Cynthia Ozick and Gal Beckerman are among the winners of the 2010 National Jewish Book Awards.
The awards, which were announced Jan. 11, are given out annually by the Jewish Book Council to honor the best in American Jewish writing.
Ozick, a novelist and essayist, won a lifetime achievement award for her many works of fiction and criticism.
Beckerman, a journalist, was honored with the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award for “When They Come For Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry,” his account of efforts to obtain freedom for Jews in the former Soviet Union.
Philanthropist Harold Grinspoon won a special IMPACT award for creating the PJ Library program, which provides nearly 70,000 Jewish children’s books free each month to families with young children.
Other winners included “The Rebbe: The Life and Afterlife of Menachem Mendel Schneerson,” by Samuel Heilman and Menachem Friedman, which took top honors in the American Jewish studies category; Martin Fletcher’s “Walking Israel” in the contemporary Jewish life and practice category; and David Grossman for fiction for his translated novel “To the End of the Land.”
The awards will be presented March 9 in New York. A complete list of finalists is available at www.jewishbooks.wordpress.com.
The Jewish Book Council has been giving out the National Jewish Book Awards since 1948. — jta