Books by Jonathan M. Hess

Before Fiddler on the Roof, there was Deborah, a blockbuster melodrama about a Jewish woman forsaken by her non-Jewish lover. Deborah and Her Sisters offers the first comprehensive history of this transnational phenomenon, focusing on its ability to bring Jews and non-Jews together during a period of increasing antisemitism.

This book opens our eyes to the vast corpus of popular fiction written by Jews for Jews in nineteenth-century Germany, discovering a tradition of Jewish literature that is in many ways still with us today.