Jewish Genre Reading Challenge discussion

It's the final month of the 2024 Jewish Genre Challenge! Thank you so much to everyone who has joined us throughout the year to share your reading and talk about books.

We very much hope you'll join us for 2025 as we keep reading more Jewish books! There will be some new prompts and hopefully a whole new crop of wonderful Jewish genre books, as well as the hundreds of existing books waiting in our database to become your next read.

We're thinking about the best way to structure the community part of the challenge next year - please take this poll and let us know your thoughts! We welcome any feedback here in this thread as well, about any aspect of the JGC project.

Link to poll: https://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/3...

Has anyone else completed the challenge so far? I was very happy to post my completed Genre and Prompts challenges in the Challenge Completion Party!

Remember just 4 books from different genres is the minimum it takes to complete the challenge. Only two books need to be what we think of as "genre fiction," the other two can be, for example, a cookbook, a book of poems, a children's book.

Another reminder that the 6 prompts of the Prompts challenge do NOT need to be filled by reading 6 different books! One historical fiction book you read this year might have covered 3 or 4 prompts by itself.

Think over your Jewish reading this year and see if you might be able to taste that sweet sweet challenge completion victory already!

If you do realize you fulfilled the challenge and want to show off on social media, our challenge tracker posts are here - just paste on your book covers and let the world know about your big year of Jewish reading! https://www.readjewishly.com/challeng...

I think I made it at least part way!
I definitely managed a few poetry books by Jewish authors this year!
I read Goyhood, and Jennifer Friedman Lang's memoir Landed.
I learned about the Jewish Genre reading challenge somewhat late in the year, but I hope to take part more regularly in 2025.

Tree wrote: "I think I made it at least part way!
I definitely managed a few poetry books by Jewish authors this year!
I read Goyhood, and Jennifer Friedman Lang's memoir Landed.
I learned about the Jewish Ge..."

Amazing! What were your favourite books by Jewish poets you read this year? And I'd like to read some more Jewish poetry so if you have recommendations I'd love to hear them!

And what did you think of Goyhood?

Hi Sophie, here are a few poetry recommendations for you:

Yerra Sugarman’s Aunt Bird
Jessica Jacob’s’ Unalone
Elisheva Fox’s spellbook for the sabbath queen
Yehoshua November’s The Concealment of Endless Light

I hit Post too soon!
I thought Goyhood was ok. It definitely had some humorous moments and I liked the idea of the story, but it had some elements I thought were over the top.

I’m wholly incapable of picking a favorite poetry book, but any of the ones I recommended are ones I enjoyed very much for different reasons.