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The central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. The House of Fragile Things, Nation­al Jew­ish Book Award Winner of the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award (History) In the dramatic years between 1870 and the end of World War II, a number of prominent French Jews—pillars of an embattled community—invested their fortunes in France’s cultural artifacts, sacrificed their sons to the country’s army, and were ultimately rewarded by seeing their collections plundered and their families deported to Nazi concentration camps. In this rich, evocative account, James McAuley explores the central role that art and material culture played in the assimilation and identity of French Jews in the fin-de-siècle. Weaving together narratives of various figures, some familiar from the works of Marcel Proust and the diaries of Jules and Edmond Goncourt—the Camondos, the Rothschilds, the Ephrussis, the Cahens d'Anvers—McAuley shows how Jewish art colle

Fascinating case studies on weighing competing Jewish values in difficult, real-world situations. 2021 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Con­tem­po­rary Jew­ish Life and Practice, The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook Judaism offers us unique—and often divergent—insights into contemporary moral quandaries. How can we use social media without hurting others? Should people become parents through cloning? Should doctors help us die? The first ethics book to address social media and technology ethics through a Jewish lens, along with teaching the additional skills of analyzing classical Jewish texts, The Jewish Family Ethics Textbook guides teachers and students of all ages in mining classical and modern Jewish texts to inform ethical decision-making. Both sophisticated and accessible, the book tackles challenges in parent-child relationships, personal and academic integrity, social media, sexual intimacy, conception, abortion, and end of life. Case studies, largely drawn from real life, concretize the dilem

Legal scholar Micah Schwartzman uncovers and explains key issues of freedom of religion and speech in a post-Roe America. Micah Schwartzman is the director of the Karsh Center for Law and Democracy and the Hardy Cross Dillard Professor of Law. A scholar who focuses on law and religion, jurisprudence, political philosophy and constitutional law, Schwartzman joined the UVA Law faculty in 2007. Schwartzman received his B.A. from the University of Virginia and his doctorate in politics from the University of Oxford, where he studied as a Rhodes Scholar. During law school, he served as articles development editor of the Virginia Law Review and received several awards, including the Margaret G. Hyde Award. After graduating, Schwartzman clerked for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit and was a postdoctoral research fellow at Columbia University’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities. Schwartzman’s work has appeared in the Harvard Law Review, University of Chicago Law Review, Virginia Law Review, Supr

Author Nancy Churnin discusses the power of having a pen, paper, and something to say. Dear Mr. Dickens, 2021 National Jewish Book Award winner for children's picture book. In Eliza Davis's day, Charles Dickens was the most celebrated living writer in England. But some of his books reflected a prejudice that was all too common at the time: prejudice against Jewish people. Eliza was Jewish, and her heart hurt to see a Jewish character in Oliver Twist portrayed as ugly and selfish. She wanted to speak out about how unfair that was, even if it meant speaking out against the great man himself. So she wrote a letter to Charles Dickens. What happened next is history. Nancy Churnin is the author of Dear Mr. Dickens, the 2021 National Jewish Book Award children's picture book winner and 2022 Sydney Taylor Honor winner; A Queen to the Rescue, the Story of Henrietta Szold, Founder of Hadassah, a 2022 Sydney Taylor Notable and many more picture books about people who persevered to achieve their dreams and make the wo

Author Weina Randel discusses The Last Rose of Shanghai: A love story transcending class, race, religion, and even war. National Jewish Book Award Finalist, The Last Rose of Shanghai In Japanese-occupied Shanghai, two people from different cultures are drawn together by fate and the freedom of music... Weina Dai Randel is the award-winning author of three novels, The Last Rose of Shanghai, The Moon in the Palace, and The Empress of Bright Moon, a historical duology about Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor. Weina is the winner of the RWA RITA Award, a finalist of the National Jewish Book Awards, the Goodreads Choice Award semifinalist, and the RT Book Reviewers Choice nominee. Her novels have been translated into seven languages and sold worldwide. Born in China, Weina came to the United States at twenty-four, when she began to speak, write and dream in English. She holds an MA in English from Texas Woman’s University in Denton, Texas. She has worked as the subject-matter expert for Southern New Hampsh

