Wednesday, January 12, 2011

2010 National Jewish Book Awards Announced

Cynthia Ozick to receive Lifetime Achievement Award
Harold Grinspoon to receive IMPACT Award
David Grossman, Gal Beckerman, Martin Fletcher among honorees

New York, January 11, 2011-The Jewish Book Council today announced the winners of the 2010 National Jewish Book Awards, the longest-running North American awards program of its kind in the field of Jewish literature.
Given annually since 1948, the awards are designed to recognize outstanding books on Jewish topics each year. Awards are given in sixteen different categories, including debut fiction, scholarship, biography and Holocaust.

In addition to the sixteen category awards, special awards will be bestowed this year upon Cynthia Ozick, Gal Beckerman, and Harold Grinspoon.

The winners of the 2010 National Jewish Book Awards will be honored on March 9 at a gala awards ceremony to be held at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, located at 15 West 16th Street. The awards ceremony, which begins at 8:00 p.m., is free and open to the public. Masters of ceremony for the event are Ari. L. Goldman, author and professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, and Alana Newhouse, editor-in-chief of Tablet Magazine.

Acclaimed for her many works of fiction and criticism, Cynthia Ozick will be honored with the Jewish Book Council Lifetime Achievement Award. Ozick was a National Book Award Finalist for her novel The Puttermesser Papers. Her essay collection, Quarrel & Quandary, won the 2001 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism, and her novel, Heir to the Glimmering World, was a New York Times Notable Book. Her classic novella, The Shawl, was produced for the stage in New York, directed by Sidney Lumet.

Her stories have won four O. Henry first prizes, and in 2008 Ozick was awarded the PEN/Nabokov Award and the PEN/Malamud Award.
Her sixth novel, Foreign Bodies, was published in fall 2010.

This year, the Jewish Book Council will bestow the IMPACT Award on Harold Grinspoon, for his commitment to Jewish literacy and growth through the PJ Library Program, which he created to introduce children to Jewish literature and support them and their families on their Jewish journey. The PJ Library program sends nearly 70,000 Jewish children's books free to families with young children each month in more than 100 communities in North America. Through the PJ Library program, Grinspoon has established a rich foundation of Jewish literature that will influence today's youth in the years ahead.

The Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award will be given to journalist and author Gal Beckerman for his book, When They Come For Us, We'll Be Gone: the Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which tells the story behind the rescue of three million Jews trapped inside the Soviet Union at the end of World War II.

Other notable winners this year include Oxford historian Ruth Harris for Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century; Martin Fletcher, long-time NBC news correspondent in Israel for his moving memoir, Walking Israel: A Personal Search for the Soul of a Nation; and Jerusalem-born novelist David Grossman for his new work of fiction, To the End of the Land.

The complete list of winners here.

1 comment:

Profstevan said...

Graham


It is not every day that one of the world's experts on terrorism and war, involved with Israeli and U.S. security for 30 years writes a novel. (and the Australian bush fires). So, maybe your story would be about my work on terrorism AND this novel. A different kind of angle. I would of course be glad to be interviewed, live or otherwise.



To check my veracity, you can google my last name (Hobfoll) and I believe the hits will be about 50,000. I just mention that to verify that this is not an email from some kook. Also, I attach an article that featured my work in the Israeli Newspaper Maariv, as I am one of the world's foremost experts on the stress of war and terrorism, especially in the Middle East.



The novel is a Jewish adventure story, based loosely on my grandfather's early years in Poland and Russia from 1906 (the Failed 1st Russian Revolution) to 1921. It is also a book about the challenge that men face in the world, as "imperfect guardians." History has tried to rewrite Jewish life as always pious and religious. But before coming to America Jews were involved in every part of the world in which they lived, horse traders, revolutionary leaders, scoundrels, soldiers, intellectuals, peddlers, gangsters, and doctors. The novel is very much about that variegated life.



I would be most happy to send you a copy of the book for review.



The book's webpage is:



http://www.theimperfectguardian.com/