Description
What a powerful look at what it means to celebrate Jewish joy, to preserve the past, and to forge our Jewish identities in today’s tumultuous world. Here’s to uplifting Jewish stories.
—Zibby Owens, On Being Jewish Now: Reflections of Authors and Advocates
The collection of essays in Manna Songs celebrates the rich, complex, and deeply meaningful experience of being Jewish today. Each essay presents a unique and accessible perspective on the Jewish experience. As a whole, the collection covers topics ranging from food, history, literature, religious practice, joy, sorrow, and legacy. This beautiful collection showcases an abundance of voices all raised in a common song. Do not miss this gorgeous chorus!
—Christie Tate, author of NYT bestseller GROUP: How One Therapist and a Circle of Strangers Saved My Life and B.F.F.: A Memoir of Friendship Lost & Found
These are wonderful stories—short, touching vignettes of Jewish life, resilience, humor and pride. A book that is needed in our trying times.
—Rabbi David Wolpe, author of David: The Divided Heart
To read the deeply personal essays in Manna Songs is to get a kaleidoscopic view of Judaism bursting with so much color, flavor, fragrance and music, it’s a veritable buffet for all five senses. Rich in symbolism and emotion, this collection is full of descriptions of trinkets and mementos- a bracelet, a toy solider, a Viking hammer and even a plastic fork- which serve as a core around which each author builds their narrative about their own Jewish lineage. Manna Songs is a reminder of how, in an ever changing world, Judaism- Jewishness- is constant, eternal and steadfast no matter how far back into the past or forward into the future we peer.
—Gila Pfeffer, author of Nearly Departed: Adventures in Loss, Cancer and Other Inconveniences
Fierce, funny, illuminating, and tender, Manna Songs is a remarkable collection of essays. Informed by the ancient religious and cultural traditions of a people who, as contributor Lisa Grunberger puts it, “…contain Jewish multitudes,” in these pages writers of all ages and walks of life illumine modern-day Jewish life. The painful history of their ancestry is real and never glossed over, but as real is the writers’ ever-present joy and celebration of love and light. In the words of contributor Matthew Lippman: “To be a Jew, I have come to realize, is the great experience of the sorrow in the joy and the joy in the sorrow.”
—Alison McGhee, bestselling and critically acclaimed author of books for all ages, including, most recently, Weird Sad and Silent.
From obsessively documenting lost synagogues to drinking Elite instant coffee for the memories to teaching in an Orthodox day school as a secular Jew, this lively collection features a wide range of perspectives on what it means to be a Jewish writer right now. The essays explore identity, history, joy, and sorrow, and making a place in this fraught world through words. This book is for those looking for a diversity of takes on the inner lives of Jewish artists, broadly defined.
—Aviya Kushner, author of The Grammar of God and Wolf Lamb Bomb
Manna Songs reminds readers that there is much more to Judaism than Holocaust remembrance, October 7, and reaction to antisemitism. These are present, but among many aspects of Jewish life, culture, and history explored in this collection. This book opens a window into Jewish life in all its richness—ritual and language, food and memory, joy and sorrow. Readers will walk away with a deeper understanding not only of Judaism, but of the inner celebrations that shape Jewish identity and life.
—Howard Lovy, author of Found and Lost: The Jake and Cait Story
Manna Songs is a triumphant collection of stories that celebrate and uplift the Jewish experience, honoring the culture and heritage that have defined our people for thousands of years. The essays are beautifully written and heartfelt, and sure to warm your soul like your bubbe’s matzah ball soup on a Friday night.
—Heidi Shertok, author of Unorthodox Love
Manna Songs is full of memoir stories of Jewish joy, a joy often presented through travel, especially resulting from the mid twentieth century when Jewish flux was widespread. And they are full of food. Food that reminds us what it is to be Jewish. Like the manna described in The Book of Exodus (16:1-36.) Then too the Jews were on the move, wandering in the desert, and fed by a Godly food that fell from the sky. According to the commentaries the manna fell twice a day like snow and when you put it in your mouth it tasted like your favorite food. These stories that stretch from a Passover seder in the Himalayas to the sanctity of a Bubbe’s kitchen in New York are full of what we inherit as Jews: community, love and warmth. That is Jewish joy!
—Rachel Neve-Midbar, author of Salaam of Birds
What a stunning collection. These essays offer a richly personal immersion in Jewishness as we bear witness to the reading of the Haggadah and the Seder meal at table after table, each one the same, yet beautifully singular. We dissolve into the rhythms of Rosh Hashanah, wander the hallways of Jewish day school, hover in the silvery stillness of Shabbat, and feel the ever-present weight and shadow of the Holocaust. But this kaleidoscopic exploration—this celebration of what it means to be Jewish—is also an ode, an homage, and a love song to the complicated and gorgeous texture of thirty-two distinct lives and the beloved people within them: a comic grandmother who bonds through dirty jokes but can’t quite reach her daughter; a brokenhearted college student who boards a train home for Passover because she needs her family more than ever; a 103-year-old WWII veteran who slips his granddaughter cash for a flight to Israel; a mother who loses custody of her daughter and reconciles this unbearable loss through her understanding of Torah and God. And these moments are just the beginning. Again, what a stunning collection.
—Jeannine Ouellette, author of the bestselling Substack Writing in the Dark
