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.”
Why I became the Forward’s Editor-in-Chief
- Alyssa Katz, Editor-in-Chief
You are surely a friend of the Forward if you’re reading this. And so it’s with excitement and awe — of all that the Forward is, was, and will be — that I introduce myself to you as the Forward’s newest editor-in-chief.
And what a time to step into the leadership of this storied Jewish institution! For 129 years, the Forward has shaped and told the American Jewish story. I’m stepping in at an intense time for Jews the world over. We urgently need the Forward’s courageous, unflinching journalism — not only as a source of reliable information, but to provide inspiration, healing and hope.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
