Oren Kessler
2024 WINNER
"This is a story of two nationalisms, and of the first major explosion between them. The rebellion was Arab, but the Zionist counter-rebellion is a vital, overlooked element in the chronicle of how Mandatory Palestine became the State of Israel."
-PALESTINE 1936: THE GREAT REVOLT AND THE ROOTS OF THE MIDDLE EAST CONFLICT
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Iddo Gefen
2023 WINNER
Daniella Zamir
TRANSLATION WINNER
"They went looking for her first memory, snow on the beach in Jerusalem. Tomorrow he would turn her in, but at that moment they were still riding the 480 bus together, second seat from the back. Lilian had fallen asleep, and Sammy was looking out the window, stroking his frayed leather satchel. There was only one thing he could say with absolute certainty – the world had changed since he last went out in it".
-JERUSALEM BEACH
ASTRA HOUSE
_edited.jpg)
Menachem Kaiser
2022 WINNER
"Yes: the more I think about it the more I think that in the most morally honest version of this story the reclamation would be perpetual, irresoluble, Sisyphean; my children and their children should inherit not the building but the struggle to reclaim it, the struggle to understand what it is they're trying to reclaim."
-PLUNDER: A MEMOIR OF FAMILY PROPERTY AND NAZI TREASURE
MARINER BOOKS
Benjamin Balint
2020 WINNER
"In centering on the question of who can claim to be Kafka’s true heirs, the trial in Jerusalem threw into stark relief the very different ways Israel and Germany remain freighted by their ruptured pasts... Does Kafka’s beguiling legacy belong to German literature or to the state that regards itself as the representative of Jews everywhere?"
-Kafka's Last Trial
W.W. NORTON
Michael David Lukas
2019 WINNER
"Whatever comes of these pages, I have found satisfaction in writing them.In my research and in the shape of my days, in the wheat-starch paste and the acid-free thread, in the long hours hunched over ancient paper and my walks home along the River Cam, I have found myself…"
-Joseph, The Last Watchman of Old Cairo
Spiegel & Grau
Ayelet Tsabari
2015 WINNER
"She loved and hated Jerusalem: a city that would forever be contested, forever divided, never at peace. But there was more to Jerusalem than what one saw in the news, like how beautiful it was, not in the way BC was, but in a hard, raw and broken way. How it felt alive, a kind of beast, pulsating, breathing, vibrating under her feet."
- Naomi, The Best Place on Earth
Harper Collins Canada
Matti Friedman
2014 WINNER
"Perhaps it is difficult to grasp, in our times, how a book could elicit such passion. The codex had outlived the age of its creation, when a book was an object of vast worth, a product of great craftsmanship and scholarship, and a repository of irreplaceable knowledge. It had...retained its singular value because of the zealousness of its keepers; there were no known copies."
- The Aleppo Codex
Algonquin Books
Gal Beckerman
2012 WINNER
"Living in a totalitarian state, these were people who decided, almost out of nowhere, to assert an ancient identity, turn themselves into pariahs, risk everything, and become living proof of man's capacity for bravery--all so they could simply be Jews."
- When They Come for Us, We'll Be Gone
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Austin Ratner
2011 WINNER
"He wished he could go back there now, to the edge of the birch forest where the gnats tumbled in the light of the sunset, back to that place where he's gotten lost chasing a butterfly in the woods and Papa had come for him, crashing through the weeds in the red shirt with the buttons."
- Phillipe, The Jump Artist
Bellevue Literary Press
Kenneth Moss
2010 WINNER
"Yet they looked beyond the needs of the moment and sought to lay the groundwork for a different kind of Jewish future--one in which Jews as individuals, liberated from inner crisis and outer siege, might engage the full range of creative possibilities, questions, and freedoms that modernity offers."
- Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution
Harvard University Press
Sana Krasikov
2009 WINNER
"We drove alongside the river, which reflected the dull luster of the sky. I'd noticed that even without clouds, the sky was rarely transparent. During my first few days in Moscow the pollution had felt suffocating, but now it seemed to add a sawdust luminosity to the city."
- Narrator, One More Year
Spiegel & Grau
Lucette Lagnado z”l
2008 WINNER
"Malaka Nazli hadn't simply been a place, I realized, but a state of mind. It was where you could find an extraordinary, breathtaking level of humanity...mercy and compassion and tenderness and grace, those ethereal qualities that make and keep us human."
- The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit
Harper Perennial
