tampon.” Though the subject can be grim, the writing and descriptions keep a reader’s interest. Fascinatingly, Lerner told The New York Times that she is an amalgam of both sisters, the “normal” one and the mentally ill one, because she received a bipolar diagnosis in her twenties and has managed the condition with medication for decades. Though classic works like William Styron’s Darkness Visible or Kay Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind develop understanding of patients’ experiences, this fictional work enables a perspective on mental illness as it affects all four of the family members.
Displaced Persons by Joan Leegant
Acclaimed short story writer Joan Leegant is back with her second collection, Displaced Persons, whose stories are set partly in Israel – where she was a visiting writer at Bar Ilan University for five years. The stories are clever and their humor is Jewishly specific: In one story, the father of a woman getting divorced tries to make her feel better by joking, “What’s the difference between a nasty divorce and a circumcision? In a divorce, you get to cut off the whole prick.” The story “Wonder Women” is about how two women of different generations, displaced from their families in different ways, form an unlikely bond. Read to gain understanding of how families both fracture and come together, told with humor.
Food, Hope and Resilience: Authentic Recipes and Remarkable Stories from Holocaust Survivors by June Hersh
June Hersh’s most recent cookbook Food, Hope and Resilience: Authentic Recipes and Remarkable Stories from Holocaust Survivors blends culinary history, personal history, and recipes for a fascinating and inspirational read, drawing on some of the themes in her five previous books. Survivors from Poland, Germany and Austria, Belgium and France, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, Romania, Russia and Ukraine, and Greece tell their stories and share the food traditions of their families and communities. The recipes reflect both the cooks’ native lands and their journeys fleeing Nazi persecution. Especially moving are the stories of specific memories of eating the featured recipes. Dr. Judita Hruza grew up in Hungary, then fled to Sweden, finally landing in the U.S., where she was a practicing pediatrician. She wrote of being sent to clean a house as part of her forced labor duties at a work camp in Austria. A woman there was cooking a dish of onions, potatoes, and pasta and gave a portion to Hruza. Judita writes, “Although this is a dish I associate with a terrible part of my life, I continued to make it after the war because I have such a strong memory of enjoying it that day.” For her, cooking food from difficult memories is a way of taking control of the past, when she lacked agency. As one of the contributors, Evelyn Seroy, writes: “I want to leave something so others will know my mother and father were here.”
Uncovered: Women’s Roles, Mitzvot, and Sexuality in Jewish Law by Nechama Goldman Barash
As she says in her introduction to Uncovered: Women’s Roles, Mitzvot, and Sexuality in Jewish Law, American-Israeli Talmud scholar Nechama Goldman Barash, mother to four daughters, has a reason for writing: “This book is the answer to my daughters and to my students who often ask me why I stay committed to Orthodoxy. As an Orthodox woman and a feminist, my values are based on intellectual critique and religious belief, coupled with halachic practice. In essence, my dedication to halakhic observance is informed by the questions I ask and the answers I seek.” The book is organized in sections such as “Does Gender Matter?” “Women and Torah Study: A Beit Midrash of Their Own,” “The Voice of a Woman,” and “Wearing Pants in the Community.” Wherever you fall on the spectrum of Jewish observance, Goldman Barash’s careful rendering of a plenitude of sources of Jewish law in English translation, along with analysis, will enable you to see how those upholding both halachic and feminist values have many sources backing their approach. Goldman Barash is a long-time teacher, and her careful exposition is the result of her remarkable ability to explain sources in clear and understandable language.
Why Rain Comes from Above: Explorations in Religious Imagination by Devora Steinmetz
Dr. Devora Steinmetz has also been a teacher and writer for many years, and her book Why Rain Comes from Above: Explorations in Religious Imagination (Hadar Press, 2024) enables those not able to physically be in her classroom at Hebrew College in Boston to benefit from her fascinating teaching. Steinmetz holds a Ph.D. in literature, and her approach to Jewish texts reflects this literary sensibility. She wants to encourage the reader to experience religious imagination, which she defines as “allowing ourselves to step inside the stories, images, and teachings that our texts and tefillot offer, and open ourselves to the experiences and awareness that make themselves available to us.” She writes of the work of building the tabernacle, “Entering into these stories, we are invited to imagine not only the work from which we were freed – the work of our enslavement — but also the kinds of work in which we engaged during our journey from enslavement to freedom and the kinds of work to which we might choose to dedicate ourselves today.” Her sophisticated literary approach to classical Jewish texts will help you develop your imagination, trying on the “as-if experience” she writes about.
The Madwoman in the Rabbi’s Attic: Rereading the Women of the Talmud by Gila Fine
Begun as a session at the Limmud conference in England, Fine’s book takes a unique approach in using familiar female archetypes – the “shrew,” the “femme fatale,” the “prima donna,” the “Madonna/Whore,” the “overachieverix,” and the “angel in the house” – to showcase how rabbinic literature both upholds and subverts these types. What Fine does well is defamiliarizing the familiar. For example, her analysis of the Victorian phrase “angel in the house” (which she illustrates with an animation still from the movie “Snow White”) analyzes the famous text about the oven of Akhnai (Bava Metzia 59a-b) as a male character depicted as the “angel in the house.” Fine writes, “The implications of this gender reversal are radical. In identifying Rabbi Eliezer with the angel in the house, and his confinement to the private sphere as the source of his onaa [“wrong”], there is an unspoken acknowledgment of the deprivation that is the lot of women everywhere.” She summarizes the message of this subversion: “If a man, cast in the role of the angel in the house, finds his rejection from the beit midrash deeply painful – a pain that devastates him and nearly destroys the world – then, we must assume, this is true for all angels in all houses.” This deeply learned and well-analyzed look at classical Jewish texts has a fresh take, helping the texts to continue to impart meaning in our world and to anchor our sensibilities.
Read one or all, by yourself or with a book club, but be sure to avail yourself of these Jewish women’s wisdom now available in print. Happy reading in 2025!

Beth Kissileff is the co-editor of the anthology Bound in the Bond of Life: Pittsburgh Writers Reflect on the Tree of Life Tragedy, author of the novel Questioning Return and the editor of the anthology Reading Genesis. Her writing has appeared in the Atlantic, Michigan Quarterly Review, New York Times, Tablet, the Forward, 929English and Haaretz, among others. Visit her online at www.bethkissileff.com.