Reverse-engineering his imagined past, Israeli author Yaniv Iczkovits follows his characters across the Pale of Settlement. The Slaughterman’s Daughter, finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. With her reputation as a vilde chaya (wild animal), Fanny Keismann isn’t like the other women in her shtetl in the Pale of Settlement—certainly not her obedient and anxiety-ridden sister, Mende, whose “philosopher” of a husband, Zvi-Meir, has run off to Minsk, abandoning her and their two children. As a young girl, Fanny felt an inexorable pull toward her father’s profession of ritual slaughterer and, under his reluctant guidance, became a master with a knife. And though she long ago gave up that unsuitable profession—she’s now the wife of a cheesemaker and a mother of five—Fanny still keeps the knife tied to her right leg. Which might come in handy when, heedless of the dangers facing a Jewish woman traveling alone in czarist Russia, she sets off to track down Zvi-Meir and bring him home, with the help of the

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Joshua Cohen reimagines a meeting between two giants of 20th century Judaism as debate about the Jewish destiny. 2021 National Jewish Book Award and 2022 Pulitzer Prize Winner, The Netanyahus: An Account of a Minor and Ulti­mate­ly Even Neg­li­gi­ble Episode in the His­to­ry of a Very Famous Family Corbin College, not quite upstate New York, winter 1959–1960: Ruben Blum, a Jewish historian—but not an historian of the Jews—is co-opted onto a hiring committee to review the application of an exiled Israeli scholar specializing in the Spanish Inquisition. When Benzion Netanyahu shows up for an interview, family unexpectedly in tow, Blum plays the reluctant host to guests who proceed to lay waste to his American complacencies. Mixing fiction with nonfiction, the campus novel with the lecture, The Netanyahus is a wildly inventive, genre-bending comedy of blending, identity, and politics that finds Joshua Cohen at the height of his powers. Joshua Cohen was born in 1980 in Atlantic Ci

Author Lori Banov Kaufmann transports us to an unlikely love story set against the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. National Jewish Book Award Winner, Rebel Daughter A young woman survives the unthinkable in this stunning and emotionally satisfying tale of family, love, and resilience, set against the destruction of Jerusalem in 70 CE. Lori grew up in Charleston, South Carolina. She received her undergraduate degree from Princeton and a masters from Harvard. She’d always wanted to write and in fact wrote The Ice Cream Lover’s Guide to Boston with her husband when they were both in grad school. While this important addition to the literary canon never made it to the bestseller lists, it did get the authors a lot of free ice cream! The intervening years were filled with making Aliyah and working as a strategy consultant for high-tech companies. Her expertise was helping military companies commercialize their technology for civilian applications. Upon retiring from consulting, Lori went back to her early

Author Jai Chakrabarti muses on the power of art, friendship, and love to bridge the human experience. A Play for the End of the World, winner of the National Jewish Book Award for debut fiction. New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk’s oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India. Travelling there alone to collect his friend’s ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor’s guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.

Author and philanthropist Mark Gerson uncovers surprising delights and insights from the deceptively familiar text. The Telling: How Judaism’s Essen­tial Book Reveals the Meaning of Life, finalist for the 2021 National Jewish Book Award for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. Mark Gerson is an entrepreneur and philanthropist, as well as the author of books on intellectual history and education. His articles and essays on subjects ranging from Frank Sinatra to the biblical Jonah have been published in The New Republic, Commentary, The Wall Street Journal and USA Today. He hosts the popular podcast “The Rabbi’s Husband” and recently wrote “The Telling: How Judaism’s Essen­tial Book Reveals the Meaning of Life, which came out from St. Martins Press in 2021. Mark is married to Rabbi Erica Gerson.

