
And the winners of the 69th National Jewish Book Awards are. . .
Today, the Jewish Book Council revealed the winners of the 2019 National Jewish Book Awards, which span 24 categories. Winners include Bari Weiss, whose book How to Fight Anti-Semitism was written in the aftermath of the 2018 attack on a synagogue in Pittsburgh; Dani Shapiro for her bestselling memoir Inheritance; and Ilya Kaminsky for his poetry collection Deaf Republic, which was also a finalist for the 2019 National Book Award for Poetry.
Biblical historian and translator Robert Alter took home a Lifetime Achievement Award. Alter’s annotated translation of the Hebrew Bible, published in 2018, has been hailed as a landmark achievement that centers the literary qualities of the text. The Alter Bible is also notable for being a one-man translation. Pamela Nadell received the Book of the Year Award for America’s Jewish Women, a 400-year history of Jewish women in the United States.
A selection of this year’s winners are featured below. You can find the full list here.
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Jewish Book of the Year
America’s Jewish Women: A History from Colonial Times to Today
Pamela S. Nadell
W. W. Norton & Company
Lifetime Achievement Award
The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary
Robert Alter
W. W. Norton & Company
Autobiography and Memoir
Inheritance: A Memoir of Genealogy, Paternity, and Love
Dani Shapiro
Alfred A. Knopf
Biography
Touched with Fire: Morris B. Abram and the Battle against Racial and Religious Discrimination
David E. Lowe
Potomac Books
Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice
How to Fight Anti-Semitism
Bari Weiss
Crown
Debut Fiction
Naamah
Sarah Blake
Riverhead Books
Fiction
Fly Already: Stories
Etgar Keret
Riverhead Books
History
The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians, and Other European Immigrants Out of America
Daniel Okrent
Scribner
Poetry
Deaf Republic
Ilya Kaminsky
Graywolf Press

Aaron Robertson
Aaron Robertson has written for The New York Times, The Nation, Foreign Policy, and elsewhere. His translation of Igiaba Scego's novel Beyond Babylon (Two Lines Press, 2019) was shortlisted for the PEN Translation Prize and Best Translated Book Award.