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This piece is part of our Witnessing series, which shares pieces from Israeli authors and authors in Israel, as well as the experiences of Jewish writers around the globe in the aftermath of October 7th.
It is critical to understand history not just through the books that will be written later, but also through the first-hand testimonies and real-time accounting of events as they occur. At Jewish Book Council, we understand the value of these written testimonials and of sharing these individual experiences. It’s more important now than ever to give space to these voices and narratives.
Where I work, at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education, books are everywhere. They fill many of the long shelves throughout our archive of Oregon Jewish history, and we sell everything from Jewish cookbooks to Timothy Snyder’s On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century in our gift shop.
I come home from work to more books scattered all around the house. Each night before bed, my wife and I read our third-grader books like Katy Farina’s Baby-Sitters Little Sister and Yehudi Mercado’s graphic novel Chunky. Our daughter stacks her favorites on her nightstand for easy access. She’s finally reached that age where she can entertain herself after dinner and in rush hour traffic with a book.
I’ve always read for pleasure and for research, but it was only in the last few years that I started seeking out Jewish books. I’m not a joiner by nature, but after a lifetime of rejecting clubs, organized sports, and every other collective affiliation from middle school to my late forties, I have found myself diving deep into my Judaism. A bearded buddy at my daughter’s school once said, “Doesn’t it feel nice to have a tribe?” To my surprise, it really did.
Instead of pushing against membership as I always had, opting in to my born identity strengthened my sense of purpose in daily life. It enhanced the joy I felt doing good deeds for strangers, cooking for my family, and showing up for friends who were struggling. The simple act of allowing myself to feel connected to a group that wasn’t, for once, entirely of my own making felt better than “nice.” Joining felt invigorating, meaningful. With every step I took, I pushed harder against my own lone wolf mentality, asking more questions of myself and our culture to see where we aligned.As podcaster Jonah Platt put it, I was “going full Jew,” and I loved it.
Books have played a key role in this transformation. Growing up, my family was not religiously observant, but we were proudly Jewish. While my white and European presentation matched my dad’s Scottish surname, Gilbreath, my mom’s family were New Yorkers whose relatives hailed from Russia, Poland, Germany, and what was previously the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We carried names like Shapiro, Szlagman, and Greissman. We had Polish relatives who died in the Holocaust; relatives who lost their thriving brick manufacturing business to Russian pogroms; and relatives who moved to Israel and Argentina to make a new life. My grandma Syliva’s stepfather, Moishe Szlagman, served as an Orthodox cantor, but for some unknown reason, my grandma had disavowed religion. Despite this, my family felt connected to our Judaism: we always lit Hanukkah candles, I attended Jewish day school from preschool to fifth grade, and I loved my Jewish summer camps just as my mom had. We ate holiday meals over a green tablecloth that a distant relative hand-stitched in the early 1900s. Grandma cupped my face to say Tatala, shayne punim — a Yiddish term of endearment meaning “beautiful face.” Despite all this, by sixth grade, I started to distance myself from my Jewish identity, building my own “tribal” affiliations with fellow skateboarders, rebels, rock ‘n rollers, lefties, desert rats, and nature nerds. Life continued that way for decades. And yet, all that time, lurking in the background, was this other family I’d neglected: the Jews.
On the surface, I had always quietly recognized the Jewish community’s cultural contributions to science, literature, and entertainment. I relished the way we valued intellect and education and were active in progressive movements as philanthropists, activists, and volunteers. My own uncle Sheldon, rest his soul, participated in Civil Rights activities on his New York college campus and excitedly recounted to us his experience seeing James Baldwin read in the city. I always felt pride in those moments when someone would lean over to whisper “They’re Jewish” about some celebrity or public figure. Casual acknowledgments of my identity made no demands of me and were an easy point of pride, but I didn’t want Judaism to completely define me. I was also an artist, a skateboarder, an outdoorsperson, a bohemian.
