2009 National Jewish Book Awards Announced

Posted by Naomi Firestone

And the winner is…

2009 Everett Family Foundation
Jewish Book of the Year Award

Louis D. Brandeis: A Life
Melvin I. Urofsky
Pantheon Books

Jewish Book Council
Lifetime Achievement Award
Ruth Gruber

Ahead of Time: My Early Years as a Foreign Correspondent
(Wynwood)
Exodus 1947: The Ship That Launched a Nation
(Crown)
Destination Palestine: The Story of the Haganah Ship Exodus, 1947
(Current Books)
Haven: The Dramatic Story of 1000 World War II Refugees and How They Came to America
(Coward-McCann)
I Went To The Soviet Union
(Viking Press)
Israel Today: Land of Many Nations
(Hill and Wang)
Raquela: A Woman of Israel
(Coward, McCann & Geoghegan)
Rescue: The Exodus of the Ethiopian Jews
(Atheneum)
Witness: One of the Great Correspondents of the Twentieth Century Tells Her Story
(Schocken Books)

American Jewish Studies
Celebrate 350 Award

Winner:

We Remember with Reverence and Love: American Jews and the Myth of Silence after the Holocaust, 1945-1962
Hasia R. Diner
New York University Press

Finalists:

Orthodox Jews in America
Jeffrey S. Gurock
Indiana University Press

Jewish Immigrants and American Capitalism, 1880-1920: From Caste to Class
Eli Lederhendler
Cambridge University Press

Anthologies and Collections

Winner:

Rethinking European Jewish History
Jeremy Cohen and Moshe Rosman, eds.
The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization

Finalists:

Place and Displacement in Jewish History and Memory: Zakor V’makor
David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, Milton Shain, eds.
Vallentine Mitchell

Jewish Musical Modernism, Old and New
Philip V. Bohlman, ed.
University of Chicago Press

Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir
In Memory of Simon & Shulamith (Sofi) Goldberg

Winner:

The Fall of a Sparrow: The Life and Times of Abba Kovner
Dina Porat; Elizabeth Yuval, trans. & ed.
Stanford University Press

Finalists:

Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion, and the Furies of Writing
Steven J. Zipperstein
Yale University Press

Enemies of the People: My Family’s Journey to America
Kati Marton
Simon & Schuster

Children’s and Young Adult Literature

Winner:

The Other Half of Life: A Novel Based on the True Story of the MS St. Louis
Kim Ablon Whitney
Knopf Books for Young Readers

Finalists:

Cursing Columbus
Eve Tal
Cinco Puntos Press

Clay Man: The Golem of Prague
Irene N. Watts; Kathryn E. Shoemaker, illus.
Tundra Books

Lost
Jacqueline Davies
Marshall Cavendish

Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice

Winner:

Saving Israel: How the Jewish People Can Win a War That May Never End
Daniel Gordis
John Wiley & Sons

Finalists:

Far from Zion: In Search of a Global Jewish Community
Charles London
William Morrow

Jewcentricity: Why the Jews Are Praised, Blamed, and Used to Explain Just About Everything
Adam Garfinkle
John Wiley & Sons

Fiction
JJ Greenberg Memorial Award

Winner:

Gratitude: A Novel
Joseph Kertes
Thomas Dunne Books

Finalists:

The Last Ember
Daniel Levin
Riverhead

Pictures at an Exhibition
Sara Houghteling
Knopf

Polyglot: Stories of the West’s wet edge
Wendy Marcus
Beth Am Press

The Legend of Cosmo and the Archangel
Joseph Kaufman
French Creek Press

History
Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award

Winner:

Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America
Beryl Satter
Metropolitan Books (Henry Holt and Company)

Finalists:

Jewish Property Claims Against Arab Countries
Michael R. Fischbach
Columbia University Press

Major Farran’s Hat: The Untold Story of the Struggle to Establish the Jewish State
David Cesarani
Da Capo Press

We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands
Rachel Shabi
Walker & Company

Holocaust

Winner:

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, 1933-1945, Volume 1
Geoffrey P. Megargee, volume editor
Indiana University Press

Finalists:

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City
Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak; Emma Harris, trans.
Yale University Press

The Third Reich in the Ivory Tower: Complicity and Conflict on American Campuses
Stephen H. Norwood
Cambridge University Press

Illustrated Children’s Books
Louis Posner Memorial Award

Winner:

JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible
Ellen Frankel; Avi Katz, illus.
Jewish Publication Society

Finalists:

Nachshon, Who Was Afraid to Swim: A Passover Story
Deborah Bodin Cohen; Jago, illus.
Kar-Ben Publishing

The Champion of Children: The Story of Janusz Korczak
Tomek Bogacki
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux

Jewish Family Literature
In Memory of Dorothy Kripke

Winner:

Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Spring and Summer Holidays : Passover, The Omer, Shavuot, Tisha b’Av
Paul Steinberg; Janet Greenstein Potter, ed.
Jewish Publication Society

Finalists:

JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible
Ellen Frankel; Avi Katz, illus.
Jewish Publication Society

Sacred Parenting: Jewish Wisdom and Practical Guidance for Your Family’s Early Years
Elaine Rose Glickman
URJ Press

Modern Jewish Thought & Experience
Dorot Foundation Award In Memory of Joy Ungerleider Mayerson

Winner:

Covenant & Conversation, A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible, Genesis: The Book of Beginnings
Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks, Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth
Maggid Books, an imprint of Koren Publishers, with the OU Press (of the Orthodox Union)

Finalists:

Nehama Leibowitz: Teacher and Bible Scholar
Yael Unterman
Urim Publications

The Murmuring Deep: Reflections on the Biblical Unconscious
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg
Schocken Books

The Koren Sacks Siddur: A Hebrew/English Prayerbook
Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks
Koren Publishers

Poetry

Winner:

The Book of Seventy
Alicia Suskin Ostriker
University of Pittsburgh Press

Finalists:

Ezekiel’s Wheels
Shirley Kaufman
Copper Canyon Press

Door to a Noisy Room
Peter Waldor
Alice James Books

Stupid Hope: Poems
Jason Shinder
Graywolf Press

Scholarship
Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award

Winner:

Subversive Sequels in the Bible: How Biblical Stories Mine and Undermine Each Other
Judy Klitsner
Jewish Publication Society

Finalists:

Maimonides, Spinoza and Us: Toward an Intellectually Vibrant Judaism
Rabbi Marc D. Angel
Jewish Lights Publishing

The Invention of Hebrew
Seth L. Sanders
University of Illinois Press

Sephardic Culture
Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy

Winner:
We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel’s Jews from Arab Lands
Rachel Shabi
Walker & Company

Visual Arts

Winner:

Action/Abstraction: Pollock, de Kooning, and American Art, 1940-1976
Norman L. Kleeblatt, ed.
Yale University Press
Published in association with The Jewish Museum

Finalists:

Chagall and the Artists of the Russian Jewish Theater
Susan Tumarkin Goodman, with essays by Zvi Gitelman, Vladislav Ivanov, Jeffrey Veidlinger, and Benjamin Harshav
Yale University Press
Published in association with The Jewish Museum

Photographing the Jewish Nation: Pictures from S. An-Sky’s Ethnographic Expeditions
Eugene M. Avrutin, Valerii Dymshits, Alexander Ivanov, Alexander Lvov, Harriet Murav, and Alla Sokolova, eds.
Brandeis University Press

Women’s Studies
Barbara Dobkin Award

Winner:

Mitzvah Girls: Bringing Up the Next Generation of Hasidic Jews in Brooklyn
Ayala Fader
Princeton University Press

Finalists:

Levirate Marriage and the Family in Ancient Judaism
Dvora E. Weisberg
Brandeis University Press

Still Jewish: A History of Women and Intermarriage in America
Keren R. McGinity
New York University Press

Meneket Rivkah: A Manual of Wisdom and Piety for Jewish Women
Original text by Rivkah bat Meir; Translated from the original Yiddish to German, with introduction and commentary by Frauke Von Rohden
Jewish Publication Society

Writing Based on Archival Material
The JDC-Herbert Katzki Award

Winner:

The Holocaust in the Soviet Union
Yitzhak Arad; Ora Cummings, trans.
University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem

To read the full press release, please click here.

Congratulations to all of our winners!