The five candidates for the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature have been announced. This year’s award is for non-fiction books.
As per the Jewish Book Council press release, the short list includes:
Ilana M. Blumberg for Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books (University of Nebraska Press) – Blumberg is Assistant Professor of Humanities at James Madison College at Michigan State University.
Eric L. Goldstein for The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton University Press) – Goldstein is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University.
Lucette Lagnado for The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World (Ecco) – Lagnado is a senior special writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers the uninsured and the elderly.
Michael Makovsky for Churchill’s Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (Yale University Press) – Makovsky is Foreign Policy Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center.
Haim Watzman for A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel’s Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) – Watzman is a Jerusalem based writer, translator, and journalist and is Israel correspondent for the science journal Nature.
The Rohr prize was first given out last year (to Tamar Yellin) and is one of the richest literary awards in the world.
