All Books

A beautiful Tarot deck and booklet revealing the lost and forgotten Jewish origins of the Tarot.

For hundreds of years, the original meaning of the Tarot de Marseille, the artistic ancestor of the contemporary Tarot, has been a source of mystery, speculation, and debate. When Torah student Stav Appel encountered the Jean Noblet Tarot—one of the oldest preserved decks in the tradition of the Tarot de Marseille—he found something curious: the Magician held his arms in the shape of the Hebrew letter aleph א, the Hermit wore a Jewish prayer shawl, and three pieces of matzah hid beneath the Moon. 

In The Torah in the Tarot, Appel carefully analyzes the Noblet Tarot, uncovering a rich array of Jewish symbols ingeniously concealed in its images. Given the deck’s origin circa 1650, during the Catholic Church’s centuries-long campaign to eradicate Judaism, Appel argues persuasively that its secret content suggests it originally served as a tool for clandestine Jewish education. Writing in a rich style that draws on rabbinic literary forms, Appel has presented a landmark contribution to the field of Tarot studies—revealing that when we perceive the Tarot through a Jewish lens, we can, at long last, recognize the Torah hidden in the Tarot.

The Torah in the Tarot includes a booklet written by Stav Appel with a foreword by Ariana Reines, as well as a historically accurate color reproduction of the Jean Noblet Tarot—the only modern copy that preserves the full scope of the deck’s original Judaica—created by the French artist Florent Giraud of Tarotgraphe.

The fiftieth-anniversary edition of a paradigm-shifting work by one of the most important Jewish figures in postwar America.

By the time of his death, Zalman Schachter-Shalomi (1924–2014), also known as Reb Zalman, had transformed the landscape of Judaism in America. The son of liberal Hasidic Jews, a Holocaust refugee, and a devoted Lubavitcher Hasid, Reb Zalman eventually left the traditional Hasidic fold and committed himself to seeding a Jewish renaissance. An active participant in the counterculture and New Age movements, Reb Zalman began experimenting with different forms of Jewish ritual and contemplative practice—and their intersection with other spiritual traditions—ultimately founding the Jewish Renewal movement.

Fragments of a Future Scroll, Reb Zalman's first book, was originally published by a small press in 1975 and, until now, was long out of print. A truly unique book—or "anti-book," as Shaul Magid refers to it in his new introductory essay—Fragments gathers Reb Zalman's first idiosyncratic attempts at articulating a renewed "Hasidism for the Aquarian Age," envisioning Judaism's evolving place and role within an emergent "planetary consciousness." This wild text presents an electrifying weave of sparks, flashes, stories, teachings, and ecstatically lyrical translations of traditional Jewish sources—"spiritual sheet music," as Reb Zalman called it. Full of boundary-breaking wisdom and crackling poetic oddity, Fragments of a Future Scroll is a book for people from all religious and spiritual traditions who are looking to experience the world—and consciousness itself—anew.

This historic fiftieth-anniversary edition presents an updated version of the original text, alongside essays by four contemporary Jewish thinkers—Rabbi Shaul Magid, Rabbi Tirzah Firestone, Rabbi Jericho Vincent, and Arthur Kurzweil—reflecting on Reb Zalman's enormous impact, and guiding contemporary readers into his paradigm-shifting worldview.

"This is a living and essential book." —sam sax, author of Bury It and Madness

A meditation on historical rupture and political imagination, A Flag of No Nation traces the stories of Turkish Jews in the twentieth century, navigating the tides of antisemitism, Turkish nationalism, Zionism, and the aftermath of the Ottoman Empire. Through forms of storytelling that range from allegory to oral history, Tom Haviv investigates the history of Israel|Palestine and the mythologies of nationalism, searching the archives for rituals and frames that might one day shape new realities of peace and justice. A warning against imperfect dreams, A Flag of No Nation reminds us how the act of remembrance can help us re-envision the future.

A Flag of No Nation was previously published by Jewish Currents Press.

An urgent, poetic exploration of power, memory, belief, and the dangers and possibilities of language. 

PROTOCOLS: An Erasure transforms the world’s most influential antisemitic document, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, into an erasure poem exploring essential questions of power, history, and language. 

By redacting words from the original document, Molnar created a book-length poem that breathes space and light into a text dense with hatred. She patiently uncovers the questions buried within the source text: What is the true nature of power, and how is it tied to a fear of the unknown? How can language, weaponized and eroded, also be a tool for healing? And how can silence help us reckon with history and shape the future? 

