National Jewish Book Council announces 2018 awards

A memoir by Nazi hunters Beate and Serge Klarsfeld wins top Book of the Year

New York, New York – The Jewish Book Council announced on Jan. 9 the winners of the 2018 National Jewish Book Awards. Established in 1950 by the Jewish Book Council to recognize outstanding works of Jewish literature, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest-running awards program of its kind.

Topping the list of winners are Beate and Serge Klarsfeld, who received the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year for their work Hunting the Truth (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).

This year, JBC also awarded the inaugural Biography Award in Memory of Sara Berenson Stone, a devoted philanthropist and voracious reader who moved to New Orleans in 1935, where she began her eighty-year long advocacy for Jewish causes. The first winner of the prize is Ariel Burger for his work Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).

Prime Minister Ehud Barak wins the Krauss Family Autobiography/Memoir Award for My Country, My Life: Fighting for Israel, Searching for Peace (St. Martin’s Press) and the Barbara Dobkin Award in Women’s Studies is given to Never a Native by Alice Shalvi (Halban Publishers).

Three novels take top fiction honors: The Last Watchman of Old Cairo (Spiegel & Grau) receives the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award Michael for Fiction, Michael David Lukas’s first National Jewish Book Award; Ronald Balson’s The Girl from Berlin (St. Martin’s Press) is the recipient of the Miller Family Book Club Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller; Bram Presser’s The Book of Dirt (Text Publishing) is the winner of the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction.

The winner of the 2018 Holocaust Award in Memory of Ernest W. Michel is Omer Bartov for his work Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz (Simon & Schuster) and Ronen Bergman is the winner of the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History for his book Rise and Kill First: The Secret History of Israel’s Targeted Assassinations (Random House).

Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner (BOA Editions) wins the Berru Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash in the Poetry category.

This year, the Mentorship Award in Honor of Carolyn Starman Hessel is presented to Susan Shapiro, bestselling author, award-winning writing professor, and journalist who has worked with over 25,000 students throughout her impressive career. The award recognizes her mentorship and support of Jewish authors, a number of whom have participated in the JBC Network.

The American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 award goes to The New American Judaism: How Jews Practice Their Religion Today by Jack Wertheimer (Princeton University Press).

In the Children’s Literature category, the award is presented to All Three Stooges written by Erica Perl (Knopf Books for Young Readers).

In addition to the 2018 National Jewish Book Award winners, Jewish Book Council has also announced the first recipient of the Paper Brigade Award for New Israeli Fiction in Honor of Jane Weitzman. The award is presented to Maya Arad for her work Our Lady of Kazan. An excerpt from Our Lady of Kazan has been translated into English and appears in the 2019 issue of JBC’s literary journal Paper Brigade, which will be published this month.

A complete list of the 2018 National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists, including additional information, is available at www.JewishBookCouncil.org.

Book award winners will be honored on March 5, at a gala awards dinner to be held at the Bohemian National Hall in Manhattan, hosted by Stephanie Butnick of Tablet Magazine’sUnorthodox podcast. For information: (212) 201-2920.