Posted on July 6, 2026

Teme Ring and Susan Blumberg-Kason on how independent bookstores have turned their backs on Jewish authors and readers since October 7.

Editor’s Note: For the past two and a half years, I’ve been writing about the marginalization of Jewish and Israeli authors in the publishing world. Now Teme Ring and Susan Blumberg-Kason turn our attention to what’s happening in another traditional bastion of alternative voices: the local indie bookstore. The news, it turns out, is worse than even I had suspected. In this eye-opening piece, Teme and Susan tell their story of disappointment and betrayal by the very bookstores that had once brought them joy—and find that there’s increasingly no room for Jewish voices on the shelves. — Howard Lovy

For decades, Chicago’s independent bookstores were our Gan Eden. As Jewish women, as readers, as feminists, we found in them a sense of community and possibility that felt almost sacred. One feminist bookstore stood out—its curated tables, its children’s section, its author events all felt like celebrations where every voice was welcomed and every perspective valued.

We were regulars through tight finances, city parking, COVID, and blizzards. What the bookstores gave in return was always worth the effort.

We never imagined that on a certain terrible day, we—and large swaths of the Jewish community—would be exiled from the garden.

That day came on October 7, 2023.

We are two Jewish women and book lovers in Chicago who, in the past two years, went from feeling welcomed and safe in our favorite bookstores to being ostracized, dismissed in person, and blocked on social media by our beloved feminist indie. One of us discovered she’d been blocked, ironically, on the first day of Banned Books Week 2025.

Why? They never told us, but the reason’s not hard to guess.

READ more at https://judithmagazine.substack.com/p/the-great-betrayal