Accompanying the poem, a lyric essay excavates the poet’s deep personal connection to the source text, weaving personal and collective history by traversing former concentration camps, immigrant communities in New York City, and remote desert wildernesses, and posing new possibilities for a less deterministic, more spacious and peaceful world.

A wise and energizing book of poems suffused with music, mysticism, tenderness, and wit.

Eden Pearlstein’s Nothing Is for Everyone is a manifesto of the unmanifest. Deeply, devotedly hybrid in influence and expression, this wild collection of poetry draws on rabbinic linguistics and kabbalistic meditation, free jazz and hip-hop, Marcel Duchamp and the Magid of Mezritch—all to reveal the permutational quality of language itself: its instability, resistance to containment, and divine fault lines. In these times when answers are plentiful and questions impoverished, Pearlstein’s insistence on the materiality of nothingness reveals that in fact nothing really matters. 

Nothing Is for Everyone was published by Deuteronomy Press and is distributed by Ayin Press (via Publishers Group West). 

An exploratory, mystical, and feminist companion for the traditional Jewish practice of counting the Omer.

The Omer Calendar of Biblical Women is a meditative guidebook for counting the Omer, the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavout. According to the kabbalah, each of these forty-nine days embodies a unique combination of divine attributes, or sefirot. In this calendar, each sefirah is paired with the story of a woman from the Bible who embodies the unique spiritual dimension associated with the day. Illuminated by vibrant midrashic illustrations—both classical and contemporary—the Omer Calendar of Biblical Women provides a beautiful companion for the ritual of counting the Omer, and an essential addition to any library of Jewish feminist literature.

A radical approach to dreams and dreamwork rooted in our bodies, communities, and ecosystems.

Undertorah takes readers on a journey through the root systems of the dreamworld. Drawing on a deep knowledge of ancient Jewish dream practice, world wisdom traditions, and contemporary ecotheology, this hybrid work of mystical scholarship combines personal narrative, multi-voiced oral history, and a somatic alternative to more symbolic methods of dream interpretation. A practical and paradigm-shifting guidebook for individuals and communities, Undertorah offers a transformative approach to contemporary dreamwork, grounded in embodied experience and ancestral wisdom, that connects us to spirit and inspires us to heal our world.

“Aurora Levins Morales's poetry radiates wisdom, warmth, and fortitude. A prophetic, life-centered guide for times of tumult and struggle.”
—Arielle Angel, editor-in-chief of Jewish Currents

Rimonim is a richly woven tapestry of poetry meant for use. From a time of rupture and uncertainty, beloved movement poet Aurora Levins Morales brings us a prayer book for the street, for reconstituting the future through our gestures in the present. In these poems of devotion and protest, Levins Morales speaks across and through time with an undeniably prophetic voice. Written in collaboration with various communities looking to honor, unravel, and rebuild Jewish liturgies, Rimonim is a book of lyric in the most immediate sense—of poems that are meant to be read and sung. Rooted in tradition and flowering in the tumultuous present, these poems will both accompany specific Jewish practices and offer inspiration for the sacred work of human liberation, where joy meets justice.

Ultimately, these forty-nine poems honor the forty-ninth year, when it was taught that everything in the land would begin anew, everything redistributed and freed, when the people would see that everything on this earth was “ready to wake and bloom / just under the skin of what is.”

A timely, progressive collection of essays on the Jewish relationship to Zionism and exile.

What is exile? What is diaspora? What is Zionism? Jewish identity today has been shaped by prior generations’ answers to these questions, and the future of Jewish life will depend on how we respond to them in our own time. In The Necessity of Exile: Essays from a Distance, celebrated rabbi and scholar Shaul Magid offers an essential contribution to this intergenerational process, inviting us to rethink our current moment through religious and political resources from the Jewish tradition.

On many levels, Zionism was conceived as an attempt to “end the exile” of the Jewish people, both politically and theologically. In a series of incisive essays, Magid challenges us to consider the price of diminishing or even erasing the exilic character of Jewish life. A thought-provoking work of political imagination, The Necessity of Exile reclaims exile as a positive stance for constructive Jewish engagement with Israel|Palestine, antisemitism, diaspora, and a broken world in need of repair.

A beautifully illustrated tale of traditional crafts and communal power.

