NEW YORK, N.Y. – Jewish Book Council announced the winners of the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 70th year. The winners include Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, which was named the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year. Rabbi Sacks’s final book draws on his own experiences, as well as texts by Jewish philosophers and scholars, to illustrate the importance of changing our world by shifting our focus to the collective good. This book will help ground Sacks’s legacy as one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 21st century.

Laura Arnold Leibman wins awards in three different categories with her impressive book The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects: the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History, the American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award, and the Women Studies Barbara Dobkin Award.

The second Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks goes to Now for Something Sweet by the Monday Morning Cooking Club, which recognizes the tradition of Jewish community cookbooks and their role as social history, with this particular title highlighting stories from the Jewish community in Australia.

Top honors for fiction have been given to novels written by authors who are all receiving their first National Jewish Book Awards. The winners include Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, which was given the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction; Max Gross’s The Lost Shtetl, the recipient of the The Miller Family Book Club Award in Memory of Helen Dunn Weinstein and June Keit Miller; and Rachel Beanland’s Florence Adler Swims Forever, the winner of the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction.

The winner of the Holocaust Award in Memory of Ernest W. Michel is The Unanswered Letter: One Holocaust Family’s Desperate Plea for Help by Faris Cassell. Nautilus and Bone by Lisa Richter wins the Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash.

Arthur Green is awarded his first National Jewish Book Award for Judaism for the World: Reflections on God, Life, and Love in the category of Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice in Memory of Myra H. Kraft. In addition to being selected as the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year, Rabbi Sacks’s Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times also receives the Modern Jewish Thought & Experience Dorot Foundation Award in Memory of Joy Ungerleider Mayerson.

The Krauss Family Autobiography & Memoir Award in Memory of Simon & Shulamith (Sofi) Goldberg is presented to Ariana Neumann for her memoir, When Time Stopped: A Memoir of My Father’s War and What Remains. The third annual Biography Award in Memory of Sara Berenson Stone is given to From Left to Right: Lucy S. Dawidowicz, the New York Intellectuals, and the Politics of Jewish History by Nancy Sinkoff, which was also named a Natan Notable Book from Natan Fund and Jewish Book Council in fall 2020.

This is the second consecutive year Lesléa Newman has won a National Jewish Book Award, this year for the Children’s Picture Book category for her new book Welcoming Elijah: A Passover Tale with a Tail illustrated by Susan Gal. Gavriel Savit receives the Young Adult Award for The Way Back, his second National Jewish Book Award. For the first time, Jewish Book Council is proud to present a Middle Grade Literature Award, with this year’s prize going to Anne Blankman for The Blackbird Girls.

Deborah Harris, Israel’s premier literary agent, is the recipient of this year’s Mentorship Award in Honor of Carolyn Starman Hessel. Beyond her work nurturing Israeli authors, Harris is tireless in her effort to put Israeli books in translation into international markets.

A complete list of the 2020 National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists can be found at jewishbookcouncil.org.

The winners of the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards will be honored on Monday, April 12, 2021 at 7:00PM ET at a virtual awards ceremony.