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The Koret Jewish Book Award is an annual award that recognizes "recently published books on any aspect of Jewish life in the categories of biography/autobiography and literary studies, fiction, history and philosophy/thought published in, or translated into, English." The award was established in 1998 by the Koret Foundation, in cooperation with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, to increase awareness of the best new Jewish books and their authors.^[1]

Professor Samuel Zipperstein of Stanford University oversaw the awards from their creation until 2005,^[2] when the Koret Foundation decided to increase public interest in the awards by honoring books that were less academic and more accessible to readers. Jewish Family & Life!, a non-profit organization, was selected to manage the awards. Its CEO, Rabbi Yosef Abramowitz, stated that he hoped to transform the awards into something akin to Oprah's Book Club.^[3] The History category and the Biography, Autobiography or Literary Study category were eliminated and replaced with a new category, Jewish Life & Living.

The Koret Jewish Book Award is one of the highest honors for authors of works on Jewish subjects.^[4]

Winners

Fiction

1999	(tie) Yoel Hoffmann	Katschen & The Book of Joseph
	Brian Morton	Starting Out in the Evening
2000	A. B. Yehoshua	A Journey to the End of the Millennium
2001	Philip Roth	The Human Stain^[5]
2002	Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel (editor)	The Complete Works of Isaac Babel^[6]
2003	Henryk Grynberg	Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After
2004	(tie) Aharon Megged	Foiglman ^[7]
	Barbara Honigmann	A Love Made Out of Nothing & Zohara's Journey
2005	Tony Eprile	The Persistence of Memory ^[3]
2006	David Grossman	Her Body Knows^[8]

Jewish Life and Living

2006

Rochel Berman

Dignity Beyond Death^[8]

History (discontinued)

1999	Miriam Bodian	Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam
2000	Chava Weissler	Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women
2001	David B. Ruderman	Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought^[5]
2002	Eli Lederhendler	New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity -- 1950-1970^[6]
2003	Benjamin Nathans	Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia
2004	Shmuel Feiner	The Jewish Enlightenment^[7]
2005	Elisheva Baumgarten	Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe

Philosophy and Thought

1999	Arnold Eisen	Rethinking Modern Judaism Ritual, Commandment, Community
2000	David Patterson	Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary
2001	Kenneth Seeskin	Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides^[5]
2002	(tie) Samuel Heilman	When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son ^[6]
	Ken Koltun-Fromm	Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity
2003	Moshe Idel	Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation
2004	Daniel Matt	The Zohar, Pritzker Edition, Volumes I and II^[7]
2005	Steven Greenberg	Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition
2006	Rebecca Goldstein	Betraying Spinoza^[9]

Biography, Autobiography or Literary Study (discontinued)

2000	Steven Nadler	Spinoza: A Life
2001	Cynthia Ozick	Quarrel & Quandary: Essays^[5]
2002	Dorothy Gallagher	How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories ^[6]
2003	Tikva Frymer-Kensky	Reading the Women of the Bible
2004	Benjamin Harshav	Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative^[7]
2005	Amos Oz	A Tale of Love and Darkness

Children's Literature

2005	Karen Hesse, Wendy Watson (illustrator)	The Cats in Krasinski Square
2006	Howard Schwartz, Kristina Swarner (illustrator)	Before You Were Born ^[9]

Special Awards

German writer W. G. Sebald received a special Koret award in 2002 for his contributions to literature. Steven J. Zipperstein, the director of the Korets, cited Sebald's novel Austerlitz as a particularly impressive work. Sebald died several months before the awards ceremony.^[6]

In 2006, Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated received JBooks.com's People's Choice award for the best Jewish work of fiction of the previous decade, as determined by 1,500 voters in an online contest.^[8]

References

^ Koret Jewish Book Award, National Foundation for Jewish Culture. Accessed February 19, 2008.
^ "Anatomy of a Jewish Literary Prize". The Forward. October 28, 2005. Retrieved January 24, 2024.
^ ^a ^b Siegel, Jennifer (3 March 2006). "Prestigious Book Prize Seeks More Popular Profile". The Forward. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
^ Rappaport, Scott. "Jewish studies to host lecture by winner of 2005 Koret history book prize", UC Santa Cruz Currents, April 4, 2005. Accessed February 19, 2008. "The Koret Jewish Book Award is considered to be one of the highest honors for authors writing prose on Jewish themes."
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "'Literary luminaries' receive Koret Awards". j. weekly. 23 March 2001. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Van Gelder, Lawrence (11 April 2002). "Footlights". The New York Times. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d "Berkeley Kabbalah scholar wins Koret Book Award". j. weekly. 5 March 2004. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
^ ^a ^b ^c Fishkoff, Sue (20 October 2006). "Foer gets top book award". Jewish News of Greater Phoenix. JTA. Retrieved 23 April 2012.
^ ^a ^b "Winners of the 2006 Koret International Book Awards". Jewish Telegraphic Agency. October 17, 2006. Retrieved January 24, 2024.