Hamas’ slaughter of Jewish people on October 7 left me seeking my Judaism with a surprising and welcoming ferocity. Suddenly the world was arguing about Israel, which meant it was arguing about us. The question wasn’t how I should feel. I knew how I felt. The questions were: What are the facts, and how can I respond intelligently and accurately?
To get the facts of the matter, I started devouring books and podcasts to educate myself.
Parenthood also pushed me towards Judaism. As our daughter grew up amid this renewed, anti-Jewish environment, my wife and I began asking ourselves what Judaism offered us as a family. Beyond lighting candles and singing holiday songs, what values and ideas did it provide our kid personally and spiritually? And how could belonging to an actual in-person community enrich us all?
We began to lean into the identity I had left behind. We enrolled our daughter in Jewish school. I gave her my old summer camp t‑shirts to wear as pajamas. I finally started wearing my grandfather’s Star of David on a thin gold chain. And when I joined our daughter at her school’s monthly Shabbat gathering, I cried listening to the kids sing the songs, their voices raised together.
When our daughter handed me a piece of challah, I felt the depth of our love.
Although the question and belief in God still didn’t capture my own deep spirituality, taking her to synagogue on Hanukkah for the first time felt profound. When she sang a Hebrew song to herself in our kitchen one morning, her private joy made me question why I’d resisted this for so long. When strangers asked for her name, she sometimes replied with her Hebrew name, Chaya, meaning life.
There was something there.
So at age forty-eight, eager to learn and understand what this meant, I started to read.
I read books about Jewish history and spirituality, including Sara Hurwitz’s Here All Along: A Reintroduction to Judaism and Liel Leibovitz’s How the Talmud Can Change Your Life: Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book. I read Daniel Gordis’s Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn and Noa Tishby’s Israel: A Simple Guide to the Most Misunderstood Country on Earth.
I read cultural and political histories like Emily Tamkin’s Bad Jews: A History of American Jewish Politics and Identities and Karen Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks: And What That Says About Race in America. I read personal stories, including Ilana Kurshan’s memoir If All the Seas Were Ink and the topical anthology On Being Jewish Now: Reflections from Authors and Advocates edited by Zibby Owens. To challenge my opinions and expand my worldview from sources outside my liberal bubble, I explored books from authors across the political spectrum, including Douglas Murray’s On Democracies and Death Cults.
While the Jewish Book Council website provided me with book recommendations, I subscribed to a diverse range of Jewish print magazines, such as Sapir, Lilith, Jewish Currents, and Moment Magazine. Discussions of antisemitism always appeared in my literary diet, including Dara Horn’s essential People Love Dead Jews and Dennis Prager and Joseph Telushkin’s Why the Jews? But victimization has only ever been one of our stories. What we stand for, what we build, and how we live also define what it means to be Jewish. So I read Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger’s Jews and Words, and devoured music stories like Steven Lee Beeber’s The Heebie-Jeebies at CBGB’s: A Secret History of Jewish Punk and Scott R. Benarde’s Stars of David: Rock ‘n’ Roll’s Jewish Stories.
As the books stacked up on our home shelves, it became clear how valuable Judaism — and specifically Jewish literature — was to my family, to my own view of myself. I felt excited to be part of this ancient, global tribe. Reading these books revolutionized my entire life, resulting in my choice to work at a Jewish institution.
As modern Rabbi Dovid Bashevkin said on Jonah Platt’s podcast, “Judaism is about learning how to integrate your unchosen identity into your chosen identity.” That was the story of my whole life. And it was one of many wise things I learned as I started to let Judaism back in. It had always been there, awesome and astute.
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Before connecting with my Judaism, I still had strong beliefs. I had just forged spirituality elsewhere — specifically, in nature.
I grew up in the Arizona desert. In college, I became a serious outdoors person. While hiking and camping, I’d developed this sense that if humanity could discern any objective moral code to direct our lives, then we wouldn’t find it in the human world. Laws, houses of worship — these were too susceptible to politics and toxic agendas. Instead, the answers to our questions of meaning were encoded in the wild places that humanity hadn’t built, and it was our job to discover them for ourselvesAnd if God was real — which I doubted — then the point of contact would be these places of natural beauty. So that’s where I went.
