This piece orig­i­nal­ly appeared in a JBC email on Fri­day, March 7. Sign up here for our emails to be one of the first to know the lat­est Jew­ish lit­er­ary news!

Inde­pen­dent pub­lish­ers play an invari­able role in a plu­ral­is­tic democ­ra­cy, open­ing vis­tas that are cru­cial in an age of ide­o­log­i­cal split. When demo­niz­ing those who aren’t like us is easy, cen­sor­ship becomes a default approach. It is hard­er to lis­ten to unpleas­ant truths, to let oth­ers show us alter­na­tive routes.

At Rest­less Books, we depend on sales, just as every­one else does, yet our non­prof­it sta­tus enables us to be coura­geous and to defy expec­ta­tions. I take that respon­si­bil­i­ty to heart. 

Take the case of Israeli books. At a time when few main­stream pub­lish­ers are releas­ing them and uni­ver­si­ty press­es are weary of the peer-review process, we have embraced them because they show the degree to which Israeli soci­ety, like any democ­ra­cy, depends on dis­sent. In Novem­ber, we brought out Ishai Sarid’s The Third Tem­ple, trans­lat­ed by Yardenne Greenspan, a dystopi­an nov­el with bib­li­cal under­tones about extrem­ism that con­tem­plates the pos­si­bil­i­ty of rebuild­ing, yet again, King Solomon’s tem­ple in Jerusalem. This is Sarid’s third book with us. The son of Yos­si Sarid, a promi­nent Israeli left-wing MP and cab­i­net mem­ber., Yishai Sarid is an essen­tial voice in con­tem­po­rary Hebrew lit­er­a­ture. His first book we pub­lished was The Mem­o­ry Mon­ster, a New York Times Notable Book for 2020, an explo­ration of how young Israelis approach the Shoah. It was fol­lowed by Vic­to­ri­ous, a cri­tique of how the IDF sol­diers are trained.

To say that Octo­ber 7th, 2023, had polar­ized debate, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, is to state the obvi­ous. Oth­er pub­lish­ers rushed to make polit­i­cal state­ments. Per­son­al­ly, I believe that the con­tent of our books speaks for us. We recent­ly brought out a paper­back edi­tion of our pop­u­lar trilin­gual children’s book Daniel and Ismail, writ­ten by Juan Pablo Igle­sias Yach­er and illus­trat­ed by Alex Peris. In Hebrew, Ara­bic, and Eng­lish, it is about two boys, one Jew­ish and the oth­er Pales­tin­ian, who share a com­mon love of soc­cer. And we active­ly pub­lish voic­es from the Arab world, such as Kuwaiti author and book­seller Both­ay­na al-Essa’s The Book Censor’s Library, trans­lat­ed from the Ara­bic by Ranya Abdel­rah­man and Sawad Hus­sain, which was a final­ist for the Nation­al Book Award in Trans­lat­ed Lit­er­a­ture. It was one of Time magazine’s must-read books of 2024.

I am of the opin­ion that the Jew­ish dias­po­ra, in spite — or as a result — of anti­semitism, is as viable a stage for Jew­ish life as is Israel. But that dias­po­ra needs to be astute about its own his­to­ry. We recent­ly released Max Czollek’s De-Inte­grate!: A Jew­ish Sur­vival Guide for the 21st Cen­tu­ry, trans­lat­ed by Jon Cho-Polizzi, a polemic about that ques­tions the idea that minori­ties, espe­cial­ly Jews and Arabs, should assim­i­late into the main­stream, argu­ing instead that a minor­i­ty sta­tus offers unique long-stand­ing advan­tages. For his trans­la­tion from Ger­man, Cho-Plizzi was award­ed the 2024 Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize, admin­is­tered by the Goethe-Institut.

Over­all, since its incep­tion, Rest­less Books has focused on how our world is in a con­stant state of upheaval. This is always the case for immi­grants. This year, eight of the eleven books sched­uled for are writ­ten by immi­grant writ­ers. Upheaval also leads to cen­sor­ship and extrem­ism. The cur­rent polit­i­cal cli­mate in the US already isn’t wel­com­ing to new­com­ers. Some­times at night, when insom­nia vis­its me, I imag­ine a coun­try made up entire­ly of immi­grants — every sin­gle one of its cit­i­zens. Would such a place be at a dis­ad­van­tage vis-a-vis more typ­i­cal states? Cer­tain­ly not for any lack of roots, since immi­grants — just like every­one else — have roots in abun­dance. And, as an immi­grant myself, we have some­thing else: ​“the immi­grant ethos,” push­ing for­ward all the time and at any cost, for our­selves and for oth­ers. I don’t think this dream of mine is dystopi­an. On the con­trary, I would hap­pi­ly pledge alle­giance to such a nation. After all, it would always feel new. 

Curat­ing a list of inde­pen­dent books takes time and ener­gy. Every sin­gle title we bring into the world is put togeth­er with dis­cern­ing pas­sion, since it is designed to fos­ter con­ver­sa­tion about out­sider­ness. I want read­ers to feel that in these pages the world we live in is in a state of reinvention. 

Among many oth­er books, we will soon pub­lish one nov­el about the Holo­caust and anoth­er about immi­grants in Tel Aviv. And we will cel­e­brate the nation’s 250th anniver­sary in 2026 with an anthol­o­gy titled Amer­i­can Prophets, which explores the way writ­ers, politi­cians, activists, and oth­ers have wres­tled with God and reli­gion over four centuries.

Here is a sam­pling of what we are about to release in 2025:

• Lamen­ta­tions of Neza­hual­cóy­otl, a col­lec­tion of Nahu­atl poems by the most trans­for­ma­tive thinker of the pre-His­pan­ic past in Mex­i­co, inau­gu­rates our new line of poet­ry books.
• What This Place Makes me: Con­tem­po­rary Plays On Immi­gra­tion brings togeth­er sev­en prize-win­ning Amer­i­can immi­grant play­wrights whose work looks at the capac­i­ty of out­siders to rede­fine us.
• Lin­da Bondestam’s Good Morn­ing, Space tells an illus­trat­ed sto­ry of a spir­it­ed young child who dis­cov­ers space crea­tures wak­ing up on the oth­er end of a makeshift tele­scope at 4:00 a.m.
• Sachiko Kashiwaba’s cult clas­sic The Vil­lage Beyond the Mist, which famous­ly inspired the film Spir­it­ed Away, will now be pub­lished for the first time in Eng­lish on the occa­sion of its 50th anniversary.
• Camille U. Adams’sHow to Be Unmoth­ered: A Trinida­di­an Mem­oir brings an astound­ing new voice and style to the genre, one that will rede­fine the Caribbean lit­er­ary canon.