“Call it a confirmation bias. Everywhere I turned this year, I saw a new expression of Arab Jewish identity. The revival seems to be happening across all fields—literature, food, music—yet somehow nobody’s talking about it. . . . Imagine my excitement, then, when I discovered Eduardo Halfon’s new novel, Monastery, in which the conflicted, tragicomic protagonist denies his Arab identity when talking to certain Jews, and his Jewish identity when talking to certain Arabs.”