I want to recommend two books for the fall Jewish holidays, or indeed any season. One book is new, the other an Israeli classic. Both offer a much-needed invitation: to set aside our tendency to intellectualize Jewishness and to view Israel through the two-dimensional lens of politics.

Instead, they approach Israel and Jewishness through a far more elemental and mysterious lens: What has kept us together as a people? And what keeps us attached to that tiny parcel of land in the Middle East and especially one city within it, Jerusalem? 

The first book is political theorist Shivi Greenfield’s A Jewish Tale of Love: On Defiance, Meaning, and the Fate of a People (Wicked Son), published in August. The book bludgeons us with provocative ideas from the start. Greenfield describes how the existential crisis Jews are facing today has less to do with loss of physical security and far more with the loss of love. Words like “identity” and “peoplehood,” he writes, do not get to the heart of the problem. Why does being part of the Jewish story no longer exert a pull on so many Jews? In other words, where has the love gone?

The paradox Greenfield identifies is striking. He discusses how, for much of Jewish history, Jews have faced an unimaginably high cost for being Jewish, and yet, he writes, many “loved their Jewishness more fiercely than life itself.”

This passionate, devotional love—of Jewishness, of other Jews, of God—survived exile, persecution, expulsion and catastrophe. It was a “living, breathing force” and a “vital, defiant energy” that made Jewishness something worth holding onto even when doing so could cost everything.

The fading of that fierce love in recent decades, Greenfield argues, threatens us more than any crisis we face from without. What persecution failed to extinguish over centuries could disappear through indifference today. A Jewish Tale of Love is an impassioned examination of that Jewish love, how it sustained us for millennia, why we are losing it and how we can reignite it. 

My second recommendation, the Israeli classic, is a work of fiction, Mr. Mani, by Israeli literary giant A.B. Yehoshua, who passed away in 2022. The novel explores some of the same questions as A Jewish Tale of Love, about connection to and love of Jewishness and the Land of Israel, but through the lens of a sweeping, multigenerational saga. 

In many ways, the novel, which Yehoshua published in 1990, is a love song to Jerusalem. At its center is a Sephardic family, the Manis, that has been connected to the city for generations—living there, leaving it for Basel, Athens, and Vienna, returning to it and carrying it with them when they go again. We see Jerusalem through multiple eyes, both Jewish and non-Jewish, as individual stories unfold across the 19th and 20th centuries and the great historical events and upheavals of those times.

Through these stories, Jerusalem arises as sacred and profane, magnetic and mundane, shabby and irresistible—a place of redemption and of ordinary life, filled with births and burials, attachments and rifts, shopping for spices and endless complaints about the weather. The Jerusalem snowstorm seems to be its own character in the book.

Throughout it all, we are left grappling with the same enduring mystery: Why do Jews long for Jerusalem? Why do they keep carrying it with them in the Diaspora?  Why do they so often feel torn between the two places?

In Mr. Mani, Jerusalem is always there, holding up a little flickering candle even to those far away. For those answering Jerusalem’s call and taking up its promise, Mr. Mani has good advice: Don’t forget to bring warm clothes—and a ton of patience.

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Izabella Tabarovsky is a scholar of Soviet antizionism and contemporary antisemitism, the author of Be A Refusenik: A Jewish Student’s Survival Guide, and a sought-after speaker and lecturer.  She is a fellow with the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, DC; senior fellow with the Z3 Institute for Jewish Priorities in Palo Alto; and a fellow with the London Centre for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism and the Comper Center for the Study of Antisemitism and Racism at the University of Haifa. Tabarovsky grew up in Novosibirsk, Siberia, and immigrated to the United States from the USSR with her family in 1990. She now lives in Jerusalem.