JCO Book Club

Goyhood, by Reuven Fenton, wears its title like a dare. It’s a wink, a provocation, and a confession all at once - because this is a story about a man who has spent his whole life standing just outside the frame of Jewish identity, close enough to feel its warmth but not close enough to claim it. He’s a “goy,” yes - but one whose heart has been shaped, warped, comforted, and occasionally tormented by a culture he thought wasn’t really his to inhabit.

Fenton follows his protagonist through the kind of adulthood that sneaks up on you - real adulthood, with its disappointments, revelations, and late-night Googling of ancestral DNA results - forcing him to ask what belonging actually means. Is it blood? Practice? Proximity? Or is it the complicated, unspoken ache of wanting to be part of something without knowing whether you’re allowed in?

The pages are filled…