Jason Diamond on being a (Jewish-)American Author
From The Five Books: Jewish Authors on the Books That Shaped Them by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
February 3, 2026 · 57 min
About this episode
Jason Diamond discusses his experiences as a Jewish-American author and explores themes of family and identity in his work.
In this conversation, Jason Diamond unpacks what it means to be an American, Jewish, or Jewish-American author. We also discuss family secrets, Jewish gangsters, the humor and alienation of Franz Kafka, and how Art Spiegelman’s Maus taught Jason to accept his family’s silences. Jason’s debut novel, Kaplan’s Plot, follows Elijah Mendes, who returns to Chicago after his tech business collapses and discovers that his family owns a Jewish cemetery, where a man he’s never heard of — his great-uncle Solomon Kaplan — is buried. As Elijah begins to untangle his family’s past, the novel moves between his present-day relationship with his mother, Eve, who is dying of cancer, and the earlier story of his grandfather, Yitz Kaplan. That past narrative traces Yitz and his brother Sol from a pogrom in Odessa to their arrival in America alone, and follows the brothers’ complicated bond as Yitz rises to become a Jewish gangster in 1920s Chicago. Jason Diamond has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, Esquire, Harper's Bazaar, The Wall Street Journal, McSweeny's, NPR, and many other outlets. He is the author of The Sprawl, and the memoir, Searching For John Hughes. He is the co-author…
People in this episode
Host: Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Guest: Jason Diamond
Topics covered
- Jewish-American identity
- family secrets
- literature
- gangsters
- Kafka
- family history
Keywords
- Jewish-American author
- family secrets
- Kafka
- gangsters
- Kaplan's Plot
- literature
Mentioned in this episode
Books & works: Maus, Amerika, Be Here Now, The Gods of New York, Effingers, Kaplan’s Plot
Places: Chicago, Odessa
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