Jewish Book Council announced the winners of the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards, now in its seventy-first year. In all but one category, this year’s winning authors are all receiving their first National Jewish Book Award.
The winning books include To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah by Dvora Hacohen (Harvard University Press), which was named the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year as well as the Biography Award in Memory of Sara Berenson Stone. Through diaries, archival documents, and letters, historian Devorah Hacohen presents a fascinating biography of Henrietta Szold — writer, editor, educator, and founder of Hadassah. Hacohen portrays the relentless passion of Szold, who devoted her life to creating opportunities both for Jewish women and the disadvantaged, as she sought to not only empower women, but also to foster a spirit of social cohesion and equality.
Joshua Cohen wins the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction for his novel The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ultimately Even Negligible Episode in the History of a Very Famous Family (New York Review Books). Jai Chakrabarti wins the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction with his novel A Play For the End of the World (Knopf) and Helene Wecker is recognized as the recipient of the The Miller Family Book Club Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller for her novel The Hidden Palace (HarperCollins Publishers).
The Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks goes to Bene Appétit: The Cuisine of Indian Jews (HarperCollins Publishing India) by Esther David and Joy Ladin wins the Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash for The Book of Anna (EOAGH Books).
Dara Horn’s People Love Dead Jews receives the Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award, and was also recently named a Natan Notable Book from Natan Fund and Jewish Book Council in October 2021.
Nancy Churnin has won the National Jewish Book Award in the Children’s Picture Book category for Dear Mr. Dickens, illustrated by Bethany Stancliffe (Albert Whitman & Co). Lori Banov Kaufmann receives the Young Adult Literature Award for Rebel Daughter (Delacorte Press/RHCB), and the Middle Grade Literature Award goes to Gordon Korman for Linked (Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.).
This year, we are pleased to present the Mentorship Award in Honor of Carolyn Starman Hessel to Bonny V. Fetterman. As senior editor and director of Judaica at Schocken Books in the 1980s and 90s, Bonny developed a list of influential books on the Bible, Jewish history, Holocaust studies, and Hebrew and Yiddish literature in translation, and early works of Jewish feminism. Her titles appeared on university curriculums in the burgeoning field of Jewish studies, and became staples in synagogue libraries and on home bookshelves. Following her time at Schocken, Bonny went on to serve as literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine for twelve years and to work independently with authors as a freelance editor, agent, and publishing consultant, a role which she continues today. Her commitment to her authors and to the enhancement of Jewish literature over four decades has been exceptional and exemplary.
Jewish Book Council is also pleased to announce Oren Gazit as the 2021 winner of the Paper Brigade Award for New Israeli Fiction in Honor of Jane Weitzman. An excerpt of The First Ending, Then the Second, translated byJessica Rutman Setbon, is featured in the 2022 issue of Paper Brigade.
A complete list of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists can be found below, and additional information is available at www.JewishBookCouncil.org/.
JBC’s website features a database of current and past National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists; judges’ remarks on the 2021 winners and finalists will also be available after the April 2022 virtual celebration.
The winners of the 2021 National Jewish Book Awards will be honored on Wednesday April 6, 2022 at 7:00 PM ET at a virtual ceremony. To buy tickets for the awards ceremony, click here!
About Jewish Book Council: Jewish Book Council is a nonprofit organization dedicated to educating, enriching, and strengthening the community through Jewish literature. With over 250 touring authors each year, 2,000 book clubs, 1,300 events, the National Jewish Book Awards, Natan Notable Books, the popular literary series Unpacking the Book: Jewish Writers in Conversation, a vibrant digital presence, and an annual print publication, Paper Brigade, JBC ensures that the authors of Jewish-interest books have a platform, and that readers are able to find these books and have the tools to discuss them with their communities.
About the National Jewish Book Awards: The National Jewish Book Awards were established by Jewish Book Council in 1950 in order to recognize outstanding works of Jewish literature. They are the oldest awards of their kind.
Jewish Book of the Year
Everett Family Foundation Award
Winner:
To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah
Dvora Hacohen, Foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Harvard University Press
Mentorship Award in Honor of Carolyn Starman Hessel
Bonny V. Fetterman
American Jewish Studies
Celebrate 350 Award
Winner:
A Fortress in Brooklyn: Race, Real Estate, and the Making of Hasidic Williamsburg
Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper
Yale University Press
Finalists:
Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice
Rachel B. Gross
NYU Press
Laura Arnold Leibman
Oxford University Press USA
Autobiography and Memoir
The Krauss Family Award in Memory of Simon & Shulamith (Sofi) Goldberg
Winner:
The Empathy Diaries: A Memoir
Sherry Turkle
Penguin
Finalists:
Afterlight: In Search of Poetry, History, and Home
Isa Milman
Heritage House Publishing
Seth Rogen
Viking Canada, an imprint of Penguin Random House Canada
In the Shadows of Paris: The Nazi Concentration Camp That Dimmed the City of Light
Anne Sinclair
Kales Press
Biography
In Memory of Sara Berenson Stone
Winner:
To Repair a Broken World: The Life of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah
Dvora Hacohen, Foreword by Ruth Bader Ginsburg
Harvard University Press
Finalists:
Joshua M. Greene
Insight Editions
Book Club
The Miller Family Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller
Winner:
Helene Wecker
HarperCollins Publishers
Finalists:
Weina Dai Randel
Lake Union
Yaniv Iczkovits, translated from the Hebrew by Orr Scharf
Schocken
How to Find Your Way in the Dark
Derek B. Miller
Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Children’s Picture Book
Winner:
Nancy Churnin, illustrated by Bethany Stancliffe
Albert Whitman & Co.