Guidance and provocations for finding meaning in ‘unprecedented’ times. Torah in a Time of Plague: Historical and Contemporary Jewish Reflections, winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Modern Jewish Thought and Experience. This collection of essays uses Torah – broadly understood to include any canonical Jewish text or tradition – to illuminate, explore, bemoan, or grapple with our current moment of plague. Rabbi Dr. Erin Leib Smokler is the Dean of Students and the Director of Spiritual Development at Yeshivat Maharat rabbinical school, where she teaches Hasidism and Pastoral Torah. She is also a faculty member at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America and at the Institute for Jewish Spirituality. Erin earned both her PhD and MA from the University of Chicago’s Committee on Social Thought, and her BA from Harvard University. She was ordained by Yeshivat Maharat. Erin previously served as Assistant Literary Editor of The New Republic magazine, and her writing has appeared there, as wel

Studying Jewish tradition as an expression of the Jewish purpose. Rabbi Helen Plotkin is co-founder of the Beit Midrash at Swarthmore College, where she taught courses in Biblical Hebrew and classical Hebrew texts for 20 years. She is founder and director of Mekom Torah (pronounced McComb Toe-RAH), offering deep Jewish study opportunities for adults and teens that transcend the boundaries of the various Jewish movements. Mekom Torah is committed to a radically ancient vision of Judaism as a culture of learning in which study is not a preparation for Jewish life, it is Jewish life. Rabbi Plotkin also teaches in the Beit Midrash at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. Rabbi Plotkin holds a BA from Swarthmore College in Philosophy and Linguistics, an MA from the University of Michigan in Ancient Chinese Language and Thought, and rabbinical ordination from Reconstructionist Rabbinical College. She is editor and annotator of the recent book, In This Hour: Heschel's Writings in Nazi Germany and London Exile, and

Major themes of Jewish life, reviewed, rethunk... remixed. Roberta Rosenthal Kwall is the Raymond P. Niro Professor at DePaul University College of Law. Professor Kwall earned her JD from the University of Pennsylvania and received her undergraduate degree in Religious Studies from Brown University. She also has a Master's Degree in Jewish Studies. Kwall is an internationally renowned scholar and lecturer and has published over 30 articles on a wide variety of topics including Jewish law and culture, authorship rights, and intellectual property. She is the author of several law casebooks that are used nationally as well as two monographs: “The Myth of the Cultural Jew: Culture and Law in Jewish Tradition” (Oxford U. Press, 2015) and “The Soul of Creativity” (Stanford U. Press, 2010). Currently she is working on a book for a popular audience about transmitting Jewish tradition in a diverse world. Kwall also has written numerous Opeds, articles, and book reviews on topics of relevance to the Jewish community

Dig into the Jew­ish lit­er­ary land­scape with the Jewish Book Council’s intriguing and rich annual literary journal. Becca Kantor is the editorial director of Jewish Book Council and its annual print literary journal, Paper Brigade. She received a BA in English from the University of Pennsylvania and an MA in creative writing from the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Becca was awarded a Fulbright fellowship to spend a year in Estonia writing and studying the country's Jewish history. She lives in Brooklyn.

Judaism's views on sex, sensuality, and intimacy within marriage. Noam is now emeritus at the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem where since 1978 he has been a senior research fellow and educator. He earned a graduate degree in general philosophy at Columbia University and the Hebrew University, while studying Bible and Rabbinics at JTSA and the Hartman Beit Midrash. His popular publications and worldwide lecturing have promoted Homemade Judaism - empowering families to create their own pluralistic Judaism during home holidays - Pesach, Hanukkah and Shabbat. His most popular publications include: A Different Night: The Family Participation Haggadah; A Different Light: The Big Book of Hanukkah; A Day Apart: Shabbat at Home; The Israeli Haggadah: Halaila Hazeh; and A Night to Remember: The Haggadah of Contemporary Voices (published together with his son). His educational study guides for day school teachers include multidisciplinary analyses of family conflicts such as Cain and Abel, Adam and Eve, Hagar

Civil litigation as a powerful tool against white supremacy. Amy Spitalnick is the Executive Director of Integrity First for America, the civil rights nonprofit that spearheaded the successful landmark lawsuit against the neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and hate groups responsible for the Charlottesville violence. Amy has extensive experience in government, politics, and advocacy, including as Communications Director and Senior Policy Advisor to the New York Attorney General and Communications Advisor and Spokesperson for the New York City Mayor. She has also worked for a number of federal, state, and local officials, campaigns, and advocacy organizations. Amy frequently appears in national media and has been awarded a number of fellowships and honors, including being named a Women inPower Fellow at the 92nd Street Y, a Truman National Security Project Fellow, and a City & State 40 Under 40 Rising Star. Amy graduated from Tufts University.

