Here’s the press release from Ari Goldman‘s wife Shira Dicker:
New York, NY. January 9, 2008 – With winners in twenty categories hailing from six countries this year, the 57th Annual National Jewish Book Awards takes on an international flavor. And with Israel’s 60th anniversary on the horizon, it seems only fitting that a quarter of the 2007 awards will go to Israeli authors.
This year’s top honorees for the oldest Jewish literary award in the nation are James L. Kugel, winner of the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award for How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now (Free Press); and Rabbi Harold Kushner, winner of the Jewish Book Council Lifetime Achievement Award, for his important body of work, which includes the international bestseller, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, first published in 1981.
Dr. Kugel and Rabbi Kushner – as well as eighteen other winners in as many categories — will be honored on March 4th, 2008 at a gala award ceremony to be held at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, located at 15 W.16th Street.
In celebration of Israel’s upcoming 60th Anniversary, a special Israeli-themed musical performance will be featured as part of the National Jewish Book Awards program. The awards ceremony, which begins at 7:30 p.m., is free and open to the public but seating is limited.
As in years past, acclaimed authors Samuel G. Freedman and Ari L. Goldman, who both serve on the faculty of the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, will serve as joint masters of ceremonies.
Other top winners for the 2007 National Jewish Book Award include Meir Shalev, in the Fiction category, for his novel A Boy and a Pigeon (Schocken Books); George Konrad in the Biography, Autobiography & Memoir category, for his book A Guest in my Own Country: A Hungarian Life (Other Press); Michael Makovsky in History for Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (Yale University Press); Edward Kaplan in American Jewish Studies for Spiritual Radical: Abraham Joshua Heschel in America (Yale University Press); and Vanessa Ochs in the Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice category for Inventing Jewish Ritual (Jewish Publication Society).
What kind of press release is this without mention of the First Lady of Jewish Culture — Alana Newhouse?