Finalists:
Megan Hoyt, illustrated by Iacopo Bruno
HarperCollins Children’s Quill Tree Books Imprint
Soosie: The Horse That Saved Shabbat
Tami Lehman-Wilzig, illustrated by Menahem Halberstadt
Kalaniot Books
The People’s Painter: How Ben Shahn Fought for Justice with Art
Cynthia Levinson, illustrated by Evan Turk
ABRAMS Books
Lisa Rose, illustrated by Isabel Muñoz
Kar-Ben Publishing
Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice
Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award
Winner:
Dara Horn
W. W. Norton & Company
Finalists:
Becoming a Soulful Parent: A Path to the Wisdom Within
Dasee Berkowitz
Kasva Press LLC
The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook
Neal Scheindlin
Jewish Publication Society
Debut Fiction
Goldberg Prize
Winner:
A Play for the End of the World
Jai Chakrabarti
Alfred A. Knopf
Finalists:
Iddo Gefen, translated by Daniella Zamir
Astra House
Hanna Halperin
Viking
Education and Jewish Identity
In Memory of Dorothy Kripke
Winner:
Simon J. Bronner
Wayne State University Press
Fiction
JJ Greenberg Memorial Award
Winner:
Joshua Cohen
New York Review Books
Finalists:
David Grossman, translated by Jessica Cohen
Alfred A. Knopf
How to Find Your Way in the Dark
Derek B. Miller
Mariner Books, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers
Food Writing & Cookbooks
Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award
Winner:
Bene Appétit: : The Cuisine of Indian Jews
Esther David
HarperCollins Publishers India
Finalist:
Bavel: Modern Recipes Inspired by the Middle East
Ori Menashe and Genevieve Gergis with Lesley Suter
Ten Speed Press
History
Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award
Winner:
James McAuley
Yale University Press
Finalists:
Belonging and Betrayal: How Jews Made the Art World Modern
Charles Dellheim
Brandeis University Press
In the Midst of Civilized Europe: The Pogroms of 1918 – 1921 and the Onset of the Holocaust
Jeffrey Veidlinger
Metropolitan Books
Holocaust
In Memory of Ernest W. Michel
Winner:
The Ravine: A Family, a Photograph, a Holocaust Massacre Revealed
Wendy Lower
Mariner Books (previously Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)
Finalists:
A Promise of Sweet Tea: Memoirs of a Survivor
Pinchas Eliyahu Blitt
The Azrieli Foundation
Into the Forest: A Holocaust Story of Survival, Triumph, and Love
Rebecca Frankel
St. Martin’s Press
From the Vilna Ghetto to Nuremberg: Memoir and Testimony
Abraham Sutzkever (1913−2010). Edited, translated and with an afterword by Justin D. Cammy
McGill-Queen’s University Press
Middle Grade Literature
Winner:
Gordon Korman
Scholastic Press, an imprint of Scholastic Inc.
Finalists:
Dani Colman
Wonderbound
How to Find What You’re Not Looking For
Veera Hiranandani
Kokila; Penguin Young Readers
Modern Jewish Thought and Experience
Dorot Foundation Award in Memory of Joy Ungerleider Mayerson
Winner:
Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Responses
Erin Leib Smokler, ed.
Ben Yehuda Press
Finalists:
The Telling: How Judaism’s Essential Book Reveals the Meaning of Life
Mark Gerson
St. Martin’s Essentials
It Could Lead to Dancing: Mixed-Sex Dancing and Jewish Modernity
Sonia Gollance
Stanford University Press
Can We Talk About Israel?: A Guide for the Curious, Confused, and Conflicted
Daniel Sokatch; illustrated by Christopher Noxon
Bloomsbury Publishing
Poetry
Berru Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash
Winner:
Joy Ladin
EOAGH Books
Finalists:
If This is the Age We End Discovery
Rosebud Ben-Oni
Alice James Books
Sarah Matthes
Persea Books, Inc.
Marcela Sulak
Black Lawrence Press
Scholarship
Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award
Winner:
Jews and Their Roman Rivals: Pagan Rome’s Challenge to Israel
Katell Berthelot
Princeton University Press
Finalists:
Seekers of the Face: Secrets of the Idra Rabba (The Great Assembly) of the Zohar
Melila Hellner-Eshed
Stanford University Press
Power and Emotion in Ancient Judaism: Community and Identity in Formation
Ari Mermelstein
Cambridge University Press
Sephardic Culture
Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy
Winner:
The Memory Work of Jewish Spain
Daniela Flesler and Adrián Pérez Melgosa
Indiana University Press
Finalist:
Sigal Samuel
Levine Querido
Women Studies
Barbara Dobkin Award
Winner:
Judy Batalion
William Morrow
Finalist:
Jewish Women’s History from Antiquity to the Present
Federica Francesconi and Rebecca Lynn Winer, editors
Wayne State University Press
Writing Based on Archival Material
The JDC-Herbert Katzki Award
Winner:
International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War
Jaclyn Granick
Cambridge University Press
Finalist:
Federica Francesconi
University of Pennsylvania Press
Young Adult Literature
Winner:
Lori Banov Kaufmann
Delacorte Press/RHCB
Finalists:
Aden Polydoros
Harlequin Trade Publishing/Inkyard
Liz Kessler
Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing
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