The Past Again
Releasing June 30th 2026
The Past, Again asks a haunting question: could the unspeakable horrors of Jewish history happen again in twenty-first-century America?
In sun-drenched, seemingly carefree Santa Barbara, the Cohen family live what looks like an idyllic life. Judah, their bright, restless son, stumbled onto the truth of the Holocaust as a child and has been running from his Jewish identity ever since. Now a scholarship student at an exclusive prep school, he is determined to leave behind his “bookish” family and claim a place in the rarefied world of wealth and influence he sees all around him.
Everything changes when a small, almost trivial incident involving his little sister and her best friend (whose mother is German) sparks outrage. What should have been a private misunderstanding goes public, then viral, attracting national attention and drawing the family into a storm of online harassment, media distortion, and emboldened antisemitism.
Judah’s mother, who survived the Farhud, the anti-Jewish pogrom in Iraq, recognizes the pattern immediately: Jews are never more than one wave of hatred away from danger. His father, raised in the safety of American privilege, clings to the belief that it cannot happen here. Caught between a past he tried to deny and a present that is spiraling out of control, seventeen-year-old Judah must decide who he is, what he’s willing to risk, and whether he can protect the very family he thought he had outgrown.
Gripping and unsettling, The Past, Again is a family drama and a warning, asking how fragile “paradise” really is, and what happens when history stops feeling like history at all.
Praise For Book
A Five-Star Review in Reader’s Favorite
In Benjamin Abravenel’s The Past, Again, Judah Cohen is a Santa Barbara boy whose childhood changes after he finds Holocaust photographs in his father Brian’s study and begins answering to James instead of his given name. As James grows older, he sets his sights on Montecito, where architecture and wealth seem to offer an escape from the crowded Jewish house he wants to leave. His mother, Lori, has a private past from Iraq and Israel that James barely knows, while Chase Ravenscroft’s family hides its own reinvention behind a polished estate.
When Judith, James’s younger sister, explains Yom HaShoah to her German American friend Ashley, a neighborhood misunderstanding becomes public. The Cohen family is pulled into a storm that brings old fears into modern California.
Benjamin Abravenel’s The Past, Again is a gorgeous novel, full of both heartening and heartbreaking moments. The author brings generational trauma to the forefront in a skilled display of an inheritance that boils inside a home long after the senior Cohens tell themselves they have left it behind. Abravenel writes about Jewish family life with intimate familiarity, making Brian’s scholarship on the Zohar and Lori’s music feel organic. The writing is at its best when divulging private history, which ultimately becomes public. Lori’s interview about her Iraqi Jewish childhood is beautifully handled because it changes her from a protective mother into someone finally speaking for Sairah’s losses.
I genuinely felt sympathy for James, whose ambition toward Montecito exists beside his loyalty to Judith. Elegantly written and immersive, this book is a smart choice for readers who adore literary fiction. Very highly recommended.
Contact Benjamin Abravenel
benjaminabravenel@gmail.com
(000) 000-0000