The Jewish Writer Behind So Many of Your Favorite Thrillers

I’m not going to lie. I, like so many TV streamers, am a huge fan of the Harlan Coben Netflix industrial complex. He’s the Jewish writer behind so many of the best thrillers (on the page and on television) and his latest offering, “I Will Find You,” starring Britt Lower and Sam Worthington, is now one of the top 10 most-watched shows on Netflix.

If there’s a new Harlan Coben TV show — and there always seems to be — I’m going to watch it. Will it always be great? No. Will I always thoroughly enjoy the well-acted dark mystery from beginning to end? Most likely. And judging by the viewership stats, I’m hardly alone.

There are currently 13 shows in the Netflix Harlan Coben Collection, including (and let’s take a deep breath here) “I Will Find You,” “Safe,” “Run Away,” “Fool Me Once,” “The Stranger,” “Missing You,” “Innocent,” “Stay Close,” “Just One Look,” “Caught,” “Gone for Good,” “Hold Tight” and “The Woods.”

I mean, it’s quite a short list when you compare it to the number of books the bestselling author has written (35, which have sold over 100 million copies worldwide), but it’s still quite a feat.

Coben started his writing career in 1990, and from the beginning, featured characters inspired by his Jewish heritage and family. The TV adaptations of these books rarely feature explicitly Jewish characters. Still, being Jewish is a big part of Coben’s identity, and not something he’s ever shied away from.

Here are some things to know about Coben’s Jewish childhood and how it impacts his writing.

Harlan Coben was raised Jewish in New Jersey

You may have guessed it, but Coben’s family’s original last name was Cohen — it was changed by his father to Coben after he married Harlan’s mother. Coben was born in Newark, New Jersey and raised in one of the Garden State’s most Jewish cities: Livingston, where Jews make up more than 40% of the residents. Livingston is where Jason Alexander, Chelsea Handler and Jared Kushner were raised, to name but a few famous Jews.

According to Jewish News, he was named Harlan, or Chaim, after his paternal grandfather, who died before he was born. “My parents were U.S.-born. My grandfather was one of seven brothers born in Jerusalem [and immigrated] to the U.S.,” he told the Forward in 2008.

He grew up attending huge 100-person seders “made up of the ‘patriarchs,'” according to that Jewish News interview. The article continues: They were “a group of five or six close friends of his maternal grandfather and their extended families. The ‘giant’ seder used to take place at Goldman’s Hotel in New Jersey, now a very fancy and spacious establishment called the Wilshire.”

Coben also raised his three kids in suburban New Jersey. He lives in a beautiful home in Ridgewood. 

Coben has written beautiful odes to his Jewish parents

Both of Coben’s parents died fairly young, his father of a heart attack at 59, his mother of cancer “around 60.” Her age was one of the first mysteries of Coben’s mystery-filled life and he inherited his love for long stories from her. They both died before they could see quite how successful their second-born son would become, in 1988 and 1996, respectively. They are both buried in New Jersey’s Congregation B’nai Jeshurun Cemetery.

Coben had his bar mitzvah at the B’nai Jeshurun Synagogue in Short Hills, New Jersey and shared that his most vivid recollection of the event was the smell of his father’s Old Spice aftershave.

“No I can’t tell you what part of the haphtara I recited from the pulpit of B’nai Jeshurun. Something from Ezekiel, I think. But there’s that part in the ceremony where the father blesses the son. My father bent down and whispered in my ear. He said something about loving me and being proud — much as I want to, I can’t remember the exact words — and then he kissed me on the cheek. I remember the feel of his cheek on mine, the catcher’s-glove hand cupping my head, and the smell of Old Spice,” he wrote in a 2003 New York Times piece.

He has other vivid bar mitzvah recollections about his mother, who went by Corky, on his website: “At the Stoloff’s bar mitzvah, circa 1978, the temperature rose to ninety degrees, so Corky — yes, even I called her that — took her blouse off. No, I’m not kidding. Ask Jean Stoloff. She still has the picture of my mother sitting at the head table — this would have been post-candle-lighting ceremony and pre-Grandpa-saying-the-prayer-over-the-challah — in only her bra, a mischievous smile spread across her face.” He also wrote about how Corky marched with Gloria Steinem and was a woman ahead of her time: “[one] moment she was a strident Betty Friedan, the next she’d be like Golda in a bad production of ‘Fiddler On The Roof.'”

The way he thinks of Jewishness has changed through the years

“The importance of my Jewishness changes,” he told the Guardian in 2022. “I’m secular, but it’s the world I grew up in. It’s in my makeup. I view my Jewishness as cultural. There’s a weird deal with Jews where they will define themselves as Jewish even if they don’t buy a word. You don’t see too many Catholics or Christians or anybody Muslim saying, ‘Oh, I’m a Catholic, but I don’t buy a word of it!'”

It’s important for him to feature Jewishness in his work

“All my books have Jewish characters,” Coben told the Forward’s Masha Leon back in 2008. The most famous of these is sports agent and “accidental detective” Myron Bolitar. He is the protagonist of Coben’s first commercially successful novel, “Deal Breaker,” the first book in the series of Bolitar novels. Bolitar is not just Jewish like Coben, but like Coben, Bolitar also played college basketball — but was a more successful athlete than the Amherst grad was.

There’s another wishful thinking aspect of the Bolitar novels. Bolitar lives with his parents in their New Jersey home in his first novel, and it was a way for Coben to keep the memory of his own Jewish parents alive: “Myron got to keep his parents. I didn’t. So I have a habit of overwriting and being too sentimental during the scenes with Myron and his parents. Tough. Skim them if you wish,” Coben wrote on his website.

Bolitar’s nephew, Mickey Bolitar, is the hero of the Mickey Bolitar YA series, and his Jewish identity is also explicitly mentioned in the books.

The most Jewish Harlan Coben TV show is quite surprising

Of all the many show and movie adaptations of Coben’s work, only one seems to feature the explicit Jewishness that’s part of so many of Coben’s books. It’s surprisingly, the Polish “The Woods,” an adaptation of Coben’s 2007 novel of the same name that draws from the author’s experience as a counselor at a sleepaway camp in Pennsylvania.

In the book, protagonist Paul “Cope” Copeland, a county prosecutor, is working to solve a 20-year-old mystery from his childhood summer camp, which involved the disappearance of his sister. Cope is Jewish, the son of an immigrant from the former Soviet Union who was the victim of anti-Jewish persecution. The owner of the summer camp in the novel is the Jewish Ira Silverstein.

And yet, in the Polish series, which takes place a decade after the book, our protagonist is no longer explicitly Jewish, but the camp director, Dawid Goldsztajn, is; he and his daughter become targets of antisemitism.

“The shift from the original American setting to post-Holocaust Poland means these events resonate very differently. Having the only two openly Jewish characters in the series become the victims of antisemitism evokes memories of 1939-1945, as well as the prejudice and tension endured by Jews under Communism. In an oblique way, it echoes what happened to Cope’s father in the Soviet Union,” Nathan Abrams wrote in the Forward in 2020.

There may still be a very Jewish Netflix Coben adaptation in the future

Netflix has reportedly been working on getting a Myron Bolitar series off the ground for the last three years, and in May of this year, it was officially announced. The series will be helmed by the one and only David E. Kelley.

“What an honor — not to mention, great fun — it is to partner up at Netflix with legend David E. Kelley and his remarkable team on this exciting new series,” Coben shared with Deadline. “The Myron Bolitar books mean a great deal to me, and I’m thrilled to have such a talented and inspired group bringing them to life.”