Jewish American Heritage - Young Adults

Created on May 19, 2021, 3:28 pm

Last Updated June 5, 2025, 10:20 am

May is Jewish American Heritage Month. For more information, see https://jewishamericanheritage.org/. For winners of the Sydney Taylor Book Award and lists of current and past winners, see https://jewishlibraries.org/sydney_taylor_book_award/. The Sydney Taylor Book Award, administered by the Association of Jewish Libraries, an affiliate of the American Library Association (ALA), is named in memory of the classic All-of-a-Kind Family series author Sydney Taylor. The award recognizes titles for children and teens that exemplify high literary standards while authentically portraying the Jewish experience.

1) Amelia, If Only

Author

Albertalli, Becky

Description

Amelia Applebaum isn't in love with Walter Holland. He just happens to be her favorite moderately famous, chaotically bisexual YouTuber. Who she just happened to invite to prom. (But it's fine. No, for real. If you delete the post, it didn't happen.)

Okay, maybe her friends are right: She's slightly parasocially infatuated. But Amelia just knows sparks would fly--if only she could connect with Walter for real.

If

...

2) Forbidden book

Author

Formats:

Book - New - 14 Days, eBook

Description

"On the night before her wedding, 17-year-old Sorel leaps from a window and runs away from her life. To keep from being discovered, she takes on the male identity of Isser Jacobs -- but it soon becomes clear that there is a real Isser Jacobs, and people want him dead. Her mistaken identity takes Sorel into the dark underworld of her small city in the Pale of Settlement, where smugglers, forgers, and wicked angels fight for control of the Jewish community....

3) The diary of a young girl: the definitive edition

Author

Formats:

Book, Playaway, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"This definitive edition, featuring a new translation, is the diary as Anne Frank wrote it, containing entries about her burgeoning sexuality and confrontations with her mother that were cut from previous editions. Frank's diary is among the most enduring documents of the twentieth century."--|cProvided by publisher.

4) Song of a blackbird

Author

Van Lieshout, Maria

Description

"In 1943 Amsterdam, Emma Bergsma's world changes when she witnesses Jewish families being forcibly deported to concentration camps. That pivotal moment lights a fire within her, and she decides to join the Dutch Resistance. Before long, Emma is drawn into a clandestine world of printing presses and counterfeiters, with thousands of lives on the line. In 2011 Amsterdam, teenage Annick's world has changed as well. A search for a bone marrow donor for...

Author

Formats:

Book - New - 14 Days, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"Clara loves rules. Rules are what have kept her and her sister, Molly, alive -- or, rather, undead -- for over a century. Work their historic movie theater by day. Shift into an owl under the cover of night. Feed on men in secret. And never fall in love. Molly is in love. And she's tired of keeping her girlfriend, Anat, a secret. If Clara won't agree to bend their rules a little, then she will bend them herself. Boaz is cursed. He can't walk two...

6) A world worth saving

Author

Description

After coming out as trans, fourteen-year-old A is forced to attend weekly Save Our Sons and Daughters meetings, where he uncovers the terrifying truth that the group is run by a demon feeding on their pain and is part of a larger, darker force preying on the world's vulnerable.

7) The judgment of Yoyo Gold

Author

Description

"Yoyo Gold has always played the role of the perfect Jewish daughter. She keeps kosher, looks after her siblings, and volunteers at the local food bank. She respects the decisions of her rabbi father and encourages her friends to observe the rules of their Orthodox faith. But when she sees her best friend cast out of the community over a seemingly innocent transgression, Yoyo's eyes are opened to the truth of her neighbors' hypocrisies for the first...

8) The ballerina of Auschwitz

Author

Eger, Edith Eva

Description

"Edie is a talented dancer and skilled gymnast with hopes of making the Olympics. Between her rigorous training and her struggle to find her place in a family where she's considered the daughter "with brains but no looks," Edie's too busy to dwell on the state of the world. But life in Hungary in 1943 is dangerous for a Jewish girl. Just as Edie falls in love for the first time, Europe collapses into war, and Edie's family is forced onto a train bound...

9) The Bletchley riddle

Author

Formats:

Book, Playaway, eBook, Kindle

Description

"This middle grade historical adventure follows two siblings at Bletchley Park, the home of WWII codebreakers, as they try to unravel a mystery surrounding their mother's disappearance."-- From publisher description.

