Books
Mah Jongg: How Generations of Jewish Women Built Community Through a Chinese Game (Coming Fall 2027)
Mah Jongg is a brisk, engaging celebration of a century of Jewish women building community through a Chinese game. Centering Jewish women—their interests, experiences, and voices—the book places their stories within the rich history of mah jongg in the United States and around the world.
The book honors the distinctly American variation first codified by American Jewish women and, at the same time, the game’s Chinese origins and contemporary global forms (while avoiding previously romanticized and Sinophobic stereotypes that have marred this history).
Above all, Mah Jongg focuses on how Jewish women have used the game to create family bonds, friendships, charitable networks, and community. Whenever possible, it will let these women speak in their own voices. Tracing the game’s American arc from its introduction in 1922 through its current revival, the book situates readers within the past hundred years of mah jongg—and looks ahead to the century still to come.
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Matching Minds With Sondheim: The Puzzles and Games of the Broadway Master (2025)
By near-universal consensus, Stephen Sondheim was the greatest musical theater composer of his generation. Matching Minds with Sondheim is a journey into the rich but largely unmapped puzzle and game aspects of the composer’s creative life, illuminating how Sondheim’s playful designs delivered moments of clarity and connection for his friends and colleagues. For the first time, this book offers an enthralling tour of what Sondheim described as his “puzzler’s mind,” helping readers to better understand the man, his work, and—if they accept the challenge—themselves.
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Learn more at MatchingMindswithSondheim.com and on Instagram.
The New Yorker: “Clever and appropriately obsessive.”
Drama Book Shop: “So popular we can’t keep it on our shelves.”
The Times of London: “Read the book.”
Making Dinosaurs Dance: A Toolkit for Digital Design in Museums (2023)
“A wonderful guide to the kind of agile, experimental, responsive operational strategies needed in the museum of the future.” — Elizabeth Merritt, Founding Director, Center for the Future of Museums, American Alliance of Museums
Making Dinosaurs Dance takes the reader behind the scenes to learn how the American Museum of Natural History innovates visitor digital engagement, highlighting design techniques used both there and at museums around the world. Based on my six years at the landmark institution that inspired the Night at the Museum franchise, the book introduces The Six Tools of Digital Design – user research, rapid prototyping, public piloting, iterative design, youth collaboration, and teaming up – then applies them through case studies across a range of topics.
Read more here.
Friday is Tomorrow, or The Dayenu Year (2022)
Chronicles from the NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive
“Stories like Joseph’s suggest we are a lot better than we think we are.” —Micki McElya, author of The Politics of Mourning
“Compulsively readable” —James Loney, columnist
Friday is Tomorrow, or The Dayenu Year is a true story of learning to grieve and thrive during the first year of the COVID-19 Pandemic.
Within the first month of the lock-down, the author loses his father to the disease and then, soon after, his job. Through the support of his family, friends, and community, Friday is Tomorrow tells the uplifting story of how one man learns to maintain traditions in a time of uncertainty while reaching for his dreams.
At times moving, at times humorous, the ups and downs of this New Yorker were originally penned (quite literally, with a physical pen) for Columbia University’s NYC Covid-19 Oral History, Narrative and Memory Archive. Edited together for the first time, Friday is Tomorrow is more than just an opportunity to read one person’s struggle with the world wrought by the recent pandemic.
It is an invitation to take the time and space you need to consider and better understand your own story.
Learn how to get your own copy, download a free sample, and more at FridayisTomorrow.com.
Seltzertopia: The Extraordinary Story of an Ordinary Drink (2018)
“Of the thousands of books written about seltzer water, this is by far my favorite–especially the part that’s about me.” –Mel Brooks
Based on more than fourteen years of original research and interviews, the extraordinary story of this ordinary drink can finally be told.
Learn where to get your own copy, watch videos of presentations, follow the book tour and more at Seltzertopia.com.
© Copyright 2023 – Barry Joseph