Jewish American Heritage - Young Adults

Created on May 19, 2021, 3:28 pm

Last Updated April 30, 2024, 5:13 pm

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) 28 days: a novel of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

In Warsaw, Poland, in 1942, Mira faces impossible decisions after learning that the Warsaw ghetto is to be "liquidated," but a group of young people are planning an uprising against their Nazi captors.

2) alchemy of air a jewish genius a doomed tycoon and

This entry no longer exists in the catalog

3) Alma presses play

Author

Description

"Alma's life is a constant of halfways: She's half-Chinese, half-Jewish; her parents spend half the time fighting, and the other half silent; and, at thirteen, she's halfway through becoming a woman. Then comes the year when everything changes, and her life is overtaken by constant endings: friends move away, romances bloom and wither, her parents file for divorce, and just like that her childhood seems to be over. Among this world of confusing beginnings,...

4) Almost autumn

Author

Kaurin, Marianne

Formats:

Book, eBook, eAudiobook

Description

As autumn approaches Ilse Stern is thinking about her infatuation with Hermann Rød, and whether his determination to be a painter will interfere with their romance--but the reality of being Jewish in occupied Oslo is about to turn her whole world upside down, as the deportation of the Norwegian Jews begins.

5) 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....

6) American shoes: a refugee's story

Author

Turke, Rosemarie Lengsfeld

Description

"Set against a backdrop of Adolf Hitler's rise to power, the reign of Nazi Germany, and the entire course of World War II in Europe, American Shoes recounts the tumultuous childhood of a young American girl and her family trapped within a country that turned against itself, where human decency eroded and then vaporized. Forced to grow up in the midst of endemic fear stoked by a ravenous madman, American Shoes portrays the breakdown of a society from...

7) Anna and the Swallow Man

Author

Formats:

Book, eBook, Kindle

Description

When her university professor father is sent by the Gestapo to a concentration camp, seven-year-old Anna travels the Polish countryside with the mysterious Swallow Man during World War II.

8) Anne Frank: the biography

Author

Müller, Melissa

Description

Praised as "remarkable," "meticulous," and "long overdue," Anne Frank: The Biography, originally published in 1998, still stands as the definitive account of the girl who has become "the human face of the Holocaust." For this nuanced portrait of her famous subject, biographer Melissa Muller drew on exclusive interviews with family and friends as well as on previously unavailable correspondence, even, in the process, discovering five missing diary...

9) Anne Frank's diary: the graphic adaptation

Author

Description

"The only graphic biography of Anne Frank's diary that has been authorized by the Anne Frank Foundation and that uses text from the diary ... maintains the integrity and power of the original work. With ... illustrations and ample direct quotation from the diary, this edition [for young readers] will expand the readership for this important and lasting work of history and literature"--

Author

Description

A fictional presentation of life in the Amsterdam annex with Anne Frank's family, told from the perspective of co-resident and fellow teenager Peter van Pels.

11) The assignment

Author

Description

Standing in opposition to a class assignment to debate Hitler's Final Solution, seniors Cade and Logan become embroiled in turmoil involving their teacher, principal, Commissioner of Education, white supremacists, and their entire community.

Author

Crowder, Melanie

Description

A gorgeously told novel in verse written with intimacy and power, Audacity is inspired by the real-life story of Clara Lemlich, a spirited young woman who emigrated from Russia to New York at the turn of the twentieth century and fought tenaciously for equal rights. Bucking the norms of both her traditional Jewish family and societal conventions, Clara refuses to accept substandard working conditions in the factories on Manhattan's Lower East Side....

13) 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.

14) 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...

15) 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...

16) The Berlin Boxing Club

Author

Formats:

Description

In 1936 Berlin, fourteen-year-old Karl Stern, considered Jewish despite a non-religious upbringing, learns to box from the legendary Max Schmeling while struggling with the realities of the Holocaust.

17) The Bletchley riddle

Author

Formats:

Book - New - 14 Days, Playaway

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."--

18) Blind

Author

DeWoskin, Rachel

Description

After a horrific accident leaves her blind, fifteen-year-old Emma, one of seven children, eagerly starts high school as a sophomore, and finds that nearly everything has changed-- sometimes for the better.

19) blood for blood

This entry no longer exists in the catalog

20) The blood years

Author

Arnold, Elana K

Formats:

Book, 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...