10) Diary of a dying girl

Author

Formats:

Description

"Mallory Smith shares her innermost thoughts while living with a terminal illness"-- Provided by publisher.

11) Time and time again

Author

Greenfield, Chatham

Series

Reese's Book Club LitUp

Description

Stuck in a time loop, queer Jewish teens Phoebe and Jess start to fall for each other, causing chronically ill Phoebe to worry about a future that may never come.

12) The girl who sang: a holocaust memoir of hope and survival

Author

Description

"A heartrending graphic memoir about a young Jewish girl's fight for survival in Nazi occupied Poland, The Girl Who Sang illustrates the power of a brother's love, the kindness of strangers, and finding hope when facing the unimaginable." -- Publisher annotation.

Author

Gordon, Cambria

Series

Formats:

Book, Playaway, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"As the United States enters World War II, seventeen-year-old Eleanor wants to do something to help her Jewish relatives in Poland, so she puts her brilliant math skills to work for the US army to fine-tune a top-secret weapon that will help defeat the enemy"-- Provided by publisher.

14) Impossible escape: a true story of survival and heroism in Nazi Europe

Author

Sheinkin, Steve

Description

"A true story of two Jewish teenagers racing against time during the Holocaust: one in hiding in Hungary, and the other in Auschwitz, plotting escape"-- Provided by publisher.

15) Courage to dream: tales of hope in the Holocaust

Author

Shusterman, Neal

Series

Courage to Dream

Formats:

Graphic Novels & Manga, eComic

Description

"Courage to Dream plunges readers into the darkest time of human history-the Holocaust. This graphic novel explores one of the greatest atrocities in modern memory, delving into the core of what it means to face the extinction of everything and everyone you hold dear. This gripping, multifaceted tapestry is woven from Jewish folklore and cultural history. Five interlocking narratives explore one common story--the tradition of resistance and uplift....

16) The boy who followed his father into Auschwitz: a true story retold for young readers

Author

Dronfield, Jeremy

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

In 1939, Gustav Kleinmann, a Jewish upholsterer in Vienna, was seized by the Nazis. Along with his teenage son Fritz, he was sent to Buchenwald in Germany. There began an unimaginable ordeal that saw the pair beaten, starved, and forced to build the very concentration camp they were held in. When Gustav was set to be transferred to Auschwitz--a certain death sentence--Fritz refused to leave his side. Throughout the horrors they witnessed and the suffering...

17) Hour of need: the daring escape of the Danish Jews during World War II

Author

Description

"In the Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale, legend had it that if danger ever come to Denmark, the mighty warrior Holger Danske promised to wake from his centuries-long slumber to protect its citizens. When the Nazis move to round up young Mette and her fellow Danish Jews in a surprise raid in 1943 after years of letting Denmark rule its people, her father must make life and death decisions to save his family. Overnight, they have become refugees...

18) Run and hide

Author

Description

"A . . . nonfiction graphic novel that follows the stories of Jewish children, separated from their parents, who escaped the horrors of the Holocaust"--Provided by publisher. In the tightening grip of Hitler's power, towns, cities, and ghettoes were emptied of Jews. Unless they could escape, Jewish children would not be spared their deadly fate in the Holocaust, a tragedy of unfathomable depth. Only 11% of the Jewish children living in Europe before...

19) The blood years

Author

Arnold, Elana K

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

Frederieke Teitler and her older sister, Astra, live in a house, in a city, in a world divided. Their father ran out on them when Rieke was only six, leaving their mother a wreck and their grandfather as their only stable family. He's done his best to provide for them and shield them from antisemitism, but now, seven years later, being a Jew has become increasingly dangerous, even in their beloved home of Czernowitz, long considered a safe haven for...

20) Wrath becomes her

Author

Polydoros, Aden

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"Lithuania, 1943. A father drowns in the all-consuming grief of a daughter killed by the Nazis. He can't bring her back. But he can use kishuf, an ancient and profane magic to create an avenging golem in her image. Vera was made for vengeance. She is the Jew that the Nazis cannot kill. But is she more than the wrath that her creator infused within her?"--Provided by publisher.