Winners of the 2008 Nat’l Jewish Book Awards
-- Publishers Weekly, 1/14/2009
For the second year in a row, the top prize in the oldest Jewish literary award in the nation goes to a book about the Good Book. Tamara Eskenazi and Rabbi Andrea L. Weiss are the winners of the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award for The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (URJ Press). The Jewish Woman’s Prayer Book, edited by Aliza Lavie (Spiegel & Grau) is this year’s Barbara Dobkin Award in Women’s Studies. These books are among the 16 categories to be celebrated at a March 5 award ceremony at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan.
The other winners include: For biography, autobiography and memoir—Marie Syrkin: Values Beyond the Self by Carole S. Kessner (Brandeis); children’s and young adult literature—The Diary of Laura's Twin by Kathy Kacer (Second Story); contemporary Jewish life and practice—Conscience: The Duty to Obey and the Duty to Disobey by Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis (Jewish Lights); fiction—Songs for the Butcher’s Daughter by Peter Manseau (Free Press); history—1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War by Benny Morris (Yale); Holocaust—The Holocaust by Bullets: A Priest's Journey to Uncover the Truth Behind the Murder of 1.5 Million Jews by Father Patrick Desbois (Palgrave Macmillan); and Sephardic Culture—Greece: A Jewish History by K.E. Fleming (Princeton).
