As literature elevates, it is occasionally important to elevate literature, which is, perhaps, why the 2017 National Jewish Book Awards took place in a Manhattan penthouse with a view so stunning as to distract a journalist from her notes. And as literature delights with piquant details, it was appropriate that Michael Chabon, attending to receive…
Winners of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards, announced this morning by the Jewish Book Council, include Daniel Gordis, whose “Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn” won Book of the Year, Rose Tremain, who won the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award in Fiction for “The Gustav Sonata,” and Michael Chabon, who was awarded the…
The first volume of the Jewish Book Council’s new annual literary journal, Paper Brigade, isn’t exactly subtle in its messaging: its cover, designed by Katherine Messenger, features sketches of an attractive set of bookish people utterly lost in Jewish literature. They seem to occupy a bubble of calmness. One woman sits absorbed in Anita Diamant’s…
Anxiety continues to roil through the pro-Israel world over a possible last-minute political move by the Obama administration that could permanently alter the Israeli-Palestinian geopolitical landscape. 48 hours after the Nov 8 election, I flew to South Florida for a series of lectures and briefings organized by StandWithUs, NOVA Southeast University and other organizations as…
After all the noise surrounding the Nazi Romance book this summer, I looked closer at my own reading list. I could tell someone what books were awful in their treatment of Judaism and Jewish people, but could I recommend books that were wonderful? I couldn’t. A little ashamed, I set off to read books where…
As the executive director of the Jewish Book Council for over 20 years, Carolyn Starman Hessel has been called the “Jewish Oprah.” She helped launch the careers of writers such as Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Francesca Segal and Dara Horn. Most of all, she made a small Jewish organization into a powerhouse of the…
Naomi Firestone-Teeter will be the new director of the Jewish Book Council, the Forward has learned. Firestone-Teeter, previously the associate director of the organization, will take over from Carolyn Starman Hessel, who led the Jewish Book Council for more than 20 years. “She will do a wonderful job,” Hessel said of Firestone-Teeter. “She’s been exemplary…
When the artists Rutu Modan and Yirmi Pinkus formed the publishing house Actus Tragedus in 1995, it was, in Pinkus’s words, “an effort to find ourselves readers outside of Israel” for their comics and illustrations. Actus published books in English, an act that Modan and Pinkus said was seen at the time as snobbish and…
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