Two ¿ìɫֱ²¥ books are honored with National Jewish Book Awards

Two ¿ìɫֱ²¥ books have been recognized by the 75th National Jewish Book Awards.

A Woman is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe by Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach has won in the Nahum M. Sar­na Memo­r­i­al Award in the Scholarship category and The Barbara Dobkin Award in the Women’s Studies category. Groundbreaking and beautifully illustrated, A Woman is Responsible for Everything explores the integral role of women in early modern Jewish communal life. Marshalling previously untapped archival sources to tell the stories of these woman for the first time, authors Debra Kaplan—Samuel Braun Chair for the History of the Jews in Germany at Bar-Ilan University—and Elisheva Carlebach—Salo Wittmayer Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society at Columbia University—contribute a new chapter to the history of Jewish women and a new understanding of the Jewish past.

Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Yiddish Children’s Literature by Miriam Udel has won in the Education and Jewish Identity category, In Memory of Dorothy Kripke. Tracing how modern Yiddish children’s literature gave expression to emerging forms of Jewish identity, Udel—associate professor of Yiddish language, literature, and culture and the Judith London Evans Director of the Tam Institute for Jewish Studies at Emory University—provides the most comprehensive study to date of this corpus of nearly a thousand Yiddish picture books, chapter books, story and poetry collections, and anthologies. Moving geographically from Europe to the Americas and chronologically through the twentieth century, Udel considers this emerging canon in relation to the deep Jewish past and imagined Jewish futures before reckoning with the tragedy of the Holocaust. Ultimately, she shows how Yiddish authors, educators, and cultural leaders, confronting practical limits on their ability to forge a fully realized nation of their own, focused instead on making a symbolic and conceptual world for Jewish children to inhabit with dignity, justice, and joy.

In addition to the winning titles, two PUP books were all named as award finalists. Hebrew Orientalism: Jewish Engagement with Arabo-Islamic Culture in Late Ottoman and British Palestine, by Mostafa Hussein, is a finalist for the Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy, the Sephardic Culture category. The Jewish South: An American History by Shari Rubin, is a finalist for the Celebrate 350 Award, in the American Jewish Studies category.

The National Jewish Book Awards are administered annually, by the Jewish Book Council. Recent ¿ìɫֱ²¥ books honored by the council include Jonathan Marc Gribetz’s Reading Herzl in Beirut, which won the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award for History in 2025. Also in 2025, Ronnie Grinberg’s Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals was selected as a finalist for the American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award and the Women’s Studies Category.