Advancing social justice through Torah. Rabbi Barry H. Block serves Congregation B'nai Israel in Little Rock, Arkansas. A Houston native and graduate of Amherst College, Rabbi Block was ordained by Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in New York in 1991, and he received his DD, honoris causa, in 2016. A member of the CCAR Board of Trustees, currently serving as vice president of organizational relationships, Block is the editor of The Mussar Torah Commentary (CCAR Press, 2020), a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award. He also contributed to several earlier CCAR anthologies, including Inscribed: Encounters with the Ten Commandments, The Sacred Exchange, The Sacred Encounter, Navigating the Journey, and A Life of Meaning: Embracing Reform Judaism's Sacred Path, and he is a regular contributor to the CCAR Journal. Rabbi Naamah Kelman was appointed Dean of the Taube Family Campus of HUC-JIR in Jerusalem on July 1, 2009. Previously, she served as Associate Dean. Ordained by HUC-JIR in Isr

Feminism, intertextuality and 3000 years of making sense of God. Rabbi Kari Tuling received rabbinic ordination in 2004 and earned her PhD in Jewish Thought in 2013, both from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati. She has served congregations in Connecticut, Indiana, New York, and Ohio, and has taught Jewish Studies courses at the University of Cincinnati and the State University of New York, Plattsburgh. She currently serves as the rabbi of Congregation Kol Haverim in Glastonbury, Connecticut. Recent publications include contributions to the CCAR Journal: Reform Jewish Quarterly, chapters in A Life of Meaning: Reform Judaism’s Sacred Path and Inscribed: Encounters with the Ten Commandments, both by the CCAR Press. Her first book, Thinking About God: Jewish Views, was published in 2020 by JPS/University of Nebraska Press.

Tension and compatibility in the long story of our Jewish and American identities. Dr. Jonathan D. Sarna is University Professor and Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History at Brandeis University, where he directs the Schusterman Center for Israel Studies. He also chairs the Academic Advisory and Editorial Board of the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati and serves as Chief Historian of the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia. Author or editor of more than thirty books on American Jewish history and life, Dr. Sarna’s American Judaism: A History (Yale 2004), recently published in a second edition, won six awards including the 2004 “Everett Jewish Book of the Year Award” from the Jewish Book Council. His most recent books are (with Benjamin Shapell) Lincoln and the Jews: A History (St. Martin’s, 2015), and When General Grant Expelled the Jews (Schocken/Nextbook, 2012). Sarna’s annotated edition of Cora Wilburn’s previous

Controversy, confusion and confidence in God’s goodness, from antiquity to present. After being graduated from New York University with a B.A. in philosophy and Phi Beta Kappa, Rabbi Wayne Allen, Ph.D. attended the Jewish Theological Seminary of America where he earned a Masters degree in Rabbinics and went on to receive rabbinic ordination. He served as a congregational rabbi for 35 years, taking on postings in New York City, Los Angeles, and Toronto. The Jewish Theological Seminary conferred an honorary Doctor of Divinity upon him for his years of dedicated service. Rabbi Allen was awarded a Masters degree in Philosophy from York University in Toronto where went on to earn his Ph.D. He has taught Jews and non-Jews of all ages in formal and informal settings including the American Jewish University, the University of Waterloo, the Community Hebrew Academy of Toronto, and Camp Ramah in California. Along with Harvey Haber he wrote Giving Thanks: Graces for All Occasions. Among his interests has been Jewish L