J.S. Gold Does For Judaism What ‘Percy Jackson’ Did For Greek Myth

Demon-killing shofars, a living tallit worthy of Doctor Strange, and health-restoring manna.

Those are just a few things one can expect while reading J.S. Gold’s The Sanhedrin Chronicles, where history, culture, folklore, and religious mysticism come vividly to life, holding the promise of a sprawling new fantasy book series that will do for Judaism what the bestselling Percy Jackson saga did for Greek mythology.

“I wanted to introduce readers to a Jewish mythology, Kabbalah, and the esoteric tradition of what it means to be Jewish,” Gold tells me. “That has been lost on a lot of Jews, and I think it’s so cool and so rich.”

The story revolves around Arthur Rose, a nerdy college student highly resentful of his Hasidic upbringing, who must re-embrace his roots after the father that abandoned him years ago suddenly dies and leaves him heir apparent to a clandestine society of badass demon hunters known as Sanhedrin (named for the supreme court of Jewish antiquity).

“The first book is very much involved with claiming your pride as a Jew and self-actualizing as a Jew,” states Gold. “Claiming that Jewish pride and identity for yourself.”

Now available from Histria Books, the novel wonderfully captures the — ahem — lightning in a bottle magic of Rick Riordan’s The Lightning Thief, with plenty of clever world-building to spare. Like The Writer from Josh Gad and the Berkowitz brothers, Gold has found a way to make the obscurities Jewish tradition accessible to mainstream audiences by paying homage to and remixing both 5,000 years of religious development and long-entrenched hero tropes.

The New York-based author found himself inspired to start writing Sanhedrin after the 2018 release of Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther movie, which revolutionized minority representation in pop culture. “It was a revelation because it was not using Black aesthetics for aesthetic-purposes only,” Gold says of the Marvel Studios blockbuster that grossed over $1 billion and won three Oscars. “It’s going into the Black milieu, the Black psychology, the Black culture, the Black mind. I thought to myself, ‘Where is that for the Jewish people?’ Where is a Jewish superhero story that is not using just the aesthetics of Judaism or the trappings of Judaism, but is actually going into themes that are resonant in the Jewish mind and in the Jewish milieu?’”

While media contains its fair share of overtly Jewish characters, particularly within the realm of comic books (think Magneto, Kitty Pryde, Ben Grimm, and Moon Knight), Gold felt there was an opportunity to move beyond the usual depictions.

“We have been complacent in our own representation,” he proclaims, citing audience passivity regarding the Moon Knight TV show’s disappointingly surface-level presentation of Marc Spector’s canonically Jewish background as a prime example. “I see The Sanhedrin Chronicles as a way to move the needle and introduce non-Jewish readers to our world and the things we really grapple with.”

At the same time, he “wanted to deepen and widen [the] understanding of what it means to be a Jewish person” for fellow members of the tribe by emphasizing the fact that seemingly out-there ideas espoused in Kabbalistic texts are not mutually exclusive from contemporary practices. “We don’t dwell in the mystic because we think that it represents an esoteric tradition that isn’t part of who we are, but that could not be farther from the truth,” the author explains. “This mysticism we have is part of our world. It’s just we don’t recognize it as such.”

Similar to Arthur, Gold leads a double life, teaching US and world history to high school students by day, “which is actually kind of perfect for a story like this because it enables me to understand the history of our people,” he says. “I took opportunities to inject that history. I don’t think a lot of Jewish people know their own history, and I actually think it does a disservice to our own understandings of identity.”

Dense, yet never overwhelming, The Sanhedrin Chronicles is merely the curtain-raiser for an epic spanning multiple sequels. “We have a lot of themes yet to explore,” notes Gold, teasing everything from the divisive opinion on patrilineal Jews to a “head-on” exploration of the modern state of Israel. “All … these grander themes of how Jews interact with the world,” he continues, vowing to have the second installment out by late 2026, or early 2027.

While he’s hesitant to announce the sequel’s title at the time of our interview, the author does feel comfortable enough to share his numerical aspirations for the Sanhedrin series. “There’s a part of me that wants it to be seven, for the seven days of creation. It just works out,” he concludes. “I don’t think it’s gonna be seven. I think there’s too much story in my head. I would probably say I’ve got enough for eight or nine books.”