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.Koret Jewish Book Award, National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Accessed February 19, 2008.
Professor Samuel Zipperstein of Stanford University oversaw the awards from their creation until 2005, 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. 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.Rappaport, Scott. "Jewish studies to host lecture by winner of 2005 Koret history book prize", UC Santa Cruz Currents, April 4, 2005. Accessed February 19, 2008. "The Koret Jewish Book Award is considered to be one of the highest honors for authors writing prose on Jewish themes."
Winners
Fiction 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 2002 Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel (editor) The Complete Works of Isaac Babel 2003 Henryk Grynberg Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After 2004 (tie) Aharon Megged Foiglman Barbara Honigmann A Love Made Out of Nothing & Zohara's Journey 2005 Tony Eprile The Persistence of Memory 2006 David Grossman Her Body Knows
Jewish Life and Living 2006 Rochel Berman Dignity Beyond Death
History (discontinued) 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 2002 Eli Lederhendler New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity -- 1950-1970 2003 Benjamin Nathans Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia 2004 Shmuel Feiner The Jewish Enlightenment 2005 Elisheva Baumgarten Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe
Philosophy and Thought 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 2002 (tie) Samuel Heilman When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son 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 2005 Steven Greenberg Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition 2006 Rebecca Goldstein Betraying Spinoza
Biography, Autobiography or Literary Study (discontinued) 2000 Steven Nadler Spinoza: A Life 2001 Cynthia Ozick Quarrel & Quandary: Essays 2002 Dorothy Gallagher How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories 2003 Tikva Frymer-Kensky Reading the Women of the Bible 2004 Benjamin Harshav Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative 2005 Amos Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness
Children's Literature 2005 Karen Hesse, Wendy Watson (illustrator) The Cats in Krasinski Square2006 Howard Schwartz, Kristina Swarner (illustrator) Before You Were Born
Special awards
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.
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.
References
External links Koret Jewish Book Award