$100,000 Prize to The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit

The 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature has been awarded to Lucette Lagnado for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (HarperCollins/Ecco). The prize--administered by the Jewish Book Council--carries a $100,000 cash award.

The New York Times called the memoir by Lagnado, a senior writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal, a “crushing, brilliant book.”

The Jewish Book Council also announced two winners of the 2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Choice Award: Ilana M. Blumberg for Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books (Univ. of Nebraska) and Eric L. Goldstein for The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton). Each will receive a $7,500 cash award.

The Sami Rohr Prize was established in 2006 by Rohr’s family to honor the businessman and philanthropist’s love of Jewish literature. It is awarded to a nonfiction book or a novel in alternating years, and is the largest monetary prize of its kind in the Jewish literary world.