It’s November, which means it’s time to do one of my favorite – and hardest! – tasks of the year. When I assemble the Hanukkah gift guide, I try to ensure there are both new books and old favorites to select from. In addition, not every book will be Hanukkah themed. Some are just so powerful or fun that they make a wonderful gift. Narrowing it down to just four choices per category is rough, so please do feel free to browse on our other pages for additional recs or write in with a specific need!
Below, the books are presented with what I felt was the most relevant snippet from the publisher’s marketing blurb. I repeat – I DID NOT WRITE THESE DESCRIPTIONS – they are from the marketing blurbs.
A Dragon Called Spark by Lily Murray and illustrated by Kirsti Beautyman: Lonely in a new town during Hanukkah, Eva finds comfort in her imaginary dragon, Spark. As candles glow and friendships grow, miracles—big and small—bring light to the darkness in this heartwarming tale of courage, imagination, and connection. Amazon | Bookshop
Here is the World by Leslea Newman illustrated by Susan Gal: Beginning with the weekly observance of Shabbat, readers join a family through the holidays and the corresponding seasons. From sounding the shofar on Rosh Hashanah to lighting the menorah for Chanukah to rattling a grogger for Purim, and on through the Jewish year, the joy and significance of each holiday beautifully come to life. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
The Eight Knights of Hanukkah by Leslie Kimmelman and illustrated by Galia Bernstein:The whole kingdom has gathered to celebrate Hanukkah–but a dastardly dragon keeps interrupting the festivities. Can the Eight Knights of Hanukkah set things right? Amazon | Bookshop
Hanukkah Pajamakkahs by Dara Henry illustrated by Olga and Aleksey Ivanov: A lively picture book celebrating holiday traditions, the patience of parenting, sibling relationships, and children’s fondness for pajamas, along with a fun, read-aloud, new book to help everyone celebrate the holiday together – in, or out, of pajamakkahs. Amazon | Bookshop
Need more picture books: Check out our picture books page!
Rebecca Reznik Reboots The Universe by Samara Shanker: When Becca discovers a (not) Hanukkah goblin that’s turned her bedroom upside down, literally, she and her best friends Naomi and Eitan once again find themselves facing down demons from Jewish lore. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish Review
Let It Glow by Marissa Meyer and Joanne Levy: When Aviva Davis and Holly Martin meet at the holiday pageant tryouts for their local senior’s center, they think they must be seeing double. While they both knew they were adopted, they had no idea they had a biological sibling, let alone an identical twin! One thing the girls do have in common is their curiosity about how the other celebrates the holidays. What better way to discover the magic of the holidays than to experience them firsthand? The girls secretly trade lives, planning to stage a dramatic reveal to their families. Two virtual strangers swapping homes, holidays, and age-old traditions–what could possibly go wrong? Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish Review
Golem Crafters by Emi Watanabe Cohen: On the same day Faye’s brother comes home with a black eye, a package arrives from a relative they have never met. It’s a slab of clay: some weird kind of bar mitzvah present? The strange gift turns out to be an invitation to learn a craft that has been in their family for centuries. And it’s not pottery. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish Review
A World Worth Saving by Kyle Lukoff: How is one trans kid who hasn’t even chosen a name supposed to save his friend, let alone the world? And is a world that seems hellbent on rejecting him even worth saving at all? Read to find out! Amazon | Bookshop
Not seeing what you need? Check out our Middle Grade page for more books!
