Three Brooklyn Jews Read The Chosen
How This Book Club Started
This began quietly, almost accidentally.
At first, it was just me and Mike—two die-hard lovers of Brooklyn, long walks, neighborhood history, and conversations that wander. We’re both Jewish, but our Judaism lives in different places. Not opposite places—just different ones. That difference has always made the conversations richer.
We didn’t start with a big plan. No formal book club. No mission statement. Just the idea that reading something together might open up space for the kinds of conversations we already loved having.
Then came The Chosen.
Why The Chosen
We chose this book because it felt necessary. Not trendy. Not light. Necessary.
In a time of rising antisemitism, it felt important to return to a Jewish story that grapples with identity, faith, generational trauma, and choice, without flattening any of it. The Chosen is deeply Jewish, but also deeply human. It holds war, the Holocaust, fatherhood, silence, devotion, rebellion, and love in the same breath.
And then, unexpectedly, our “test run” expanded.
Enter Mina
At an event Mike was hosting at his home to support Shamir Hospital in Israel, I ran into Mina.
Mina runs Prospect Gymnastics in Ditmas. She’s a Brooklyn girl through and through, but with a past that doesn’t always fit neatly into that sentence. She grew up Chabad Orthodox, then left Chabad. What she carried with her from that world, and what she chose to leave behind, mirrors so many complicated Jewish journeys, my own included. I went to yeshiva and got kicked out in fifth grade. I grew up in an Orthodox community, but my parents were actors—liberal, artistic, not religious, but deeply traditional. Jewishness was everywhere in my life, even when belief was not. Mike grew up culturally Jewish in a traditional home, much like me. His kids attended Chabad when they were younger, but today they’re not religious. Judaism, for all three of us, is something lived, questioned, inherited, reshaped. So suddenly, this wasn’t just a book club. It was three people with very different Jewish pasts sitting with the same text, and hearing different echoes in it.
Reading Together
What struck me most was how differently we experienced the same ending. Mina and I were wrecked. We cried. Something about the silence, the grief, the weight of what is passed down, and what is chosen, hit us in the body. Mike was astonished. Moved, yes, but in a quieter, more contemplative way. Where we felt heartbreak, he felt awe. That difference felt meaningful. It reminded me that Jewish stories don’t land the same way for everyone, and that’s not a problem: it’s the point.
We talked about:
War and what it does to families
The shadow of the Holocaust, even when it isn’t always named
The tension between who we are born to be and who we choose to become
Fathers and sons
Silence as love, silence as harm
None of us read the book “the same way,” but we all felt changed by it.
Why We’re Writing This Down
This blog is not a review site. It’s not academic. It’s not polished or performative. It’s an archive. A place to document conversations, thoughts, and moments as they happen. A record of what it looks like when people with shared roots—but different paths—sit together and read carefully. Right now, this is just the beginning: a book club that started as a test between two Brooklyn obsessives and grew into something fuller.
Down the line, this space may grow to include Ditmas Park neighborhood interviews, long-time resident stories, and oral histories; voices that carry memory the way books do, but differently.
For now, this is where we start.
With one book.
Three people.
And the belief that reading together—especially now—still matters.