Jewish American Heritage - Young Adults

Created on May 19, 2021, 3:28 pm

Last Updated April 18, 2025, 11:00 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.

21) Disappearing act

Author

Castle, Jiordan

Description

Jiordan’s family was never quite like everyone else’s, with her father’s mood swings, her mother’s attempts at normalcy, and her two older sisters with a different last name. But on the surface, they fit in. Until the day the FBI came knocking on the door. After that, her father’s mood plunged to a dangerous new low. After that, there was an investigation into his business and a sentencing in court. Soon Jiordan’s father would have to...

22) Lion's legacy

Author

Series

Tennessee Russo books volume 1

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

White, Jewish Tennessee Russo joins his estranged father in his search for ancient rings belonging to the Sacred Band of Thebes. Seventeen-year-old Tennessee Russo's life is imploding. His boyfriend has been cheating on him, and all his friends know about it. Worse, they expect him to just accept his ex's new relationship and make nice. So when his father, a famous archaeologist and reality show celebrity whom he hasn't seen in two years, shows up...

23) This dark descent

Author

Josephson, Kalyn

Series

This dark descent volume 1

Formats:

Book, eAudiobook

Description

Mikira, a seventeen-year-old daughter of a famous horse breeder, takes part in a magical horserace to save her family, and enlists the help of Arielle, a talented, black-market enchanter, and Damien, a young lord involved in a succession battle, who both have their own motives for helping her.

24) Alte Zachen =: Old things

Author

Description

This is an intergenerational graphic novel that follows 11-year-old Benji and his elderly grandmother, Bubbe Rosa, as they traverse Brooklyn and Manhattan, gathering the ingredients for a Friday night dinner. Bubbe's relationship with the city is complex - nothing is quite as she remembered it and she feels alienated and angry at the world around her. Benji, on the other hand, looks at the world, and his grandmother, with clear-eyed acceptance....

25) A Danger to Herself and Others

Author

Sheinmel, Alyssa

Formats:

eBook, eAudiobook

Description

Four walls. One window. No way to escape. Hannah knows there's been a mistake, she doesn't need to be institutionalized. What happened to her roommate at that summer program was an accident. As soon as the doctor and judge figure out that she isn't a danger to herself or others, she can go home to start her senior year. Those college applications aren't going to write themselves. Until then, she's determined to win over the staff and earn some privileges...

26) Weeping Under This Same Moon

Author

Formats:

eBook, eAudiobook

Description

Gold Medal in ForeWord Magazine's Book of the Year Award for the best in Young Adult Fiction The International Reading Association IRA has named Weeping Under This Same Moon a Notable Book for 2009. Arts Reach Alliance - Valley Reads Selection for 2010 Weeping Under This Same Moon, by Jana Laiz is based on the true story of two teenage girls from different cultures, whose paths intertwine, dramatically altering the course of their lives. Mei is an...

27) The Castle School (for Troubled Girls)

Author

Sheinmel, Alyssa

Description

From New York Times bestselling author Alyssa Sheinmel comes the emotional story of a grieving teenager sent to a boarding school that is nothing like she expected. When Moira Dreyfuss's parents announce that they're sending her to an all-girls boarding school deep in the Maine woods, Moira isn't fooled. She knows her parents are punishing her; she's been too much trouble since her best friend, Nathan, died-and for a while before that. At the Castle...

28) We are inevitable

Author

Description

After losing his brother, mom, and most of his friends, Aaron Stein is left with his shambolic father alone in their moldering secondhand bookstore, but just when he considers selling the store he meets new people and takes on new challenges, helping him come to terms with what he has lost and who he wants to be.

29) How to Pack for the End of the World

Author

Falkoff, Michelle

Formats:

eBook, eAudiobook

Description

If you knew the world was going to end tomorrow, what would you do? This is the question that haunts Amina as she watches new and horrible stories of discord and crisis flash across the news every day. But when she starts at prestigious Gardner Academy, Amina finds a group of like-minded peers to join forces with—fast friends who dedicate their year to learning survival skills from each other, before it’s too late. Still, as their “prepper”...

30) When the angels left the old country

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

"Uriel the angel and Little Ash (short for Ashmedai) are the only two supernatural creatures in their shtetl (which is so tiny, it doesn't have a name other than Shetl). The angel and the demon have been studying together for centuries, but pogroms and the search for a new life have drawn all the young people from their village to America. When one of those young people, Essie, goes missing. Uriel and Little Ash set off to find her. Along the way...

