The best Jewish books I read in 2023

(JTA) - When I spoke with novelist Elizabeth Graver in August about her novel "Kantika" - inspired by her own Turkish Jewish family - I asked her how she managed to breathe life into a tired genre like the Jewish family saga.

"I want the characters to be flawed and complex, and for the turns that they take to come out of their intersections with both history and their own very particular circumstances," she told me.

The flawed and the complex; the historic and the particular. These are the qualities that I look for in a good book. Below are some of the Jewish books I read and enjoyed in 2023....