The age of Tinder, Hinge and JSwipe doesn’t seem to leave much room for Fiddler’s Yente and other shadchan. But the most inventive writers always provide us windows into our world that make the old new again, and that is precisely what Lynda Cohen Loigman and Jean Meltzer have done in simultaneously funny and sweet new novels about matchmakers.

Cohen Loigman’s is rooted in the old school, the tale of a cynical divorce attorney who inconveniently inherited the gift of joining souls from her grandmother, a matchmaker who arrived in New York in the 1920s. Meltzer’s is more modern, about the creator of a Jewish dating app whose formula for “The Perfect Jewish Husband” falls flat in her own life. Both force us to confront the age-old conundrum of what makes for the perfect match, who’s the ideal go-between and how to think about the dilemma in 2022.

Attorney/writer Lynda Cohen Loigman is the bestselling author of The Two-Family House and The Wartime Sisters. 

Jean Meltzer, whose debut novel was The Matzah Ball, has the unique distinction of being the world’s only Emmy-winning, chronically ill and disabled, rabbinical school dropout writer.