The Koret Jewish Book Award is an annual award that recognizes "recently published books on any aspect of Jewish life in the categories of biography/autobiography and literary studies, fiction, history and philosophy/thought published in, or translated into, English." The award was established in 1998 by the Koret Foundation, in cooperation with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, to increase awareness of the best new Jewish books and their authors. [1]
Professor Samuel Zipperstein of Stanford University oversaw the awards from their creation until 2005, [2] when the Koret Foundation decided to increase public interest in the awards by honoring books that were less academic and more accessible to readers. Jewish Family & Life!, a non-profit organization, was selected to manage the awards. Its CEO, Rabbi Yosef Abramowitz, stated that he hoped to transform the awards into something akin to Oprah's Book Club. [3] The History category and the Biography, Autobiography or Literary Study category were eliminated and replaced with a new category, Jewish Life & Living.
The Koret Jewish Book Award is one of the highest honors for authors of works on Jewish subjects. [4]
1999 | (tie) Yoel Hoffmann | Katschen & The Book of Joseph |
Brian Morton | Starting Out in the Evening | |
2000 | A. B. Yehoshua | A Journey to the End of the Millennium |
2001 | Philip Roth | The Human Stain [5] |
2002 | Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel (editor) | The Complete Works of Isaac Babel [6] |
2003 | Henryk Grynberg | Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After |
2004 | (tie) Aharon Megged | Foiglman [7] |
Barbara Honigmann | A Love Made Out of Nothing & Zohara's Journey | |
2005 | Tony Eprile | The Persistence of Memory [3] |
2006 | David Grossman | Her Body Knows [8] |
2006 | Rochel Berman | Dignity Beyond Death [8] |
1999 | Miriam Bodian | Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam |
2000 | Chava Weissler | Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women |
2001 | David B. Ruderman | Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought [5] |
2002 | Eli Lederhendler | New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity -- 1950-1970 [6] |
2003 | Benjamin Nathans | Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia |
2004 | Shmuel Feiner | The Jewish Enlightenment [7] |
2005 | Elisheva Baumgarten | Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe |
1999 | Arnold Eisen | Rethinking Modern Judaism Ritual, Commandment, Community |
2000 | David Patterson | Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary |
2001 | Kenneth Seeskin | Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides [5] |
2002 | (tie) Samuel Heilman | When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son [6] |
Ken Koltun-Fromm | Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity | |
2003 | Moshe Idel | Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation |
2004 | Daniel Matt | The Zohar, Pritzker Edition, Volumes I and II [7] |
2005 | Steven Greenberg | Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition |
2006 | Rebecca Goldstein | Betraying Spinoza [9] |
2000 | Steven Nadler | Spinoza: A Life |
2001 | Cynthia Ozick | Quarrel & Quandary: Essays [5] |
2002 | Dorothy Gallagher | How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories [6] |
2003 | Tikva Frymer-Kensky | Reading the Women of the Bible |
2004 | Benjamin Harshav | Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative [7] |
2005 | Amos Oz | A Tale of Love and Darkness |
2005 | Karen Hesse, Wendy Watson (illustrator) | The Cats in Krasinski Square | |
2006 | Howard Schwartz, Kristina Swarner (illustrator) | Before You Were Born [9] |
German writer W. G. Sebald received a special Koret award in 2002 for his contributions to literature. Steven J. Zipperstein, the director of the Korets, cited Sebald's novel Austerlitz as a particularly impressive work. Sebald died several months before the awards ceremony. [6]
In 2006, Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated received JBooks.com's People's Choice award for the best Jewish work of fiction of the previous decade, as determined by 1,500 voters in an online contest. [8]
Saul Bellow was a Canadian–American writer. For his literary work, Bellow was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, the 1976 Nobel Prize in Literature, and the National Medal of Arts. He is the only writer to win the National Book Award for Fiction three times, and he received the National Book Foundation's lifetime Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 1990.
The National Book Awards (NBA) are a set of annual U.S. literary awards. At the final National Book Awards Ceremony every November, the National Book Foundation presents the National Book Awards and two lifetime achievement awards to authors. The National Book Awards were established in 1936 by the American Booksellers Association, abandoned during World War II, and re-established by three book industry organizations in 1950. Non-U.S. authors and publishers were eligible for the pre-war awards. Since then they are presented to U.S. authors for books published in the United States roughly during the award year.
Philip Milton Roth was an American novelist and short-story writer. Roth's fiction—often set in his birthplace of Newark, New Jersey—is known for its intensely autobiographical character, for philosophically and formally blurring the distinction between reality and fiction, for its "sensual, ingenious style" and for its provocative explorations of American identity. He first gained attention with the 1959 short story collection Goodbye, Columbus, which won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction. Ten years later, he published the bestseller Portnoy's Complaint. Nathan Zuckerman, Roth's literary alter ego, narrates several of his books. A fictionalized Philip Roth narrates some of his others, such as the alternate history The Plot Against America.
