Jewish Literary Review

Posted on December 6, 2007 by Steve Pollak

This just in … Sami Rohr prize finalists

The Jewish Book Council today announced the five finalists for the $100,000 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

This year, the prize will go to a nonfiction writer. Without further ado, here are the names:

• Ilana M. Blumberg for “Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books” (University of Nebraska Press). Blumberg is Assistant Professor of Humanities at James Madison College at Michigan State University.

• Eric L. Goldstein for “The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity” (Princeton University Press). Goldstein is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University.

• Lucette Lagnado for “The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World” (Ecco). Lagnado is a senior special writer and investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal who covers the uninsured and the elderly.

• Michael Makovsky for “Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft” (Yale University Press). Makovsky is Foreign Policy Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

• Haim Watzman for “A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). Watzman is a Jerusalem based writer, translator, and journalist and is Israel correspondent for the science journal Nature.

The winner will be announced in the Spring 2008.

Last year, the inaugural Sami Rohr prize went to a fiction writer, Tamar Yellin, for “The Genizah at the House of Shepher” (Toby Press).

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