TEMPLE SHIR TIKVA

Former head speechwriter for Michelle Obama, author of the highly acclaimed Here All Along (2019), and most importantly, a child of Shir Tikva, Sarah Hurwitz returns with her second book, As A Jew.

Wrestling with rising antisemitism and seeking answers about her own Jewish identity, she went back through time to discover how hateful myths about Jewish power, depravity, and conspiracy have worn a neural groove deep into the world’s psyche, shaping not just how others think about Jews, but how Jews think about themselves. She soon realized that the Jewish identity she’d thought was freely chosen was actually the result of thousands of years of antisemitism and two centuries of Jews erasing parts of themselves and their tradition in the hope of being accepted and safe.

In As a Jew, Hurwitz documents her quest to take back her Jewish identity: how she stripped away the layers of antisemitic lies that made her recoil from her own birthright and unearthed the treasures of Jewish tradition. With antisemitism raging worldwide, Hurwitz’s defiant account of reclaiming the Jewish story and learning to live as a Jew, without apology, has never been timelier or more necessary.