The Ner Shalom Book Club

Join us as we explore the wonderful world of Jewish literature, non-fiction, and Jewish authors.

We look forward to discussing these books in person

If you are not on the ner shalom email list and would like to be, sign up here.

For more information on our Book Club, please contact Amy Gray.

2026 Book Club Picks

January 8 @ 3 pm
A Guide for the Perplexed - Dara Horn

Software prodigy Josie Ashkenazi has invented an application that records everything its users do. When she visits the Library of Alexandria as a tech consultant, she is abducted in Egypt’s post-revolutionary chaos with only a copy of the philosopher Maimonides’ famous work to anchor her—leaving her jealous sister Judith free to take over her life. A century earlier, Cambridge professor Solomon Schechter arrives in Egypt, hunting for a medieval archive hidden in a Cairo synagogue. Their stories intertwine in this spellbinding novel of how technology changes memory and how memory shapes the soul.

February 5 @ 3 pm
Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging - Angela Buchdahl

From the first Asian American to be ordained as a rabbi, a stirring account of one woman’s journey from feeling like an outsider to becoming one of the most admired religious leaders in the world.

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.

March 5 @ 3 pm
Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life – Pamela Reitman

Charlotte Salomon Paints Her Life is historical fiction inspired by the life and work of a young German-Jewish art student at The Berlin Fine Arts Academy. In 1938 she was robbed of her First-Place contest prize because she was a Jew. Following that humiliation, her enrollment was annulled. After Kristallnacht, she was sent from Berlin into exile with her grandparents on the Côte d’Azur, where she embarked on the making of her masterpiece, “Life? Or Theater?” She produces over 1000 paintings telling the story of a coming-of-age during Hitler’s rise to power and a coming-to-terms with a legacy of familial suicide, including her own mother. Charlotte will not be deterred from completing her masterpiece. Then she risks her life to make sure it will endure beyond her short life before she is captured by the Nazis.

This is a story about the courage to create under dire circumstances and the power of art to transform trauma.

April 2 @ 3 pm
The Jew in the Lotus - Rodger Kamenentz

While accompanying eight high–spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist–Jewish dialogue with the Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought. Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists. This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots.

May 7 @ 3 pm
The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights - Kitty Zeidis 

“A haunting meditation on the bonds between mothers and daughters. Zeldis offers a fascinating look into historic New York City and New Orleans, and her skill as a storyteller is matched by her compassion for her characters. What a beautiful read.”—Fiona Davis, New York Times bestselling author of The Magnolia Palace “By turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, Kitty Zeldis’s The Dressmakers of Prospect Heights, set against the backdrop of the not-always-so-roaring Twenties, is an only-in- America story of reinvention, rising above tragedy, and finding family.”—Lauren Willig, New York Times bestselling author of Band of Sisters

June 4 @ 3 pm
As a Jew: Reclaiming Our Story from Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us – Sarah Hurwitz

An urgent exploration of how antisemitism has shaped Jewish identity and how Jews can reclaim their tradition, by the celebrated White House speechwriter and author of the critically acclaimed Here All Along. At thirty-six, Sarah Hurwitz was a typical lapsed Jew. On a whim, she attended an introduction to Judaism class and was astonished by what she discovered: thousands of years of wisdom from her ancestors about what it means to be human. That class sparked a journey of discovery that transformed her life.

July 2 @ 3 pm
Street Dreams - Faye Kellerman

Detective Peter Decker teams up with his wife and daughter to solve a crime rooted in both the past and present. While on routine patrol, LAPD Officer Cindy Decker rescues a newborn abandoned in an alley dumpster. But she can’t call it a night until she sees the infant safe in a hospital, cared for by a professional -- in this case a male nurse with soulful eyes and lots of charm.

Now the hunt is on for the mother. Armed with advice from her overworked father, Detective Peter Decker, Cindy plunges into her inner-city Hollywood district, a world of helpless people and violent gangs. Pursuing each new lead batters her complex relationships and endangers her life.

August 6 @ 3 pm
Spies of No Country: Secret Lives at the Birth of Israel - Matti Friedman

Award-winning writer Matti Friedman’s tale of Israel’s first spies has all the tropes of an espionage novel, including duplicity, betrayal, disguise, clandestine meetings, the bluff, and the double bluff - but it’s all true.

The four spies at the center of this story were part of a ragtag unit known as the Arab Section, conceived during World War II by British spies and Jewish militia leaders in Palestine. Intended to gather intelligence and carry out sabotage and assassinations, the unit consisted of Jews who were native to the Arab world and could thus easily assume Arab identities. In 1948, with Israel’s existence in the balance during the War of Independence, our spies went undercover in Beirut, where they spent the next two years operating out of a kiosk, collecting intelligence, and sending messages back to Israel via a radio whose antenna was disguised as a clothesline.

September 3 @ 3 pm
An Unorthodox Match - Naomi Ragen

An Unorthodox Match is a powerful and moving novel of faith, love, and acceptance, from author Naomi Ragen, the international best-selling author of The Devil in Jerusalem.

California girl Lola has her life all set up: business degree, handsome fiancé, fast track career, when suddenly, without warning, everything tragically implodes. After years fruitlessly searching for love, marriage, and children, she decides to take the radical step of seeking spirituality and meaning far outside the parameters of modern life in the insular, ultraorthodox enclave of Boro Park, Brooklyn. 

October 1 @ 3 pm
The Hebrew Priestess: Ancient and New Visions of Jewish Women’s Spiritual Leadership -
Jill Hammer and Taya Shere

It has been barely 40 years since rabbinical seminaries began ordaining women as rabbis. But women have played a role in Jewish religious leadership from the days of the Bible and even before. Miriam the Prophetess and Deborah the Judge are just the two most prominent of these women, most of whose names are lost to history. The Hebrew Priestess tells the stories of these women, often reading between the lines of the Bible and Talmud to rediscover the women that rabbinic editors tried to erase.

November 5 @ 3 pm
Fagin the Thief - Alison Epstein

A thrilling reimagining of the world of Charles Dickens, as seen through the eyes of the infamous Jacob Fagin, London’s most gifted pickpocket, liar, and rogue.

“Fagin the Thief takes one of literature’s greatest rogues and gives him a soul, a backstory, and a spotlight. Layered and clever, Epstein’s story is as ambitious as it is deeply satisfying.” --Rebecca Makkai, New York Times bestselling author of I Have Some Questions for You.”

Dec 3 @ 3 pm
Choose books for 2027!