I spent years hiking in the West’s deserts, forests, and riverbanks. I found what I needed there: humility, purpose, a sense of wonder and connection, a lasting awe of the world, and a desire to preserve and protect it.
During my mystical wanderings, I read all kinds of books, but it never even occurred to me to look to the Torah or rabbis for answers. Religion felt too human, a polluted city of the mind.
Now, I look to Jewish texts for new understandings of my history, culture, and spiritual ideas. Of all these, Sarah Hurwitz’s Here All Along: A Reintroduction to Judaism provided the most nourishment.
Her personal experience mirrored mine in many ways, especially in the way she reconnected with her Judaism as an adult.
By breaking down complex Jewish ideas in a digestable, accessible, way, the book served as a substantial and practical primer on Jewish practice for a beginner such as myself.
“When asked to capture the essence of Judaism,” Hurwitz writes, “Hillel, who was one of the greatest Jewish sages, replied, simply, ‘That which is hateful to you, do not do to another: this is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary — now go study.’” As an American consistently frustrated by our fragmented, isolated society, that spoke to me. I recognized that Judaism had core values of care, equality, and action.
For instance, when I read that we made kosher laws partly because God demanded we treat animals with care and minimize their suffering, it struck like an epiphany: the same beliefs I held as an eco-conscious person were also core tenets of my religion.
Additionally, the fundamental principle of Jewish ethics, called B’tzelem elohim, states that every human being has inherent equal dignity and infinite worth, because God made everyone in God’s own image. Jews are bound to a legal spiritual agreement to uphold the laws and better the world. I also found Hurwitz’s discussion of sin — and in contrast, mitzvot — to be compelling. Rather than worrying about how we’ll be judged for our actions in the afterlife, Judaism calls on us to help others and repair our broken world right here and now. That requires thinking about the needs of others, including people and animals.
Mitzvot are acts that connect us to the Divine and to each other, and compose our effort to better the world for everyone.
Even though the majority of American Jews’ experience involves the recitation of Hebrew prayers in synagogue, praying is not essential to Judaism. Prayer and “Jewish worship,” says Hurwitz, “isn’t just about contemplation or petition, it’s about action.” Action is the key: it puts our morality and values to work.
I love that — the call for us to get up and do something! The world is as screwed up as it is incredible. It’s our responsibility to improve it—tikkun olam, meaning “repair of the world.”
We’re encouraged to stay engaged and keep questioning.Intellectual dissent — or even rebellion — is valued in Judaism, not discouraged.
As I underlined sentences and scribbled notes in the book’s margins, I began to develop a long list of Jewish values and concepts that I found amazing. These offered the pillars of a deep, fulfilling, moral, happy life. They also explained who I was, how the things that felt natural about my personality felt as such because they were inherently Jewish, and Jewish culture had shaped my family, and my family had shaped me.
Now, given the choice, this was the kind of tribe I wanted to belong to. Belonging felt refreshing, not constricting or like a burden. It was more like an inheritance, one that didn’t prevent me from still being a dedicated member of my other skater, writer, rebel, and rock ‘n’ roll tribes.
I discovered all of this through my own, nuanced research, and that is what makes it feel so right. For me, at age fifty, books are still my everything. I can no longer hold one in my hand, attend a Jewish community event, or even go to work without feeling infinitely grateful for them.
The views and opinions expressed above are those of the author, based on their observations and experiences.
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Aaron Gilbreath works at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Center for Holocaust Education. He’s written for The Atlantic, Sierra, Harper’s, The New York Times, Ora, High Times, Spin, and The Dublin Review. His work has been noted in Best American Essays, Best American Travel Writing, Best American Sports Writing, and won an LA Press Club award for environmental journalism. His third book, The Heart of California: Exploring the San Joaquin Valley, was a finalist for the Oregon Book Award.
