It’s that time of year, when Jewish authors stand up and take their bows.
The 2005 National Jewish Book Award winners were announced this week, and among the honorees are a father and daughter (winning in separate categories), an acclaimed Bay Area fiction writer and one of Israel’s best-loved novelists.
The Jewish Book Council has been handing out these awards since 1943, adding much to the promotion of American Jewish letters. The 55th Annual National Jewish Book Awards will be presented April 26 at the Center for Jewish History in New York City.
Big winners this year include celebrated Berkeley writer Michael Chabon, who won the top fiction award for his latest, “The Final Solution,” a detective story about a mute Jewish boy in England, circa 1944.
Israeli writer Amos Oz took home the top prize — the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award — for his memoir “A Tale of Love and Darkness.”
David Ellenson, the president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, picked up the Dorot Foundation Award in the category of modern Jewish thought and experience with “After Emancipation.”
By happy coincidence his daughter, Ruth Andrew Ellenson, won the Barbara Dobkin Award for Women’s Studies for “The Modern Jewish Girls’ Guide to Guilt,” a collection of essays she edited.
This year’s awards features a new category, Jewish family literature, endowed by the Kripke Foundation, in memory of the late author Dorothy Kripke. The 2005 winning book is “A Box of Candles” by Laurie A. Jacobs, illustrated by Shelly Ephraim.
Other winners of the 2005 Jewish Book Awards include:
In the category of American Jewish history, Jerome Karabel’s “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton.”
In the anthologies category, “Who We Are: On Being (and Not Being) A Jewish American Writer,” edited by Derek Rubin.
For biography/memoir, Masha Gessen’s “Ester and Ruzya” won. For children’s literature, the winner is “Real Time” by Pnina Moed Kass.
Scott-Martin Kosofsky’s “The Book of Customs” won in the category of contemporary Jewish life and practice, while Yuri Slezkine won the Ronald S. Lauder Award in Eastern European Studies for his book “The Jewish Century.”
In history, Mark Mazower won the Gerrard and Ella Berman Award for his book “Salonica, City of Ghosts.” Deborah Lipstadt won in the Holocaust category for her “History on Trial: My Day in Court with David Irving” (coincidentally, Irving was sentenced this week to three years in prison for his Holocaust denial activities).
The Louis Posner Memorial Award is given out for excellence in the field of illustrated children’s books. This year’s winner is Uri Shulevitz’s “The Travels of Benjamin of Tudela: Through Three Continents in the 12th Century.”
Winning in the poetry category, Gerald Stern for his 2005 collection “Everything is Burning: Poems.” Howard Schwartz’s “The Tree of Souls” won in the reference category, while the Mimi S. Frank Award for excellence in scholarship on Sephardic culture went to “The Schocken Book of Modern Sephardic Literature” and editor Ilan Stavans.
Elliott R. Wolfson’s “Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination” won in the scholarship category, while the winner in visual arts went to co-editors Emily D. Bilski and Emily Braun for their work, “Jewish Women and Their Salons: The Power of Conversation.”
The Jewish Book Council publishes Jewish Book World (a Jewish counterpart of Publishers Weekly) and also coordinates Jewish Book Month.