Rachelle is a young girl living in Fès, Morocco in 1920. Surrounded by a warm community of friends, family, and craftspeople—both Jewish and Muslim—Rachelle spends her days playing with other young girls in her neighborhood, trying on her grandmother's amulets, playing jokes on a nosy photographer, and watching her parents as they spin delicate threads made of gold at their jewelry workshop each day. Life in Rachelle's neighborhood, the mellah, is busy, nourishing, and filled with magic. But rumors of a machine (or is it a monster?) coming from across the sea threaten to change the mellah and the lives of its craftspeople forever. Banding together with her grandmother, her parents, and the other jewelry makers, Rachelle and four of her friends work together to put a stop to the machine's arrival—but only time will tell if they can save the vibrant world of the mellah and its beautiful golden threads for good.

Golden Threads draws on a series of inspiring historical episodes in Fès, when Jewish and Muslim artisans organized together against the introduction of a new machine that threatened to replace their manual labor and compromise their cherished way of life. A book for both middle grade readers and for adults reading aloud to younger children, Golden Threads will take people of all ages on a journey into the multi-faith world of Morocco's craftspeople, inspiring generative conversations about art, labor, community, and technology for years to come.

A masterful long poem from one of our great American poets.

Gerald Stern’s long poem I. is an extraordinary and wild compilation of poetic modes, moods, and registers—meandering and focused, hallucinatory and concrete, deranged and deeply ecstatic. Inspired by the sight of a derelict synagogue on the Lower East Side, I. is an intrinsically New York poem, concerned with shifting structures of place and identity in the face of time and rapid change. Though first written in the late aughts, Stern’s brazen, mischievous politicality and blasphemous spirituality, refracted through the biblical book and prophetic character of Isaiah, feel particularly relevant to the present moment. Intertextual, critical, at times jubilant and derisive, I. brims with Stern’s idiosyncratic mix of high intellect and chthonic populism.

The book features Stern’s original introduction, as well as a foreword and afterword written by poet-luminaries Ross Gay and Alicia Ostriker.

A groundbreaking work on spirituality and creativity.

The Place of All Possibility is a paradigm-shifting work that reframes the whole of Torah as a contemporary guidebook for creativity. Drawing from the deep well of Jewish sacred texts and the radical interpretive strategies of ancient rabbis, The Place of All Possibility provides teachings and tools for those who seek to employ creativity as a force of transformation.

Putting spiritual wisdom in conversation with the contemporary disciplines of art therapy, liberation theology, and creativity research, this essential book invites us all to rediscover our place in a world of mutual thriving. Packed with practical exercises to inspire your creative practice, The Place of All Possibility is for all people—from any tradition or none—who want to seed a world of imagination, abundance, and joy.

The story of four women who set out to uncover the secret origins of an intricate, magical city—and to change its fate.

Istehar Sha'an, whose unique powers allow her to communicate with trees and books, has led her community of refugee forest people to a remarkable place. In the archipelago-city of Moonstone, the Sha'an people find themselves in an extraordinary, multicultural metropolis that houses the Library: the world's all-encompassing repository of wisdom. But in their search for a new home, the refugees soon garner the suspicion of Moonstone's locals, who forbid their magical practices. And when a hostile prince makes a bid to inherit the city's rule from his father, Istehar and her people realize they may be faced with exile—or worse. Meanwhile, Istehar has married three wives of Moonstone—a brave warrior librarian, a subtle-minded former concubine, and a tenacious apothecary who has spent years trying to solve her parents' murder. Driven by magical intuition and guided by a mysterious book, Istehar and her wives embark on a journey that will transform not only their lives, but the city of Moonstone itself.

Readers of Ursula K. Le Guin and Guy Gavriel Kay will delight in The Moonstone Covenant's richly imagined world of mysterious archives, bookboats, and divinations—and its tales of both betrayal and healing.

A provocative collection of interconnected tales, bridging the worlds of mysticism and heresy, faith and desire—from the award-winning author of Everything is God and The Heresy of Jacob Frank.

The Secret That Is Not a Secret: Ten Heretical Tales invites you into a hidden world of faith, desire, transgression, and revelation. The inhabitants of its interlocking stories are pious and rebellious, mystical and queer, from a Hasidic woman tormented by her husband’s long beard to a closeted gay man repenting of his sins in the mikva. The first book of fiction by Rabbi Dr. Jay Michaelson, winner of the National Jewish Book Award, The Secret That Is Not a Secret is a remarkable work of mystical fiction.