WJC Book Café 2025-2026

The Hendel Library proudly offers a year of literary delights for you to explore new Jewish titles through the National Jewish Book Council. Pop in to one, any, or all book club-like experiences. Each conversation is paired with thematic edible delicacies! Open to all WJC readers!

Please RSVP for each session at librarian@wjcenter.org

Spoiler alert: you don’t have to read the book to enjoy attending!

**Events begin at 7:45 except for June’s program, which will be held at 10:00 am.

Mothers and Other Characters: A Memoir in Essays by Nicole Graev Lipson

In this intimate and riveting memoir, essayist Lipson breaks through the ready-made stories of womanhood, rescuing truth from the fiction that infiltrates our lives…it is a love letter to our forgotten selves-and the ones we’re still becoming.

Melting Point by Rachel Cockerell

On June 7, 1907, a ship packed with Russian Jews set sail not to Jerusalem or New York, as many on board had dreamt, but to Texas. They are led by Rachel Cockerell’s great-grandfather, David Jochelmann. This is the beginning of the Galveston Plan, a forgotten moment in American history when ten thousand Jews fled to Texas in the lead-up to World War I. Cockerell weaves together diaries, letters, newspaper articles, and interviews to create a new form of non-fiction.

Sisters of Fortune by Esther Chehebar

Jane Austen’s com­e­dy of man­ners fol­lowed the for­tunes of the five Ben­net sis­ters in rur­al Eng­land at the turn of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry. Chehe­bar sets hers in the gos­sipy, tight-knit Syr­i­an Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ty in Brook­lyn in the ear­ly 2000s, where the three Cohen sis­ters — Nina, For­tune, and Lucy — are wrestling with momen­tous decisions.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

In 1980, a wealthy businessman named Carl Fletcher was kidnapped from his driveway, brutalized, and held for ransom. He is returned to his wife and kids less than a week later, only slightly worse, and the family moved on with their lives, resuming their prized places in the saga of the American dream. But now, nearly forty years later, it’s clear that perhaps nobody ever got over anything, after all.

Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi’s Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging by Rabbi Angela Buchdahl

Part mem­oir, part ser­mon col­lec­tion, Heart of a Stranger tells the sto­ry of Rabbi/Cantor Angela Buch­dahl. The daugh­ter of a Kore­an Bud­dhist moth­er and an Amer­i­can Jew­ish father, Buch­dahl traces the many twists and turns she took to find her way to becom­ing the Senior Rab­bi of Cen­tral Syn­a­gogue, one of the most promi­nent and inno­v­a­tive Jew­ish com­mu­ni­ties in the Unit­ed States.