Partly Strong, Partly Broken

In the month leading up to October 7th, 2023, a progressive rabbi tries desperately to hold her interfaith community together amid increasing clashes over politics, racism, and Israel.

PARTLY STRONG, PARTLY BROKEN is a classic American novel about political divisions poisoning a community.

Set in a suburban New Jersey interfaith community during the fall of 2023 and told through the eyes of the passionate, inclusivity-minded Rabbi Adinah, the novel unfolds as the shadow of Hamas’ gruesome attack on Israel and Israel’s subsequent devastation of Gaza looms over an already fractured community. The narrative opens with Rabbi Adinah returning from a summer in Haifa, only to find her synagogue literally falling apart: a hurricane has torn through the roof, and her office is flooded. Within her congregation, a new conservative member causes strife in her weekly Torah class, and differing opinions about Israel threaten to upend her authority. In the wider community, a young Syrian refugee she mentors lies in a coma, the victim of a brutal hate crime, and the treasured alliances she’s cultivated with leaders of other faiths become increasingly challenged.

Rabbi Adinah struggles to keep her community together while her foundational beliefs and closest relationships are tested. Through a kaleidoscope of characters, Nathaniel Popkin reflects the contemporary American experience, unraveling the existential consequences that political divisions pose to a community that has long offered strength, purpose, and belonging to all its members.

PARTLY STRONG, PARTLY BROKEN tackles questions that have fractured countless families, friendships, and communities even before October 7th. What does it mean to be a Jew in America today? How can the suffering in Gaza and Israel’s promise of refuge be reconciled? When core religious, personal and political values conflict, how do people respond? The novel doesn’t offer easy answers—but it grapples with these questions with urgency, intimacy, and honesty. By exploring them through fiction, Popkin captures the emotional and moral complexities, the nuances and contradictions, that are too often drowned out in rancorous debate.

Novelist, essayist, editor, documentary writer, and critic, NATHANIEL POPKIN is the author of six books and co-editor of the anthology Who Will Speak for America?