Books

‘Humans of Judaism’ tells the Jewish story, from the shtetl to Sandy Koufax to Hasidic rapper Nissim Black

The founder of the viral page calls the book a ‘family photo album’

Courtesy of Artisan Books

By PJ Grisar October 21, 2024

Nikki Schreiber, the “one woman shop” behind the Humans of Judaism Instagram page, had a Snapple fact for me.

“Did you know this? That the founders of Snapple were three Jewish guys?” Schreiber asked.

I didn’t, but for over a decade Schreiber’s page has been sharing stories and trivia about Jews from all walks of life ranging from famous ones like Jack Black and his NASA scientist mother to lesser known icons like a rabbi and physician who teaches karate to childhood cancer patients. Schreiber started the page in 2014, as a tribute to her late father, and has since amassed 393,000 followers.

“I’m running a very public page, but I’m actually a very private person,” Schreiber said in a phone call from her home in New Jersey. Transforming the page into a book, out Oct. 22, gave Schreiber an opportunity to share these stories with “more punctuation,” but also to share her own family history.

Her father was from Newark and his dad worked as a khazan at 13 to make money for his family during the Great Depression. Her mother’s mother was born in Jerusalem, to a family that had been there seven generations, and moved to the Lower East Side, where she made a home on Henry Street.

“She taught my mother how to read, write and speak Yiddish by reading the Forward together,” Schreiber said, adding one more Jewish origin story to the mix.

The coffee-and-babka-table book is brimming with anecdotes from the Lower East Side, Israel, Egypt, Spain and beyond, featuring icons behind great Jewish achievements in sports, science and entertainment and stories of Holocaust survivors, some of whom are shown holding posters of children kidnapped by Hamas.

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After Oct. 7, Schreiber said she made an effort to include accounts from the fallout of the attack. She says she felt a sense of greater purpose with the page and the book, not just to express Jewish pride but to correct distortions of history regarding Jewish ties to Israel.

There are painful stories in the pages, but also a sense of defiance and survival. And the book is often fun, sharing the history of the current owners of Russ & Daughters (in their own words) and even an adorable profile of a proud non-human of Judaism, a Coton de Tulear (the same breed of dog owned and cloned by one Barbra Streisand) named Shayna Maydele.

“I likened it a bit to a family photo album — for all of us, not in my own home. It’s our stories,” said Schreiber. The final pages, a tribute to the Righteous Among Nations, pay homage to the larger human family. Schreiber says that many gentiles are followers of the page.

“The picture of Humans of Judaism wouldn’t be what it is without including those friends and neighbors,” said Schreiber.

PJ Grisar is a Forward culture reporter. He can be reached at [email protected] and @pjgrisar on Twitter.

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