JTS Professor Wins National Jewish Book Award
Two Professors Are Named As Finalists
David E. Fishman, professor of Jewish History, has received the Jewish Book Council’s 2017 National Jewish Book Award for The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. The book won in the Holocaust award category in memory of Ernest W. Michel. Two JTS faculty members were among the finalists for the award. Dr. Fishman’s book tells the story of the brave men and women of the Vilna ghetto who, while working under Nazi surveillance, risked their lives to smuggle and hide rare books, manuscripts, paintings Torah scrolls, and other Jewish treasures. The book was also named as a finalist in the History category. Associate Professor Marjorie Lehman was a finalist for two books, Mothers in the Jewish Cultural Imagination (with Jane L. Kanarek and Simon J. Bronner) and Learning to Read Talmud: What It Looks Like and How it Happens (with Jane L. Kanarek). The late Professor Alan Mintz (z”l) was a finalist for Ancestral Tales: Reading the Buczacz Stories of S.Y. Agnon. Professor Mintz, a longtime JTS scholar, died suddenly last year.
