Other Covenants

Alternate Histories of the Jewish People

English language

Published Dec. 25, 2022 by Ben Yehuda Press.

ISBN:
978-1-953829-40-5
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5 stars (2 reviews)

Is anything more Jewish than stories of alternate history?

After all, at the center of the traditional Passover Haggadah lies a concise story of alternate history:

“And if the Holy One, blessed be He, had not taken our ancestors from Egypt, behold we and our children and our children’s children would [all] be enslaved to Pharaoh in Egypt.”

Other Covenants features over 150,000 words of stories and poems from 30 authors, and comes to about 400 pages in print.

In Other Covenants, you’ll meet Israeli astronauts trying to save a doomed space shuttle, a Jewish community’s faith challenged by the unstoppable return of their own undead, a Jewish science fiction writer in a world of Zeppelins and magic, an adult Anne Frank, an entire genre of Jewish martial arts movies, a Nazi dystopia where Judaism refuses to die, and many more.

The 30 authors whose stories appear in this volume …

3 editions

Many futures, some excellent

4 stars

I love the premise of this book, and like any multi author collection the quality of the content is all over the place. Many great stories, some that don't quite work.

I started it excited about having an alternate history collection that wasn't going to be about "what if the Nazis won". It actually doesn't quite meet that bar, though at least there are only a couple of stories that plumb that particular horror, and the more original of the two is perhaps the highlight of the book: a psychological study of the oppressor that I was mentally chewing over for a long time. Meanwhile, the story that mashes up Scottish and Jewish history was an unexpected delight - it started out looking like the whole concept was just going to be a few puns ("Moshe Ben Nevis"; "The Hebraides") but fleshed that out into a genuinely interesting fantasy.

The …