The Jews in America, a work by Arthur Hertzberg, is an accessible and entertaining history of Jewish people in the United States from colonial times to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is a powerful novel about a family of Russian immigrant Jews on New York's Lower East Side.

The Assistant is Bernard Malamud's second novel. Frank Alpine, a drifter and dreamer, works in the corner grocery of Morris Bober, an impoverished and hard working Jew. Through his friendship with Morris and his daughter Helen, Frank learns about Jewish culture and religion.

The Stories of Bernard Malamud, published in 1983 several years before the author's death, contains stories of great wit and frightening insight.