Ilana Kurshan Wins Sami Rohr Prize For ‘If All The Seas Were Ink’
Graphic by Angelie Zaslavsky
By Talya Zax June 5, 2018
Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink: A Memoir” has won the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
“If All the Seas Were Ink” recounts the years in which Kurshan, recovering from the dissolution of her first marriage at age 27, undertook the project of reading the entire Talmud, one page per day. The memoir has been much-lauded, also winning the 2018 Sophie Brody Medal for achievement in Jewish literature.
Sara Hirschorn won the runner-up Choice Award for “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement.”
The Sami Rohr prize comes with an award of $100,000. Choice Award winners take home $18,000, and finalists $5,000. This year’s finalists, known as Sami Rohr Fellows, are Yair Mintzker for “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss,” Shari Rabin for “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth Century America” and Chanan Tigay for “The Lost Book of Moses.”
The prize is awarded annually by the Jewish Book Council to emerging authors; it is given to fiction and non-fiction books in alternating years. Last year’s fiction winner was Idra Novey, for her novel “Ways to Disappear.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
