Enjoy good literature among good company! Join the inaugural WJC Book Cafe for book discussions, themed snacks and annual author visits.
This year more than ever, we’ve been seeking meaning, community, and understanding within a Jewish framework. Join WJC for a new adventure: WJC’s Book Cafe. Tri-annually we will come together to explore a new book through discussion, tasting foods themed to the book, and even an annual authors visit! It is not necessary to have read the book to take part in these enriching cultural events. At a moment of challenges to Jewish authors who are losing tours and spaces to advertise, WJC is proud to support and celebrate excellent Jewish literature. Join us for one, two or all three books of our 2024-2025 series! For the inaugural 2024-2025 season, the WJC Book Café has selected the following books:
Dec. 11, 2024 at 7:45 pm – Mitch Albom, The Little Liar
Albom’s new novel focuses on eleven-year-old Nico Krispis who has never told a lie. When the Nazi’s invade his home in Salonika, Greece, the trustworthy boy is discovered by a German officer, who offers him a chance to save his family. All Nico must do is convince his fellow Jewish residents to board trains heading to “new homes” where they are promised jobs and safety. Unaware that this is all a cruel ruse, the innocent boy goes to the station platform every day and reassures the passengers that the journey is safe. But when the final train is at the station, Nico sees his family being loaded into a large boxcar crowded with other neighbors. Only after it is too late does Nico discover that he helped send the people he loved–and all the others–to their doom at Auschwitz…and as the decades pass, Nico never tells the ruth again.
Jan 29, 2025 at 7:45 pm – Ayelet Tzabari – Songs for the Brokenhearted
It is 1950 and thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha’ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren’t supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man. It is now 1995 and thirty-something Zohara, Saida’s daughter, has been living in New York City—a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing that her skin was lighter, that her illiterate mother’s Yemeni music was quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. Rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie. When Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket. Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family—including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future.
April 2, 2025 at 7:45 pm – Reuven Fenton – Goyhood. THE AUTHOR WILL BE JOINING US FOR THIS DISCUSSION!
A debut novel about a devoutly Orthodox Jewish man who discovers in middle age that he’s not, in fact, Jewish, and embarks on a remarkable road trip to come to grips with his fate. When Mayer (née Marty) Belkin fled small-town Georgia for Brooklyn nearly thirty years ago, he thought he’d left his wasted youth behind. Now he’s a Talmud scholar married into one of the greatest rabbinical families in the world – a dirt-poor country boy reinvented in the image of God. But his mother’s untimely death brings a shocking revelation: Mayer and his ne’er-do-well twin brother David aren’t, in fact, Jewish. Traumatized and spiritually bereft, Mayer’s only recourse is to convert to Judaism. But the earliest date he can get is a week from now. What are two estranged brothers to do in the interim? So begins the Belkins’ journey through America’s Deep South with Mom’s ashes in tow, plus two tagalongs: an insightful Instagram influencer named Charlayne Valentine and Popeye, a one-eyed dog. As the crew gets tangled up in a series of increasingly surreal adventures, Mayer grapples with a God who betrayed him and an emotionally withdrawn wife in Brooklyn who has yet to learn her husband is a counterfeit Jew.
This year’s selections will take us from the horrors of the Holocaust through the eyes of a young boy who carries an enormous burden throughout his life, to a young Yemenite woman whose actions at the dawn of the establishment of the State of Israel lead to shocking truths about her family, and finally to a young man who has lived his life as Orthodox only to find himself grappling with a God that he feels has betrayed him.