Prestigious Jewish Book Award Announced
Congrats to the winners, Tablet subjects both
January 27, 2010
The 2010 nonfiction award of the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature will go to not one but two books—both of which Tablet Magazine has featured. The victors are Sarah Abrevaya Stein for Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce and Kenneth B. Moss for Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution.
In a podcast, Sara Ivry got Stein to explain how Jews were crucial to the (surprisingly important!) ostrich trade.
And book critic Adam Kirsch reviewed Moss’s tome, which is about Jews in Russia right after the two 1917 revolutions. Wrote Kirsch: “Drawing on little-known sources in Russian, Hebrew, and Yiddish, Moss brilliantly anatomizes the institutions and ideas that flourished in that tumultuous time, before the window of history slammed shut and the European Jewish future took a much different turn.”
2010 Sami Rohr Prize Winners Announced [Jewish Book Council Blog]
Related: Birds of a Feather [Tablet Magazine]
Awakenings [Tablet Magazine]
Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.
