Jew­ish Noir: Con­tem­po­rary Tales of Crime and Other Dark Deeds edited by Ken­neth Wish­nia is a col­lec­tion of fic­tional short sto­ries with Jew­ish themes. Most of the sto­ries, but not all, are writ­ten by Jew­ish writers.

It’s always dif­fi­cult to write about a col­lec­tion of short sto­ries, since some can be won­der­ful and some… not so much. That being said, I was glad to receive Jew­ish Noir: Con­tem­po­rary Tales of Crime and Other Dark Deeds edited by Ken­neth Wish­nia in the mail, I assume because I enjoyed Mr. Wishnia’s book The Fifth Ser­vant.

Jew­ish noir is a genre which I gen­er­ally enjoy. The Jew­ish peo­ple like to think of them­selves as the “chose ones”, but that title is a mixed bless­ing and a curse. Through­out his­tory the Jews were haunted and hunted, a per­fect fod­der for noir sto­ries (now… let’s eat).

While one would think that many of the sto­ries deal with the Holo­caust, and some do, many oth­ers do not. The sto­ries deal with Civil Rights move­ment, cor­rup­tion, assim­i­la­tion and eve a dis­turb­ing look into child abuse with the Ortho­dox community.

The sto­ries are not all new, a few are reprints such as Har­lan Ellison’s “Final Schtick” (along with Ellison’s com­men­tary) as well as Yente Ser­datsky Sinkey (A Cel­e­bra­tion). It’s inter­est­ing to read how the def­i­n­i­tion of noir changed from eco­nomic des­per­a­tion and gov­ern­ment cor­rup­tion to sto­ries about sim­ply fit­ting in, belong­ing and all the drama and trauma that it entails.

You don’t have to be Jew­ish to enjoy this book, if you enjoy Holo­caust fic­tion, sto­ries of eth­i­cal dilem­mas and crime fic­tion this book is for you. If you, like myself, enjoy dark humor, you’ll like it even more.

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