The Judgment of Yoyo Gold

• Author: Isaac Blum
• Genre: YA Contemporary
• Publication Date: October 15, 2024
• Publisher: Philomel Books

Thank you to NetGalley and Philomel Books for providing me with an ARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

A smart and powerful story set in the Orthodox Jewish community about what it means to fit in, break out, and find your own way, by the award-winning author of The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen. This book is Gossip Girl + My Name Is Asher Lev + I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.

Yoyo Gold has always played the role of the perfect Jewish daughter. She keeps kosher, looks after her siblings, and volunteers at the local food bank. She respects the decisions of her rabbi father and encourages her friends to observe the rules of their Orthodox faith. But when she sees her best friend cast out of the community over a seemingly innocent transgression, Yoyo’s eyes are opened to the truth of her neighbors’ hypocrisies for the first time. And what she sees leaves her shocked and unmoored.

As Yoyo’s frustration builds, so does the pressure to speak out, even if she can only do so anonymously on TikTok, an app that’s always been forbidden to her. But when one of her videos goes viral—and her decisions wind up impacting not only her own life but also her relationship with the boy she’s falling for—Yoyo’s world is thrown into chaos. She is forced to choose which path to take, for her community, for her family, and most importantly, for herself.

Award-winning author Isaac Blum returns with a new novel that asks what it really means to be part of a community—and what it means to break free.

I was really excited to get approved for this book because I loved Isaac Blum’s first book and couldn’t wait to see what he had in store. The cover immediately caught my attention, because much like in The Life and Crimes of Hoodie Rosen, the person pictured is a visibly Orthodox Jewish character. It might not seem like a big deal, but having an Orthodox Jewish character on the cover of a book published by one of the Big Five is a huge deal for a population that is so small in comparison to the rest of the world.

As expected, Blum takes readers into the heart of a closed community that most people don’t get to see. As someone who was raised in between Conservative and Orthodox Judaism, my family leaned more towards Orthodox, allowing me insight into the community as someone who has been on the edges of it for my whole life. This made it easy for me to understand and identify with a lot of the book, although I did have a few dislikes.

Starting with the positives is Yoyo herself, and the characters around her. Yoyo is smart, capable, and comes across as significantly more mature than most of her peers. It made me sad for her that so much responsibility is on her shoulders without her getting any say in it. As one of the oldest siblings, Yoyo isn’t just driven to do well in school, she’s basically pushed to be a miniature version of a rabbi’s wife, like her mother. This requires Yoyo to be a power of example and support within the community, handle tasks around the house, and care for her younger siblings. As if that isn’t enough, we meet Yoyo just after her very best friend, Esti, left the community and has no means of contacting Yoyo. 

We also get to know a little bit about her five siblings, but more importantly, her other friends, and a new person in her life, the daughter of the new Reform Jewish rabbi, who has just moved to the area. It seems to be the first sustained interaction that Yoyo has had outside of her own community, which is insulated: she attends yeshiva (Jewish day school) with the girls from her community, shops at the kosher supermarket in town, and is always surrounded by other Orthodox Jews. A budding potential relationship with Mickey ushers in a conflict of ideas in some areas that Yoyo hasn’t really put much thought into. But it’s ultimately her experience with TikTok that causes the most conflict in Yoyo’s life.

Being a rabbi’s daughter comes with a lot of expectations, and Yoyo has shown herself more than capable of doing what her society expects of her and exceptionally self-aware for a teenager. However, now that Yoyo sees some things occurring in her community and has no outlet, she finds herself questioning some things she never even thought about questioning. This comes on the heels of Esti’s leaving the community over some things that didn’t seem overly problematic to Yoyo, and in fact are common practices of people who aren’t very religious. 

There are funny moments, and universal moments of frustration with siblings that every teenager can identify with. There is a major twist at the end, and it changed my perception about one thing that I was a bit critical of. When portraying such a small, insulated community of people, there’s a fine line between discussion and potentially misrepresenting a larger group of people. Yes, Orthodox Jews especially tend to stay in small, clannish communities, but millennia of persecution and being kept in ghettos has had strong effects on Jewish communities, especially Orthodox communities, where residents are visibly Jewish. 

One of my biggest issues with the book is that it makes the community only want people to blindly obey. Judaism is very heavy on questioning and explaining a rational reason why we are directed to obey the 613 commandments laid out in the Torah. Throughout our readings is discussion by the sages of what was meant by each paragraph, sentence, even why one word was used instead of another. And maybe it was because Yoyo was a rabbi’s daughter, with additional pressure on her to conform, but it didn’t sit right with me when normal and healthy teenage behavior is pathologized and ostracized. Women in Judaism are very important both in our past and our present, and Orthodox women aren’t just the heart of the home, they are supportive of the others in their community and are viewed as being closer to HaShem than men.

“They said that women were naturally closer to God. That’s why we weren’t required to pray as often as men, or as thoroughly, or as intensely: because women were Godly in and of themselves.”

I could empathize with what Yoyo was going through, and when you’ve always done what is expected and seen others doing that all your life, it is immensely difficult to see hypocrisy and problems within a community. It was a turning point for Yoyo when she comes to this realization, which embodies the strong tradition of social justice in Judaism:

“‘We need to worry about whatever it was that made her sneak out at night on Shabbos to sit in the dark in a parked car and vape alone. And we need to worry that it’s us, that we’re the ones who made her do that.’”

For the most part, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. I could see characters doing the wrong thing and seeing the slippery slope that they were on, but I could also see the humanity in all of the flawed characters in this book. It made them feel more realistic, and gives voice to the young people who are seeking connection with others who understand them. And while I had my issues with the story, I think it is still an important read because it gives voice to young Orthodox Jews who are ready to modernize some aspects of an ancient religion, and sometimes even those who have to learn things the hard way:

“‘It’s like every little thing was fine. Every step I took felt like the right step at the time. But then I didn’t end up where I wanted to. And I should have known. I did know. I was told over and over, but it took all these steps to figure it out myself.”

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