The Ghosts of Rose Hill by R.M. Romero: A love letter to Latin American and Jewish diasporas, based on the author’s experiences working to maintain Jewish cemeteries in Eastern Europe. The Ghosts of Rose Hill is a tender and empowering read that you will devour in one sitting. Novel in Verse! Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
See You Yesterday by Rachel Lynn Solomon: Instead pf putting the publisher blurb here, I’m letting you know that I think this time loop romance is ridiculously underrated. Solomon’s books get a lot of love, but this one is my favorite and I wish more people would scream about it! Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish Review
Eight Dates and Eight Nights by Betsy Aldredge: New Yorker Hannah Levin is allergic to exactly two things, horses and tinsel. Unfortunately, she’s surrounded by both when she’s snowed in at her grandmother’s home in a small Texas town. Super lonely, missing latkes and reliable Wi-Fi, Hannah wanders into an old deli where she meets the only other Jewish teen around, Noah, who happens to be equal parts adorable and full of annoying, over the top festival of lights spirit that he’s determined to share with Hannah one itchy Hanukkah sweater at a time. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish Review
For the Rest of Us: Edited by Dahlia Adler: From Lunar New Year to Solstice, Día de Los Muertos to Juneteenth, and all the incredible days in between, it’s clear that Americans don’t just have one holiday. Edited by the esteemed Dahlia Adler and authored by creators who have lived these festive experiences firsthand, this joyful collection of stories shows that there isn’t one way to experience a holiday. Amazon | Bookshop
Looking for more? We have an entire Young Adult page!
Latke’d and Loaded by Jessica Topper: Tzipora Solokoff was once half of America’s favorite sitcom twins. But while her sister became known as Hollywood star Kara Koff, Tzipi chose a quieter life off-camera. Now Kara’s secret elopement leaves Tzipi posing as her twin on the annual Matzo Baller Hanukkah cruise—smile, wave, fake it for one night. Easy enough…until she meets the man she thinks is her bodyguard. There is an entire series – co written with Amanda Usen – of these to check out!!! Amazon
Eight Ways To Say I Love You by Amanda Elliot: A spark of attraction burns brighter each year between childhood friends in this sweeping Hanukkah romance by USA Today bestselling author Amanda Elliot. Amazon | Bookshop
The Eight Heartbreak Of Hanukkah by Jean Meltzer: Evelyn Schwartz has the perfect Hanukkah planned: eight jam-packed days producing the live-action televised musical of A Christmas Carol. Who needs family when you’ve got long hours, impossible deadlines, and your dream job? That is, until an accident on set lands her in the medical bay with one of her chronic migraines, and she’s shocked to find her ex-husband, David Adler, filling in for the usual studio doctor. Amazon | Bookshop
Alice Rue Evades The Truth by Emily Zippys: In this sapphic homage to While You Were Sleeping, a down-on-her-luck receptionist is mistaken as the girlfriend of a comatose man and doesn’t have the heart to come clean to his devastated family—even when she starts falling for his sister. Yes, there are both Christmas and Hanukkah scenes. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
Need more romance? Check out our adult fiction page.
Homebound by Portia Elan: In a dazzling ode to human inventiveness and the desire for meaning, four lives are entangled across time by one unfinished story, saved to a floppy disk in the 1980s and destined to ripple across the centuries. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
The Griffin Sisters Greatest Hits by Jeniffer Weiner: Cassie and Zoe Grossberg were once inseparable sisters and pop sensations, but they haven’t spoken in two decades. After experiencing the dizzying highs of celebrity, they were driven apart one terrible night. Now in their forties, Zoe is a suburban New Jersey mom, while Cassie lives off-grid in Alaska. But Zoe’s teenage daughter, Cherry, is desperate to reunite them and uncover the truth behind their estrangement. As long-buried secrets surface, the sisters must confront past choices and decide if they are open to forgiveness. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys: A literary descendant of Ursula K. Le Guin, Ruthanna Emrys crafts a novel of extra-terrestrial diplomacy and urgent climate repair bursting with quiet, tenuous hope and an underlying warmth. A Half-Built Garden depicts a world worth building towards, a humanity worth saving from itself, and an alien community worth entering with open arms. It’s not the easiest future to build, but it’s one that just might be in reach. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
Pomona Afton Can So Solve A Murder by Bellamy Rose: When Pomona Afton, Upper East Side hotel heiress, stumbles out of a gala and upon the scene of her grandmother’s murder, her first thought is that the society queen won’t be missed for her kind, cookie-baking ways. In fact, she was mean, greedy, and paranoid—so paranoid that she secretly slipped a clause into her will mandating that, should she die an unnatural death, all the family assets get frozen. And if the “unnatural death” isn’t explained? Those accounts stay frozen. Can Pomona Afton (who previously couldn’t solve a crossword in the bath on a hungover Sunday) actually solve this murder? Amazon | Bookshop
Need More: We have more! Check out or adult books page.
