Katz Center Scholars Win Big at the 2017 National Jewish Book Awards

The Jewish Book Council recently announced the winners and finalists of the 2017 National Jewish Book Awards, with eight different Katz Center scholars included among them.

Steven Weitzman, Katz Center director, won for The Origin of the Jews: The Quest for Roots in a Rootless Age in the category of Jewish Education and Identity. Speaking to Penn News about the win, Weitzman reflected, “I wanted the book to tell the story of a scholarly quest in a way that was helpful to readers beyond academia while staying true to the complexity of the issues involved… I would be delighted if the book helps readers, Jewish or non-Jewish, think about their origins and their identity in a deeper way.”

Three past fellows also took home awards:

• David Fishman, a fellow in 1995–1996, won in the Holocaust category for The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis.
• Gideon Reuveni, the Charles W. and Sally Rothfeld fellow in 2008–2009, won in the Modern Jewish Thought and Experience category for Consumer Culture and the Making of Modern Jewish Identity.
• Ellie R. Schainker, the Golub Family fellow in 2010–2011, won in the Writing Based on Archival Material category for Confessions of the Shtetl: Converts from Judaism in Imperial Russia, 1817–1906.

In addition, four Katz Center fellows and/or affiliated scholars were recognized as finalists:

• Mark R. Cohen, an affiliated scholar in 2006–2007, was recognized in the Scholarship category for Maimonides and the Merchants: Jewish Law and Society in the Medieval Islamic World. 
• Alan Mintz, the Michael R. Steinhardt Term fellow in 2004–2005, was recognized posthumously in the Scholarship category for Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S.Y. Agnon. 
• Jane L. Kanarek and Marjorie Lehman, participants in the 2015 summer Collaboratory, were recognized in the Jewish Education and Identity category for Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How It Happens and also in the Women’s Studies category for Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (coedited with Simon Bronner).