The Jewish Book Council awarded Joseph Telushkin, a rabbi and author, the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award for his work “A Code of Jewish Ethics, Vol. 1: You Shall Be Holy.” Telushkin and 16 other winners will be honored at the 56th annual National Jewish Book Awards on Tuesday, March 6 at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan.
Winners for the awards include Dara Horn, in the fiction category, for her novel “The World to Come”; Daniel Mendelsohn, in biography, for “The Lost: A Search for Six of the Six Million”; David Cesarani in history, for “Becoming Eichmann: Rethinking the Life, Crimes and Trial of a Desk Murderer”; Esther Schor in American Jewish studies, for “Emma Lazarus”; and Shuly Rubin Schwartz for “The Rabbi’s Wife: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life,” which topped the field of modern Jewish thought and experience.
Winners also include editor Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett for “Writing a Modern Jewish History: Essays in Honor of Salo W. Baron,” in anthologies; children’s literature winner Markus Zusak for “The Book Thief”; Ellen B. Sucov for “Fragmented Families: Patterns of Estrangement and Reconciliation,” which won for contemporary Jewish life and practice; and Eastern European studies winner Marci Shore for “Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation’s Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968.”
In education and Jewish identity, Faydra Shapiro won for “Building Jewish Roots: The Israel Experience”; Jeffrey Herf topped the Holocaust category for “The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust”; for illustrated children’s books, the winner was “The White Ram” by Mordicai Gerstein; Deborah Bodin Cohen’s “Lilith’s Ark: Teenage Tales of Biblical Women” won for Jewish family literature; “Resurrection and the Restoration of Israel: The Ultimate Victory of the God of Life” by Jon D. Levenson won for scholarship; Dan Ben-Amos’ “Folktales of the Jews, Vol. 1: Tales from the Sephardic Dispersion” was best for Sephardic culture; and Shaye J.D. Cohen won in women’s studies for “Why Aren’t Jewish Women Circumcised?: Gender and Covenant in Judaism.”
For further information on the wards, visit www.jewishbookcouncil.org.