I’ll start this review with an admission: I wasn’t overly eager to read EMET. Certainly not because of the author — I’ve been an admirer of Roger L. Simon’s work from the moment I first stumbled upon his personal blog, even before he cofounded the website you are reading right now. Rather, it was because of the genre: I’ve been bored with fiction for the last couple of years. Just writing that surprises me now, as fiction was pretty much all I read during my 20s and 30s. However, as I gradually began the process of becoming what is known in Judaism as a baal teshuva — returning to a Jewish heritage I previously knew little about — my reading preferences drifted toward the ancient holy texts and commentary.
So I would have initially been more enthusiastic about a book from Roger that expanded on the self-revealing chapter “Steeples: How the South Gave Me Religion,” from his 2023 book American Refugees, which focuses on the mass exodus from blue states to red states. In it, he writes of his life in Los Angeles before moving to Nashville:
I was too busy with my life and the object of true worship for most Angelenos of my ilk: my career. I was comfortable in my agnostic and vague “there’s something out there” beliefs. The creation of the universe was beyond my pay grade, I would joke to those interested, and there weren’t many who were. Anyway, I was busy with the mundane.
Roger has also explored his religious awakening and its impact on his career on his Substack, also called AmericanRefugees. In a post on his 82nd birthday, titled “82? … Be Grateful to God, Roger,” he shared his new mission:
My purpose is to contribute as a writer, to try to make the world better, from whatever talents G-d has given me. Fame and fortune are immaterial. By keeping that in focus, my work improves and becomes more meaningful.
With EMET, Simon has succeeded in creating a truly meaningful work, reminding those of us who first discovered Roger through his political and social commentary that this award-winning author of the Moses Wine detective series and Oscar-nominated screenwriter is a gifted storyteller. Any hesitation I may have had in starting the book disappeared as soon as I saw the Mossad logo atop a memo explaining that the story to follow is a manuscript from a U.S. citizen. Right away, I knew it would be a page-turner.
The U.S. citizen is Benjamin Golub, a Jew in his 60s whose parents “were not particularly religious, more the bagels-and-lox on Sunday types.” Although Golub is a rabbi at a conservative synagogue in Nashville, he’s not all that religious either, at least when it comes to observing the 613 commandments in the Torah. Once a “conventional underground leftie,” he has shifted to the right politically, to the surprise of no one more than himself. We’re reminded of the adage that “a liberal is a conservative who hasn’t been mugged” when he opens his story detailing a horrific crime that might rekindle readers’ anger at Joe Biden’s open border.
In this thriller, which hits with immediacy because it deals with events still making headlines today, it’s soon Oct. 7, 2023, which led to the shocking rise of antisemitism worldwide. Readers may recall how many once-disaffiliated Jews were awakened after this resurgence of the oldest hatred. Recognizing that history tragically seemed to be repeating itself yet again led many Jews to engage with their religion in ways they’d never considered before. I remember being at a Judaica store soon after the October 7 slaughter and being moved by a father and his son who were buying their first mezuzah to affix on their door. They’d fit right in at the seminar Golub teaches at his synagogue that is “an introduction to Judaism for Jews who had been secular most of their lives and, for various reasons, had taken a new interest in their heritage.”
For Golub himself, however, it’s a fateful decision — the one behind the book’s title, which means “Truth” in Hebrew — that he makes on Oct. 7, 2023, even before he’s learned of the Hamas attack, which truly sets this story in motion and presents him with much more difficult — and consequential — decisions than whether or not to keep kosher or drive to synagogue on Shabbat.
A thoroughly rational man who often feels while he’s praying that “betting that G-d existed and living accordingly was smarter than risking the opposite,” Golub is initially as incredulous as the reader might be when — to borrow from the book’s description so as not to give too much away — “a lump of mud shaped like a man soon reveals a terrifying capacity for action.”
At the same time, the “terrifying capacity” for antisemitism is becoming more evident in his own country. Having grown up “in that era, post the Holocaust and World War II, which was perhaps the best in recorded history for people of my faith,” Golub now sees U.S. congresswomen openly rooting for Hamas and protesters calling for genocide on America’s most prestigious college campuses. (We meet such characters in EMET, and many readers may — like I did — experience a bit of Schadenfreude at their comeuppance.)
Yet just as the dangers facing Jews in Israel dwarf those of American Jews, events in Golub’s life soon become “considerably more dangerous—physically, emotionally, legally, and every conceivable way” — especially once the action moves to an Israel facing existential war.
Roger’s brilliant writing reminded me what great fiction can offer: an intensity the news — or even nonfiction — can’t match, whether the action is taking place in a Hamas tunnel or among panicked civilians taking cover from Iranian rockets. That raw power only works if the characters are brought to life, as they are in EMET, none more so than Golub, whose spiritual journey is sure to have you asking questions about how you’re living your own life. As is so important in a thriller, I agree with Glenn Reynolds that you’ll be satisfied with its ending — which already has me hoping for a sequel.
You can purchase EMET on Amazon now.
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