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A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

A nonprofit, independent news source to inform, inspire, educate and connect the St. Louis Jewish community.

St. Louis Jewish Light

Jewish Books

From 10 days to all year: St. Louis Jewish Book Festival goes season-long

From 10 days to all year: St. Louis Jewish Book Festival goes season-long

Ellen Futterman, Editor-in-ChiefPublished August 21, 2025

The St. Louis Jewish Book Festival is changing the way it tells stories. Now in its 47th year, the Festival will no longer be confined to its traditional 10-day run. Instead, it is pivoting to a year-round format, offering audiences more chances...

Every Torah portion, a poem: Rabbi’s 3-year journey becomes a book

Every Torah portion, a poem: Rabbi’s 3-year journey becomes a book

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished August 19, 2025

Rabbi James Stone Goodman has long worked in the space where poetry, music and Torah meet. His new book "Black Fire White Fire" is the fullest expression yet of that calling — a complete Torah told in poetic verse, where one foot is rooted in text...

Author of Rachel Gold mysteries takes  different path in ‘Gourmet Club’ novel

Author of Rachel Gold mysteries takes different path in ‘Gourmet Club’ novel

Ellen Futterman, Editor-in-ChiefPublished August 12, 2025

Those familiar with native St. Louisan Michael Kahn’s novels might be surprised to learn that his latest one, “The Gourmet Club,” does not include St. Louis lawyer and supersleuth Rachel Gold, save for a brief cameo. After all, 11 of the 14 books...

Why I may finally buy a Jewish coffee table book

Why I may finally buy a Jewish coffee table book

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished July 14, 2025

I’m going to be completely honest with you: I’m not a coffee table book kind of guy. I’ve also never really had a coffee table that would justify owning a coffee table book. I don’t live in the kind of home where decorative hardcover books are...

5 smart tips for a successful book hunt at the J's next summer Used Book Sale

5 smart tips for a successful book hunt at the J’s next summer Used Book Sale

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished July 13, 2025

The St. Louis Jewish Community Center’s biannual Used Book Sale returns to the Staenberg Family Complex Arts & Education Building Sunday, Aug. 24 through Thursday, Aug. 28. Patrons can once again stock up on a new selection of used reading materials...

Alex Kor, son of Holocaust survivor Eva Kor

Could you forgive a Nazi? She did—for herself

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished May 28, 2025

While listening to the incredible program that was last month's Yom HaShoah Holocaust Commemoration 2025 at Congregation Temple Israel, I thought I had heard all the stories one could hear about surviving the Holocaust. I was wrong. The featured...

How Jews shaped the Western – and how the Western shaped Jews

How Jews shaped the Western – and how the Western shaped Jews

By Olivia HayniePublished May 4, 2025

This story was originally published in the Forward. Click here to get the Forward's free email newsletters delivered to your inbox. When you think about Jewish contributions to the world of entertainment, your mind probably immediately goes to...

Former UH president, Ron Gieseke, turned his baseball obsession into a book—and a second act

Former UH president, Ron Gieseke, turned his baseball obsession into a book—and a second act

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 29, 2025

Baseball is dying, or so they say. But for Ron Gieseke, longtime fan, former United Hebrew Congregation president and now author, baseball is alive and well. And if you ask him, it’s more than just a game—it’s a conversation. Gieseke is bringing...

Performance artist Tim Youd and Stanley Lawrence Elkin (May 11, 1930-May 31, 1995) an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

He types. He reads. He doesn’t sleep. And it’s all for legendary Jewish St. Louis author, Stanley Elkin

Jordan Palmer, Chief Digital Content OfficerPublished April 21, 2025

Most performance art doesn’t come with a built-in clackety-clack soundtrack, but this one does—live, every night through May 1, on Washington University’s KWUR 90.3 FM. That’s because Los Angeles-based performance artist Tim Youd is retyping...

‘Ecce Homo’ (Behold the Man), by 19th-century painter Antonio Ciseri, depicts Pontius Pilate presenting Jesus to a crowd in Jerusalem.
Tungsten/Galleria d'Arte Moderna via Wikimedia Commons

A Roman governor ordered Jesus’ crucifixion – so why did many Christians blame Jews for centuries?

Nathanael Andrade, Binghamton UniversityPublished April 16, 2025

It’s a straightforward part of the Easter story: The Roman governor Pontius Pilate had Jesus of Nazareth killed by his soldiers. He imposed a sentence that Roman judges often inflicted on social subversives – crucifixion. The New Testament...

Chaim Grade’s "Sons and Daughters" was originally serialized in the 1960s and '70s, in New York–based Yiddish newspapers. (YIVO; Alfred. A. Knopf)

How the Yiddish writer Chaim Grade’s last novel was rescued from the archives, and wrestled into print

Andrew Silow-CarrollPublished March 27, 2025

Sixty years after he first began serializing it in the Yiddish press, and 42 years after publisher Alfred A. Knopf acquired the book, “Sons and Daughters” — the last novel by the late, great Yiddish novelist Chaim Grade — is landing in bookstores...

A five-story replica of a stamp of Superman in 1998 in Cleveland, home of the superhero’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.
AP Photo/Tony Dejak, File

See you in the funny papers: How superhero comics tell the story of Jewish America

Miriam Eve Mora, University of MichiganPublished March 26, 2025

Nearly a hundred years ago, a hastily crafted spaceship crash-landed in Smallville, Kansas. Inside was an infant – the sole survivor of a planet destroyed by old age. Discovering he possessed superhuman strength and abilities, the boy committed...

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