Tablet Magazine » Sarah Abrevaya Stein

Prestigious Jewish Book Award Announced

Marc Tracy — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 17:00:47 +0000

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]

Sundown: Gobble, Gobble, Baa, Baa

Hadara Graubart — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 19:00:49 +0000

• Turkeys aren’t the only animals that should be shaking in their boots this week. Israel and the Jewish community in Senegal have donated 99 sheep to needy Muslim families there to sacrifice for the holiday of Tabaski, which marks Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son Ishmael, as “a symbolic gesture between Israel and Senegal, between the Jewish community and the Muslim community.”* [VOA]
• Finalists for the 2010 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature have been announced, including Danya Ruttenberg and Sarah Abrevaya Stein. [JTA]
• A collage made of cut out portions of the Torah and the Koran was kept out of an exhibition in New Haven, Connecticut. Artist Richard Kamler says he intended “to create a common ground.” “You’re not going to cry ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater, even if you have free speech,” says one of the organizers. [NH Independent]
• Hadar, a new council for English-speaking immigrants in Israel, plans to find ways to maximize their influence in the nation. Some have criticized its right-wing bent, but, says the chairman, “we are not trying to be all things for all people.” [JPost]
• Israel is working on new weaponry—including “cutting-edge anti-missile systems and two new submarines that can carry nuclear weapons”—to prepare for a potential conflict with Iran. [AP]
• Have a happy Thanksgiving. We’ll see you Monday.

*Correction, November 30: This post originally stated that the Muslim holiday Tabaski marked Abraham’s binding of his son Isaac.

Birds of a Feather

Sara Ivry — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 16:00:04 +0000

“A well dressed woman nowadays is as fluffy as a downy bird fresh from the nest.” So read a line in a magazine nearly 100 years ago, when ostrich feathers represented the height of chic (and fashion copy had a long way to go). For decades, women from Berlin to San Francisco wore hats and boas festooned with long, lush plumes harvested and exported from many regions of Africa—its southern tip, its Atlantic coast, and its northernmost reaches. The United States alone imported five million dollars’ worth of ostrich feathers in 1912, the height of the market.

Two years later everything changed. In 1914, the industry that had boomed went bust, leaving everyone, from the immigrant girls who processed the feathers to the importers who bought them in bulk, jobless. Many of those people were Jews.

As Sarah Abrevaya Stein argues in her book Plumes: Ostrich Feathers, Jews, and a Lost World of Global Commerce, Jews were key players in this industry at every level. She speaks with Nextbook about how and why they came to dominate this business, the economic and political factors that led to its irreversible decline, and the difficulties in making generalizations about Jews in commerce.

And in case you’re wondering, the answer to the question that stumps Stein in the podcast is: “Between 30 and 70 years.”

Photo: Mrs. Harry K. Thaw, George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress.