Book of the Year awarded to Lioness

by Francine Klagsbrun

NEW YORK, New York – Jewish Book Council has announced the winners of the 2017 National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 67th year. The winners include the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year, Francine Klagsbrun’s Lioness: Golda Meir and the Nation of Israel (Schocken Books).

David E. Fishman wins the inaugural Holocaust Award In Memory of Ernest W. Michel, for his work The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis (ForeEdge), which focuses on the resistance group known as the “paper brigade.”

Three novels take top fiction honors: A Horse Walks into a Bar (Alfred A. Knopf), David Grossman’s second novel to win a JJ Greenberg Fiction Award (translated by Jessica Cohen); Rachel Kadish’s The Weight of Ink (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is the recipient of the The Miller Family Book Club Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller; Carol Zoref’s Barren Island (New Issues Poetry & Prose/Western Michigan University) is the winner of the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction.

This year, the first Carolyn Starman Hessel Mentorship Award is presented to Gary Rosenblatt, editor and publisher of New York’s Jewish Week. This award recognizes his support and mentorship of Jewish authors and journalists throughout his impressive career.

The Choice: Embrace the Possible by Dr. Edith Eva Egers (Scribner) wins the National Jewish Book Award in the Krauss Family’s Biography, Autobiography, and Memoir category and Waiting for the Light by Alicia Suskin Ostriker (University of Pittsburgh Press) wins the Berru Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash in the Poetry category.

The Barbara Dobkin Award in Women’s Studies is given to Coming of Age in Medieval Egypt: Female Adolescence, Jewish Law, and Ordinary Culture by Eve Krakowski (Princeton University Press). The Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award goes to The Torah of Music: Reflections on a Tradition of Singing and Song by Joey Weisenberg (Hadar Press).

In the Children’s Literature and Young Adult Literature categories, respectively, the winners are The Language of Angels: A Story About the Reinvention of Hebrew written by Richard Michelson and illustrated by Karla Gudeon (Charlesbridge Publishing) and Refugee by Alan Gratz (Scholastic). These books are also winners of the Association of Jewish Libraries’ Sydney Taylor Book Awards (AJL). Other AJL winners include The Seventh Handmaiden by Judith Pransky, which won the Sydney Taylor Manuscript Award for an unpublished middle grade fiction manuscript, and Antonio Iturbe’s The Librarian of Auschwitz (Macmillan).

A complete list of the 2017 National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists can be found below, and additional information is available at www.JewishBookCouncil.org.

The winners of the 2017 National Jewish Book Awards will be honored on March 6 at a gala awards dinner and ceremony to be held at the Prince George Ballroom in Manhattan. For ticket information call (212) 201-2920 or email evie@jewishbooks.org.

Jewish Book Council is dedicated to promoting Jewish interest literature. With over 250 touring authors each year; 1,400 book clubs; 1,100 events; its new annual print publication, Paper Brigade; the National Jewish Book Awards; the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature; the Natan Book Award; and a vibrant digital presence, JBC ensures that Jewish-interest authors have a platform, and that readers are able to find these books and have the tools to discuss them with their community.