There are a mul­ti­tude of Jew­ish expe­ri­ences,” Natasha Díaz observes in this issue of Paper Brigade. This sen­ti­ment, which has been deeply under­scored in the past year, also speaks to the essence of our journal.

In these pages, we aim to high­light the diver­si­ty of Jew­ish lives and books. Díaz dis­cuss­es the com­plex­i­ty of racial and reli­gious iden­ti­ty, which is also reflect­ed in her debut YA nov­el. Poet Diane Mehta describes carv­ing out a place for her own spir­i­tu­al­i­ty after strug­gling to rec­on­cile the Jew­ish and Jain tra­di­tions of her par­ents. Oth­er authors reflect on sci­en­tif­ic advances that have made our con­cept of her­itage more nuanced — the results of DNA tests under­pin mem­oirs by Dani Shapiro and T Kira Mad­den as well as a new wave of lit­er­a­ture reclaim­ing the lega­cy of crypto-Jews.

While many Jew­ish expe­ri­ences have only recent­ly been acknowl­edged, they have always exist­ed. Today, many writ­ers are bring­ing mar­gin­al­ized fig­ures of the past into the canon. Sarah Blake reimag­ines the sto­ry of Noah’s ark as a queer nar­ra­tive, and an excerpt from Ste­fan Hertmans’s nov­el The Con­vert details the strug­gles of an actu­al eleventh-cen­tu­ry woman who con­vert­ed to Judaism. LaN­i­tra M. Berg­er explores a moral­ly com­plex chap­ter of Jew­ish his­to­ry through the apartheid-era paint­ings of Irma Stern.

This year, many of us have felt iso­lat­ed. Books show us that we’re not alone — in fact, they can bring us togeth­er on an ever-widen­ing scale. One need look no fur­ther than an excerpt from Michael Zapata’s debut nov­el, in which two boys of dif­fer­ent back­grounds bond over their shared love of a work of sci­ence fic­tion. As Boris Fish­man notes in an inter­view, ​“Kin­ship can come from shared ideas and feel­ings, not just from shared expe­ri­ence.” I hope you’ll find your own sense of kin­ship in the fol­low­ing pages.

—Bec­ca Kan­tor, Edi­to­r­i­al Director

Could­n’t make it to the vir­tu­al launch par­ty? Watch a record­ing of the event on Face­book or YouTube.