31) Eight nights of flirting

Author

Reynolds, Hannah

Description

Sixteen-year-old Shira is on a mission to find the perfect boyfriend over Hanukkah, but after getting snowed in on Nantucket with her nemesis-slash-former-crush her plans begin to go off the rails.

32) Some kind of hate

Author

Description

"When freshman Declan Taylor hurts his pitching arm he becomes mad at the world, soon getting caught up with a group of white supremacists and turning against his Jewish former friend, Jake--but when things turn violent Declan must figure out what he actually stands for."-- Provided by publisher.

33) How to excavate a heart

Author

Arlow, Jake Maia

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle, eAudiobook

Description

It all starts when Shani runs into May. Like, literally. With her mom's Subaru.Attempted vehicular manslaughter was not part of Shani's plan. She was supposed to be focusing on her monthlong paleoichthyology internship. She was going to spend all her time thinking about dead fish and not at all about how she was unceremoniously dumped days before winter break.It could be going better.But when a dog-walking gig puts her back in May's path, the fossils...

34) Before We Were Blue

Author

Formats:

eBook, eAudiobook

Description

Get healthy on their own-or stay sick together? At Recovery and Relief, a treatment center for girls with eating disorders, the first thing Shoshana Winnick does is attach herself to vibrant but troubled Rowan Parish. Shoshana-a cheerleader on a hit reality TV show-was admitted for starving herself to ensure her growth spurt didn't ruin her infamous tumbling skills. Rowan, on the other hand, has known anorexia her entire life, thanks to her mother's...

35) It's My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding During World War II

Author

Description

"It's my whole life" are the words Charlotte Salomon is said to have used to describe a series of thirteen hundred paintings she created between 1940 and 1942 while in hiding from the Nazis. The paintings are an extraordinary, vivid document: saturated in the sunlit colors of the Mediterranean, full of powerfully expressed love, anxiety, joy, and despair, and arranged as a sequential narrative overlayed with painted words, like a graphic novel. The...

36) The life and crimes of Hoodie Rosen

Author

Description

"Hoodie Rosen's life isn't that bad. Sure, his entire Orthodox Jewish community has just picked up and moved to the quiet, mostly non-Jewish town of Tregaron, but Hoodie's world hasn't changed that much. He's got basketball to play, studies to avoid, and a supermarket full of delicious kosher snacks to eat. The people of Tregaron aren't happy that so many Orthodox Jews are moving in at once, but that's not Hoodie's problem. That is, until he meets...

37) The ghosts of Rose Hill

Author

Description

"Sent to stay with her aunt in Prague and witness the humble life of an artist, Ilana Lopez--a biracial Jewish girl--finds herself torn between her dream of becoming a violinist and her immigrant parents' desire for her to pursue a more stable career. When she discovers a forgotten Jewish cemetery behind her aunt's cottage, she meets the ghost of a kindhearted boy named Benjamin, who died over a century ago. As Ilana restores Benjamin's grave, he...

38) Why is everybody yelling?: growing up in my immigrant family

Author

Russo, Marisabina

Description

"It's 1950s New York, and Marisabina Russo is being raised Catholic and attending a Catholic school that she loves--but when she finds out that she's Jewish by blood, and that her family members are Jewish survivors of the Holocaust, her childhood is thrown into turmoil. To make matters more complicated, her father is out of the picture, her mother is ambitious and demanding, and her older half-brothers have troubles, too. Following the author's young...

39) This rebel heart

Author

Locke, Katherine

Description

"In the middle of Budapest, there is a river. Csilla knows the river is magic. During WWII, the river kept her family safe when they needed it most--safe from the Holocaust. But that was before the Communists seized power. Before her parents were murdered by the Soviet police. Before Csilla knew things about her father's legacy that she wishes she could forget. Now Csilla keeps her head down, planning her escape from this country that has never loved...

40) Ballad & dagger

Author

Older, Daniel José

Series

Outlaw saints volume 1

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

When sixteen-year-old Mateo and Chela discover each other and their powers during a political battle between neighborhood factions, they set aside their differences to unravel the mystery behind their sunken homeland and to stop a dangerous political operative who is trying to harness their gifts to unleash terror on the world.