Navigate to News section

Nextbook Press Titles Honored

2011 National Jewish Book Awards announced

by
Marc Tracy
January 10, 2012

The finalists and winners of the 2011 National Jewish Book Awards were just announced. Two books published in the past year by Nextbook Press, Tablet Magazine’s sister organization, were finalists: Deborah Lipstadt’s The Eichmann Trial in the Holocaust category and Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole’s Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza in the History category. So a hearty congratulations to the authors as well as to Nextbook Press editor Jonathan Rosen.

Reviews of and articles about several other finalists and winners have also appeared in Tablet Magazine’s pages:

• The Jewish Book of the Year is Simon Sebag Montefiore’s Jerusalem: The Biography. It was reviewed in the New York Times Book Review by … Jonathan Rosen.

• Sam Munson reviewed Yoram Kaniuk’s Life on Sandpaper, a Fiction finalist. (We also reported on Kaniuk’s successful crusade to become the first Israeli citizen registered as having no religion.)

• Lead critic Adam Kirsch reviewed Fiction finalist Lawrence Douglas’s The Vices.

• Anthony Grafton published a rather epic meditation on Elisheva Carlebach’s Scholarship finalist Palaces of Time: Jewish Calendar and Culture in Early Modern Europe.

• Contributing editor Wesley Yang appreciated Charles King’s Odessa: Genius and Death in a City of Dreams, winner for Writing Based on Archival Material.

• Vivian Gornick, whose Emma Goldman: Revolution As a Way of Life was a finalist in the Biography, Autobiography, Memoir category, discussed another radical Jewish woman, Vivian Gornick, on the Long Story Short podcast.

• David Shneer visited the Vox Tablet podcast to discuss his Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust, a Holocaust finalist.

• Poetry critic David Kaufmann reviewed Adrienne Rich’s Poetry finalist, titled (perhaps ironically) Tonight No Poetry Will Serve.

• Parenting columnist Marjorie Ingall praised two children’s finalists, Lipman Pike, America’s First Home Run King and Marcel Marceau, Master of Mime.

• And I blogged about Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus, the Biography, Autobiography, Memoir winner, whose status as a biography, autobiography, or memoir is actually debatable! (And irrelevant.)

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.