My goodness, what a week: first, the Oscars on Sunday night, and then the Jewish Oscars on Tuesday! The Jewish book Oscars, that is: the 2009 National Jewish Book Awards.

Jewish Book Council

Dozens of Jewish literary notables were there: Joseph Telushkin, James Kugel, Lawrence Schiffman, Ari Goldman, Alana Newhouse, Yitz and Blu Greenberg, just for starters. Lots of other familiar faces, too, including two former JPS interns Naomi Firestone and Miri Pomerantz Dauber, now with the Jewish Book Council, which hosted the event.

It was quite a night for JPS, with more award winners than any other publisher: Editor Emerita Ellen Frankel and Avi Katz took a prize for the best Illustrated Children’s Book, for their JPS Illustrated Children’s Bible; Paul Steinberg and Janet Greenstein Potter’s Celebrating the Jewish Year: The Spring and Summer Holidays won for best Jewish Family Literature, Judy Klitsner’s Subversive Sequel in the Bible took the award for Scholarship. Frauke von Rohden’s Meneket Rivkah: A Manual of Wisdom and Piety for Jewish Women was a finalist for in the Scholarship category, and Frankel and Katz also were finalists in Jewish Family Literature. Below you can view a slideshow of our winners at the event!

I’m a big fiction fan, so I’ve added Joseph Kertes’ Gratitude: A Novel, the fiction award winner, to my (50+ book!) reading list. If you want to add winners to your reading list, check out wwww.jewishbookcouncil.org and add your comments and suggested book list titles below in response to this posting.

-Carol Hupping, Interim Director