Erika Dreifus

Toward the end of each week, the My Machberet blog presents a collection of links, drawn primarily from the world of Jewish books and writing.

• This week, “in antic­i­pa­tion of the 75th Nation­al Jew­ish Book Awards, hon­or­ing out­stand­ing Eng­lish-lan­guage books of Jew­ish inter­est pub­lished in 2025, Jew­ish Book Coun­cil unveiled the inau­gur­al short­list for win­ners and final­ists.” (And it’s a great one!) 
• Also announced this week, the latest “Holiday Highlights” titles, aka “the Association of Jewish Libraries’ picks for the best Jewish holiday children’s books”—in this case, for Spring 2026.
• In The Times of Israel, Jessica Steinberg reports: “It took a total of 34 days after the Hamas-led terror onslaught on October 7, 2023, for Eyal Eshel to find out that his missing daughter, surveillance soldier Roni Eshel, had been killed. Eshel writes about those 34 unbearable days in ‘Abba Ba‘ (‘Dad is Coming’), published by Sella Meir….Eshel wrote the 238-page Hebrew book together with veteran author Galila Ron-Feder-Amit. An English translation is upcoming.” (If anyone reading this has info regarding this English translation, please share.)
• If I could transport myself to London on March 1, you would find me in the audience for a Jewish Book Week conversation between Adam Kirsch and Howard Jacobson, about the latter’s soon-to-be-published post-October 7 novel Howl. (Here, too, I’m crowdsourcing some information, as to date, I haven’t been able to locate publishing info for a U.S. release.)
• And believe it or not, the coming week brings a significant anniversary: the 15th “book birthday” of my short-story collection Quiet Americans. Which means I’ll be thinking of another anniversary, too.

There have been many words written this week about the Adelaide Writers’ Week festival in Australia. I’ve compiled some relevant links and added them to the section on literary/literary-adjacent communities in my “After October 7” document.

Shabbat shalom.