Jewish Genre Reading Challenge discussion

Welcome, everyone, to the 2025 Jewish Genre Reading Challenge! We're so happy to have you here and excited to talk books with you.

This thread is solely for announcements from the group mods.

Thanks to everyone who participated in 2024, and welcome to all the newcomers here to make 2025 a year of reading jewishly.

There are a couple things that will be different here in our Goodreads group this time around:

1. The Genre Challenge remains the same as it did in 2024, however the Prompts challenge has been updated with new prompts. This year we have five pairs of related prompts, and you can choose to either fulfill one from each pair of prompts, or really go for it and fulfill all ten! We're calling it the This & That challenge, and we hope it will be a lot of fun.

2. We're going to try just having a single Book Chat thread this year, to allow for more continuity. Last year some conversations towards the end of the month ended up getting truncated when we would switch to a new monthly thread. The Genre of the Month will still be posted there monthly, so just check back there at the start of the month to read that post.

Polling update: Participants from the 2024 challenge who voted in our poll to determine our 2025 community hub were about evenly split between preferring Goodreads and Facebook. Our Facebook group definitely got off to a rough start last year because I started out making it private so the links to it were all broken (oops!). But it's up and running now, so anyone who prefers to talk about the challenge and their reading throughout the year is welcome to make that your Jewish Genre Challenge home. https://www.facebook.com/groups/96435...

The Goodreads book lists for the 2025 This & That Challenge have been created! Each still only has a few books on it so please feel free to add any book that fits the relevant prompt. Please make sure each book you add has a Jewish main character. Jewish authors, particularly authors of speculative fiction, write many books that don't have Jewish main characters. We love and support all Jewish genre authors, but only books with Jewish MCs can be used to fulfill the Jewish Genre Reading Challenges.

You can find links to all the This & That book lists here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/...

Please take note that Prompt 3 has changed from when the This & That challenge was initially published.

The former prompt pair was "Read a book with a Sephardi or Mizrahi main character + Read a book with a Maghrebi, Beta Israel, Bene Israel, or Bukharan main character."

The new prompt pair is "3. Read a book featuring a Jewish food you've never tasted + Read book featuring a main character from a place you've never been."

This change was made because we wanted readers to have a wider selection to choose from. If you want to follow one or both of the original Prompt 3 pair, you are totally welcome to, your challenge will be considered valid, and you will probably get a big high five!