News

Tal­ly­ing the Figures

Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter
January 20, 2012

Post­ed by Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter

We’ve just fin­ished inputting four full years of recent reviews (not to men­tion hun­dreds of reviews from pre­vi­ous years), bring­ing our online review count to over 2,000. In hon­or of this mile­stone, I’ve pro­vid­ed a break­down of some the inter­est­ing fig­ures that have emerged as we’ve sort­ed through titles and topics:

72 books with dis­cus­sion questions 

48 books that dis­cuss the Talmud

25 graph­ic nov­els or books about graph­ic nov­els (thanks, Wendy!)

19 books that touch on Anne Frank 

16 book trailers

10 books by or about Sholem Aleichem

14 books on Kab­bal­ah

11 guides to learn or do things (e.g., to fit­ness and father­ing, Tel Aviv, the Five Books of Moses, etc.)

9 books on ​“a life” (e.g., Ariel Sharon, Isaac B. Singer, Louis D. Bran­deis, Modigliani, etc.)

7 books that focus on matzoh 

6 books by Philip Roth

5 books on Rashi (or his daughters)

4 books about Iraqi Jews

3 books on Baby­lon­ian Jews

3 books on Ethopi­an Jew­ry

2 books on Sandy Koufax

2 books on pota­toes (or pota­to pan­cakes)

2 books on Birthright Israel

2 books on Churchill

As you do your own book search­ing, let us know if any oth­er inter­est­ing fig­ures or trends emerge. Now, only 26 more years of reviews to go…

Orig­i­nal­ly from Lan­cast­er, Penn­syl­va­nia, Nao­mi is the CEO of Jew­ish Book Coun­cil. She grad­u­at­ed from Emory Uni­ver­si­ty with degrees in Eng­lish and Art His­to­ry and, in addi­tion, stud­ied at Uni­ver­si­ty Col­lege Lon­don. Pri­or to her role as exec­u­tive direc­tor and now CEO, Nao­mi served as the found­ing edi­tor of the JBC web­site and blog and man­ag­ing edi­tor of Jew­ish Book World. In addi­tion, she has over­seen JBC’s dig­i­tal ini­tia­tives, and also devel­oped the JBC’s Vis­it­ing Scribe series and Unpack­ing the Book: Jew­ish Writ­ers in Conversation.

More from Nao­mi Firestone-Teeter
Related Reading