101 Great Jewish Books

A catalog of the works that shape the Jewish mind in America today

Welcome to Tablet's list of 101 Great Jewish Books--works that, taken together, define the living Jewish cultural inheritance in America today.

Before we explain what the list is, we should tell you what it’s not: It’s not a list of “The Greatest Jewish Books of All Time,” an undertaking that would involve sifting through thousands of texts in dozens of languages produced over the course of millennia and that could only result in either a Cecil B. DeMille-like cast of thousands or a list with one entry: the Bible. What we wanted to create was a library of works that have actually moved us and shaped the way we understand ourselves as Jewish human beings in the world. We read some of these books as children; some we read under our covers as teenagers; some we got off college syllabi; some we discovered, with wonder and awe and surprise, as adults. But all are books of supreme importance in shaping our lives and our understanding of the different ways one might be a Jew in the world—whether the authors are religious Jews, or secular Jews, or not Jewish by your definition or someone else’s definition, or by any definition at all.

When it came to organizing the list, we thought about what these books meant to us and soon came up with the metaphor of the human mind. Just as each one of the brains individual lobes is useless except as a part of the grander whole, these categories, too, are meant to serve not as hard barriers but rather as points of connection and contemplation. More than a few decisions here will raise eyebrows—why, for example, is Portnoy’s Complaint filed not under the Laughing & Complaining category but under Appetites? Why is Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl not in Suffering & Loss? The answer in all cases is that we tried to place each book according to what felt for us to be its most generative material. Some of you, we know, will disagree, and others will question the very categories themselves. That, we think, is exactly the point of putting out lists.

In order to be included, a book had to meet three requirements:

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