Thriller, Historical

Everything grows in the suburbs. Grass. Trees. Flowers. Ugly ideas. Take, for example, anti-Semitism.


Not since the 1947 best-seller "Gentleman's Agreement" has a novel so intimately portrayed the ugly face of American anti-Semitism:

Nora Miller, a nominal Jew, fits right into her suburban town. She buys upscale food, chauffeurs her two children to sports’ teams, plays tennis and goes sailing with her church-going friends. Her perfectly ordinary life unravels one May morning when she discovers a swastika carved on her lawn. Enraged, Nora seeks clues to what prompted the hate crime. She disguises her identity and attends some meetings of the neighborhood neo-Nazis known as the American Clan. As a consequence, her husband disappears from a rally in the park and her idyllic world shatters.

In her quest to find Harvey Miller, Nora faces official indifference and the betrayal of friends, all while coping with her traumatized teenage daughter and son. Set in the 1970s, the fast-paced thriller moves rapidly from a tranquil suburban world to one of anti-government conspiracies, insurrection and domestic terrorism as Nora struggles to come to grips with a new reality. What she discovers will shock and dismay readers.

This collection of books featuring Jewish main characters is decidedly non-comprehensive. As we come across books that are described as having Jewish main characters, we add them to this database. The creators of the Jewish Genre Reading Challenge have not read all (or even most) of the books in this database. We have gathered information from many sources and not all may be accurate. Inclusion of a book in our database does not imply endorsement or approval. There is always the possibility that antisemitism may be present in a book, either written into a character's experience or through malicious or ignorant caricature or stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters and culture. Please take care of yourselves as you read. 

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