Preeminent Yiddish literature prize is open for submissions
Recent winners include Michoel Felsenbaum and Boris Sandler
Photo by Zoltan Bencze / Pexels
By Forverts Staff April 12, 2024
Montreal’s Jewish Public Library has announced that the Jacob Isaac Segal Awards for 2024 are now open for submissions. Its Yiddish literature award is among the most prestigious of its kind in North America, and one of the last awards of this kind today.
The two prizes it will award this year are:
- 5,000 Canadian dollars for Best Quebec Book on a Jewish Theme, for books on Jewish subjects written in French or English by authors who live in Quebec (though there is an exemption for non-residents whose book features Quebec prominently).
- 1,000 Canadian dollars for the Dr. Hirsh and Dvora Rosenfeld Award for Yiddish Literature, given for books written in Yiddish. Those applying for the Rosenfeld Award do not need to be residents of Canada.
All books must be published between January 1, 2022, and December 31, 2023, and be submitted before May 15, 2024 in pdf format by either the publisher or the author.
The Segal Awards have been given out for more than a century, though not on an annual basis.
Recent winners of the Rosenfeld Award are Michoel Felsenbaum in 2022 for A mesoyre vegn a freylekher libe-shmibe (Critical Notes on Love: Yiddish Poems on Love and Life), a collection of sensual love poems in Yiddish, and Boris Sandler in 2020 for Antiklekh funem sakvoyazh (Antiques from my Travel Bag).
You can watch the 2022 Rosenfeld Award ceremony here.
To learn more or to submit a work, click here.
This is a moment of great uncertainty. Here’s what you can do about it.
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 Passover. All donations are being matched by the Forward Board - up to $100,000.
This is a moment of great uncertainty for the news media, for the Jewish people, and for our sacred democracy. It is a time of confusion and declining trust in public institutions. An era in which we need humans to report facts, conduct investigations that hold power to account, tell stories that matter and share honest discourse on all that divides us.
With no paywall or subscriptions, the Forward is entirely supported by readers like you. Every dollar you give this Passover is invested in the future of the Forward — and telling the American Jewish story fully and fairly.
The Forward doesn’t rely on funding from institutions like governments or your local Jewish federation. There are thousands of readers like you who give us $18 or $36 or $100 each month or year.
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
