While Zibby Owens’ latest book opens with her intimate and sometimes humorous essays on divorce, motherhood and midlife weight gain, it gradually reveals a broader, weightier theme — the reality of life as a Jew in post-Oct. 7 America.  

“I want them to feel outraged,” Owens told Jewish Insider — the reaction she’s hoping for from readers by the time they reach “How It Feels to Be Jewish Right Now,” an essay in her new collection that names chants like “From the River to the Sea” as warning signs. Her book has a deliberate sequencing, Owens said: opening with universal chapters before turning to antisemitism, so that “by the time they get to the Jewish piece of it, they already are relating and it feels more personal because they might feel like [antisemitism] is happening to a friend.”

“Learning about the numbers of antisemitism [is hard to relate to] when you don’t have a specific example. I want [readers] to feel like they know someone this is happening to,” said Owens.  

In Between Chapters: How I Started Over, Took Some Chances, and Found the Plot, released on Tuesday, the author, publishing entrepreneur and mother of four weaves deeply personal and universal stories with a candid reckoning of what it means to be “publicly Jewish” since Oct. 7 and before — from a conversation with her children about the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting in 2018 to her own wedding at Central Synagogue in Manhattan, the site of an antisemitic attack over the summer. 

Owens, who turned 50 last month, spoke with JI ahead of the book release about why she chose to combine serious discussions on antisemitism with stories about falling in love with her tennis trainer and lessons from her father, Stephen Schwarzman, the billionaire co-founder and CEO of Blackstone. She also shared what she hopes non-Jewish readers take away and why she believes more Jews are choosing to speak out rather than lower their voices. 

Owens’ latest, self-published book follows the 2024 release of On Being Jewish Now: Reflections from Authors and Advocates, a collection of essays from more than 70 writers and religious leaders that she edited in the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks. In November 2023, Owens publicly withdrew her sponsorship for the National Book Awards over its “pro-Palestinian agenda.”

But before Oct. 7, Owens’ public work focused primarily on books, authors and parenting (such as her podcast “Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books”). She describes in Between Chapters as never having planned to be “publicly Jewish” before Oct. 7, and says that while she didn’t hide being Jewish, “it just wasn’t the most salient part” of her personality. 

Before Oct. 7, Owens said, her Jewish identity was present but rarely central to her public life. That changed almost overnight. “After Oct. 7, being Jewish became something that eclipsed everything else. It bled into my literary life, not even by choice necessarily,” she continued — including, she noted, rising antisemitism in the book publishing world itself.

As a Jewish woman who is the founder and chief executive of her own publishing house, Zibby Publishing, Owens told JI the rising trend of Jewish-owned publishing houses — new ventures that aim to publish Jewish and Israeli stories that mainstream houses won’t — is “great.”

“I’m eager to read the books that they publish. [Antisemitism in publishing] was particularly intense after Oct. 7. It’s [still] pervasive. Everyday there’s something online that makes me worry,” she said.   

That unease extends beyond the publishing world and into Owens’ own sense of safety raising Jewish children in New York City. In an essay written years before Oct. 7, she details telling her twins, then 11, about the Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh that took place the day they were headed to a bat mitzvah, and her son asking if something like that could happen in New York. 

Looking back on the reassurance she gave her children at the time, Owens said while she “hoped nothing would happen … having lived through 9/11, I’ve never felt totally secure in New York.”

“Part of my job as a parent is to focus on the things we can control and not make my kids panic,” she told JI. “Unfortunately, I feel less and less safe in New York everyday. The question of whether to leave is always on the table, but I really don’t want to. Also, it’s not just New York, attacks are happening more everywhere.” 

“Looking back at that essay, I couldn’t have imagined how much worse things would get so quickly,” she said.  

Yet even as many feel their sense of safety erode, “a lot of Jewish people have increased their voices, put megaphones to their voices,” in the aftermath of Oct. 7, said Owens. 

That shift stands in sharp contrast to a memory Owens returns to in the book: her mother once quieting down when discussing “Jewish things” — and the line she said in response, “There’s no reason for us to lower our voices,” which became the title of one of the book’s essays.

“I think more people than not have come forward as being outwardly Jewish — wearing Jewish stars, all of the external markers of community,” Owens told JI. “Connecting in the community has made it possible to survive this time. Despite all of the threats, Jewish people are being loud and proud, more so than before.”

“I don’t know that we have the luxury of lowering our voices,” she continued. “This is our instinct as a people. In the Holocaust era, hiding is how people survived. But it’s gotten to a point where to prevent something like that happening again, we can’t hide. We have to call out this type of behavior when we see it, even if that feels like it has no effect.”