JTS Professor Wins Prestigious Book Award

David Fishman, professor of Jewish History, won the 2017 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category for The Book Smugglers: Partisans, Poets, and the Race to Save Jewish Treasures from the Nazis. Marjorie Lehman, associate professor of Talmud and Rabbinics, and Alan Mintz (z”l), the former Chana Kekst Professor of Jewish Literature,  were named finalists in three other categories.

Dr. Fishman’s acclaimed 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.

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