Lambda Literary Awards, also known as the "Lammys", are awarded yearly by Lambda Literary to recognize the crucial role LGBTQ writers play in shaping the world. The Lammys celebrate the very best in LGBTQ literature. The awards were instituted in 1989.
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American novelist. He is known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated (2002), Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), Here I Am (2016), and for his non-fiction works Eating Animals (2009) and We Are the Weather: Saving the Planet Begins at Breakfast (2019). He teaches creative writing at New York University.
Jehuda Reinharz served as President of Brandeis University from 1994–2010. He is currently the Richard Koret Professor of Modern Jewish History and Director of the Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry at Brandeis. He is also the president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Foundation. On September 25, 2009, Reinharz announced his retirement as President of Brandeis, but at the request of the Board of Trustees, he stayed on until a replacement could be hired. On January 1, 2011, Reinharz became president and CEO of the Jack, Joseph, and Morton Mandel Foundation.
Geraldine Brooks is an Australian-American journalist and novelist whose 2005 novel March won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.
The James Tait Black Memorial Prizes are literary prizes awarded for literature written in the English language. They, along with the Hawthornden Prize, are Britain's oldest literary awards. Based at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, United Kingdom, the prizes were founded in 1919 by Janet Coats Black in memory of her late husband, James Tait Black, a partner in the publishing house of A & C Black Ltd. Prizes are awarded in three categories: Fiction, Biography and Drama.
The British Book Awards or Nibbies are literary awards for the best UK writers and their works, administered by The Bookseller. The awards have had several previous names, owners and sponsors since being launched in 1990, including the National Book Awards from 2010 to 2014.
Austerlitz is a 2001 novel by the German writer W. G. Sebald. It was Sebald's final novel. The book received the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 2019, it was ranked 5th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best books of the 21st century.
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her four novels Man Walks into a Room (2002), The History of Love (2005), Great House (2010) and Forest Dark (2017), which have been translated into 35 languages. Her fiction has been published in The New Yorker, Harper's, Esquire, and Granta's Best American Novelists Under 40, and has been collected in Best American Short Stories 2003, Best American Short Stories 2008 and Best American Short Stories 2019. In 2011, Nicole Krauss won an award from the Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards for Great House. A collection of her short stories, To Be a Man, was published in 2020 and won the Wingate Literary Prize in 2022.
The Jewish Book Council, founded in 1944, is an American organization encouraging and contributing to Jewish literature. The goal of the council, as stated on its website, is "to promote the reading, writing and publishing of quality English language books of Jewish content in North America". The council sponsors the National Jewish Book Awards, the JBC Network, JBC Book Clubs, the Visiting Scribe series, and Jewish Book Month. It previously sponsored the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature. It publishes an annual literary journal called Paper Brigade.
Rebecca Newberger Goldstein is an American philosopher, novelist, and public intellectual. She has written ten books, both fiction and non-fiction. She holds a Ph.D. in philosophy of science from Princeton University, and is sometimes grouped with novelists such as Richard Powers and Alan Lightman, who create fiction that is knowledgeable of, and sympathetic toward, science.
Urim Publications, an independent publisher of Jewish interest books, is based in Jerusalem, with an outlet in Brooklyn, New York.
Howard Schwartz is an American folklorist, author, poet, and editor of dozens of books. He has won the international Koret Jewish Book Award, for the book Before You Were Born, and won a 2005 National Jewish Book Award for Tree of Souls: The Mythology of Judaism. He has been featured in the Jewish Children's Book Project, local media in his hometown of Saint Louis, The Jerusalem Post, and The Canadian Jewish News, as well as in many other publications.
Marci Shore is an American associate professor of intellectual history at Yale University, where she specializes in the history of literary and political engagement with Marxism and phenomenology.
The Jewish Quarterly-Wingate Literary Prize is an annual British literary prize inaugurated in 1977. It is named after the host Jewish Quarterly and the prize's founder Harold Hyam Wingate. The award recognises Jewish and non-Jewish writers resident in the UK, British Commonwealth, Europe and Israel who "stimulate an interest in themes of Jewish concern while appealing to the general reader". As of 2011 the winner receives £4,000.
The National Book Award for Nonfiction is one of five U.S. annual National Book Awards, which are given by the National Book Foundation to recognize outstanding literary work by U.S. citizens. They are awards "by writers to writers". The panelists are five "writers who are known to be doing great work in their genre or field".
Ian Thomson is an English author, best known for his biography Primo Levi (2002), and reportage, The Dead Yard: Tales of Modern Jamaica (2009)