Katz Center–Supported Scholarship Recognized in the National Jewish Book Awards

Hannah Pollin-Galay was awarded the prize in the Holocaust category for Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish. She undertook this research as a Katz Center fellow in 2015–2016 during the fellowship year “Jews Beyond Reason: Exploring Emotion, the Unconscious, and Other Dimensions of Jews' Inner Lives” and further advanced it in a 2020 JQR article, “‘A Rubric of Pain Words’: Mapping Atrocity with Holocaust Yiddish Glossaries.” Completing the trifecta, the book itself was also published in our series with Penn Press, Jewish Culture and Contexts.

Simcha Gross, an assistant professor in Penn’s Jewish Studies Program, won in the Scholarship category for Babylonian Jews and Sasanian Imperialism in Late Antiquity. He too developed his research as a fellow and in JQR: he coproposed the 2021–2022 fellowship year “Rethinking Premodern Jewish Legal Cultures,” coauthored the 2022 JQR article “Babylonian Jewish Society: The Evidence of the Incantation Bowls” with Avigail Manekin-Bamberger, and received a Katz Center summer collaborative workshop grant with Rivka Elitzur-Leiman for their work on a “Central Database of Incantation Bowls.”

Aviad Moreno built on the work he conducted during the 2018–2019 fellowship year “Jewish Life in Modern Islamic Contexts” to publish Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community, which won in the Sephardic Culture category. You can also find him in the Fall 2024 issue of JQR as a contributor to the forum on “Sephardi and Mizrahi Modernities.” 

The award in the History category went to Jonathan Marc Gribetz for Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy. In addition to participating in the 2009–2010 fellowship year (“Secularism and Its Discontents: Rethinking an Organizing Principle of Modern Jewish Life”), Gribetz also developed his scholarly project in a 2017 JQR article, “The PLO’s Rabbi: Palestinian Nationalism and Reform Judaism.”

Finally, Jordan D. Rosenblum won in the Food Writing and Cookbooks category for Forbidden: A 3,000-Year History of Jews and the Pig, a book prefigured by a 2010 JQR article, “Why Do You Refuse to Eat Pork?": Jews, Food, and Identity in Roman Palestine.”

Finalists

Rosenblum was not the only JQR contributor recognized in the Food Writing and Cookbooks category. Among the finalists was Ilan Stavans, coauthor of Sabor Judío: The Jewish Mexican Cookbook with Margaret E. Boyle. You can find Stavans in the 2021 JQR forum on Jewish Latin America, where he contributed the essay “Américo Castro's ‘Problem.’”

In the Scholarship category (won by Simcha Gross, mentioned above), Iris Idelson-Shein was named as a finalist for Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe, which was published in the Katz Center’s series with Penn Press, Jewish Culture and Contexts. In advance of her book, Idelson-Shein published two articles on early modern translation in JQR: “Meditations on a Monkey-Face: Monsters, Transgressed Boundaries, and Contested Hierarchies in a Yiddish Eulenspiegel” (2018) and “New Science in Old Yiddish: Jewish Vernacular Science and Translation in Early Modern Europe” (co-authored with Magdaléna Jánošíková, 2023). She also joined the Katz Center as a fellow in 2011-2012 (“Travel Facts, Travel Fictions, and the Performance of Jewish Identity”) and 2017-2018 (“Nature between Science and Religion: Jewish Culture and the Natural World”).

Lastly, a finalist in the Modern Jewish Thought and Experience category was Noah Feldman, author of To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People. He coorganized a forum for JQR in 2022 “On Legal Theory and Jewish History,” to which he also wrote the introduction. The same year, he gave a lecture titled “Displaced Torah? Toward a Theory of Jews and the Constitution” in the Katz Center public programs series “Jewish Law and the Constitution,” which is free to watch on YouTube.

It takes a village to produce an award-winning book, and we are proud to have played a role in supporting and spotlighting these scholars.