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Marc Weitzmann Awarded Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism

Tablet columnist honored for prescient five-part series ‘France’s Toxic Hate’

by
Morton Landowne
February 23, 2015
Belgian Vice-Prime Minister and Interior Minister Joelle Milquet, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and Brussels Jewish Museum president, Philippe Blondin, take part in a ceremony in honor of the victims of a shooting at the Jewish museum in Brussels, on June 4, 2014. (Photoillustration byErik Mace for Tablet Magazine. Original photo: KRISTOF VAN ACCOM/AFP/Getty Images.)
Belgian Vice-Prime Minister and Interior Minister Joelle Milquet, French Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, and Brussels Jewish Museum president, Philippe Blondin, take part in a ceremony in honor of the victims of a shooting at the Jewish museum in Brussels, on June 4, 2014. (Photoillustration byErik Mace for Tablet Magazine. Original photo: KRISTOF VAN ACCOM/AFP/Getty Images.)

Tablet columnist Marc Weitzmann was awarded the Chaim Bermant Prize for Journalism at a ceremony today at Jewish Book Week in London. The £5,000 prize, named for the prolific British journalist and author who died in 1998, is awarded to writers whose work “furthers the understanding of contemporary life and Jewishness.” Weitzmann was cited for what the judges called his “unbelievably prescient” five-part series, “France’s Toxic Hate,” which appeared in Tablet last summer. In addition to Weitzmann, Tablet contributors Matti Friedman, Yair Rosenberg, and Batya Ungar-Sargon were also commended for outstanding work.

In accepting the award, Weitzmann, a Parisian and regular contributor to Le Monde, said that his series had been written “with a feeling of estrangement,” adding that, “for everyone in France, Jews are no longer French citizens—plain French—they are a ‘community,’ like the ‘Muslim Community.’” He stated that he is not writing about anti-Semitism, “I’m writing about France,” explaining that he sees a general reluctance to recognize anti-Semitism, and a dynamic that seeks to find a reason for the attacks on French Jewry that “puts the blame on each side.”

Weitzmann has contracted with publishers Houghton Mifflin to publish an expanded version of his Tablet series in hardcover in the coming year.

Morton Landowne is the executive director of Nextbook Inc.