Finalists Selected for $100,000 Rohr Prize
-- Publishers Weekly, 12/10/2007 7:45:00 AM
Five works of nonfiction have been selected by an anonymous panel of judges drawn from the literary and academic community as finalists for the Sami Rohr Prize. The winner receives $100,000 and two runners-up receive $7,500 apiece. Winners will be announced at the end of January.
Rohr finalists are: Ilana M. Blumberg for Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books (University of Nebraska Press); Eric L. Goldstein for The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton University Press); Lucette Lagnado for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (Ecco); Michael Makovsky for Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (Yale University Press); and Haim Watzman for A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
The inaugural Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature was awarded last year to fiction writer Tamar Yellin for The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press). The prize considers fiction and nonfiction in alternating years. The prize honors an emerging author in the field of Jewish literature who has written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern. It is administered by The Jewish Book Council under the directorship of Geri Gindea.