When We See You Again by Rachel Goldberg-Polin: In When We See You Again, Rachel pours her pain, love, and longing onto paper, giving voice to the broken among us, and reminding us that even when the world feels choked with darkness, light exists in a different way. How do we find it? Her own experience has been extreme, but at its essence, this is a universal story of trying to live with grief. It is a story of how we remember and how we persevere, of how we suffer and how we love. Amazon | Bookshop
The Final Solution To The Jewish Question by Dara Horn: Combining deep historical research, investigative reporting, and storytelling bravado, The Final Solution to the Jewish Question is both diagnosis and prescription. Horn explores and exposes the failures of Holocaust education, the long history of the antizionist movement, the compromises of the American Jewish “Golden Age,” and the organized plot to poison artificial intelligence with anti-Jewish propaganda, and weaves it all into an erudite, audacious, and convincing series of arguments that invites readers of every background and inclination to become curious about their blind spots and to absorb new and uncomfortable truths. From there, she proposes a dramatic solution rooted in a new understanding of freedom and responsibility, and clears a path toward a shared future. Amazon | Bookshop
MotherLand by Julia Ioffe: In Motherland, Ioffe turns modern Russian history on its head, telling it exclusively through the stories of its women. From her own physician great-grandmothers to Lenin’s lover, a feminist revolutionary; from the hundreds of thousands of Soviet girls who fought in World War II to the millions of single mothers who rebuilt and repopulated a devastated country; from the members of Pussy Riot to Yulia Navalnaya, the wife of opposition leader Alexey Navalny, Ioffe chronicles one of the most audacious social experiments in history and documents how it failed the very women it was meant to liberate—and how that failure paved the way for the revanche of Vladimir Putin. Amazon | Bookshop
How The Talmud Can Change Your Life by Liel Liebovitz: For numerous centuries, the Talmud―an extraordinary work of Jewish ethics, law, and tradition―has compelled readers to grapple with how to live a good life. Full of folk legends, bawdy tales, and rabbinical repartee, it is inspiring, demanding, confounding, and thousands of pages long. As Liel Leibovitz enthusiastically explores the Talmud, what has sometimes been misunderstood as a dusty and arcane volume becomes humanity’s first self-help book. How the Talmud Can Change Your Life contains sage advice on an unparalleled scope of topics, which includes communicating with your partner, dealing with grief, and being a friend. Amazon | Bookshop | BookishlyJewish review
Find more options on our nonfiction page!
Feeding The Women of the Talmud, Feeding Ourselves edited by Kenden Alfond: Retelling the stories of sixty-nine women in the Talmud and honoring them with vegan or plant-based recipes. Enjoy sixty-nine delicious, balanced recipes ideal for family meals, entertaining, and healthy snacks. Each recipe is accompanied by stunning photography and meditations on stories of women in the Talmud that draw new meaning from the text. Amazon | Bookshop
Jew-ish by Jake Cohen: When you think of Jewish food, a few classics come to mind: chicken soup with matzo balls, challah, maybe a babka if you’re feeling adventurous. But as food writer and nice Jewish boy Jake Cohen demonstrates in this stunning debut cookbook, Jewish food can be so much more. Amazon | Bookshop
Shabbat by Adeena Sussman: Woven throughout the recipes is a rich portrait of Shabbat in Israel, where it is practically a national holiday. Taking us inside the kitchens and traditions of local cooks who have shared their most beloved recipes, Shabbat brings to life Sussman’s adopted home country with transporting, slice-of-life storytelling. Deeply personal and brimming with life, Shabbat inspires us all to embrace the delights of Shabbat. Now more than ever, Shabbat cooking is what we all need. Amazon | Bookshop
Millenial Kosher by Chanie Apfelbaum: Chanie Apfelbaum, creator of world-renowned kosher food blog Busy In Brooklyn, makes her cookbook debut with a collection of modern, cultural, trendy, and bold dishes that reflect her passion for reinventing traditional foods with a Millennial vibe. Amazon