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Jennifer Weiner’s breezy bestsellers are often mentioned alongside the likes of Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing. Her first, Good in Bed, which chronicles the romantic travails of a plus-size newspaper columnist, transformed Weiner into the reigning queen of chick lit. Weiner’s subsequent efforts, such as In Her Shoes and Goodnight Nobody also concern young women navigating the familiar terrain of early adulthood—marriage, career, motherhood—and have risen to the top of the bestseller list, earning her no shortage of critical praise.
Yet for all the attention Weiner and her books have received, one aspect of her work has gone without comment: From Good in Bed‘s Cannie Shapiro to the characters who populate her new collection of stories, The Guy Not Taken, all of Weiner’s protagonists are decidedly, unabashedly Jewish. Children of the 1970s, they grow up comfortably assimilated in an upper-middle-class world where bits of Yiddish drop easily into conversation but no one bats an eye at eating a cheeseburger.
