Yale’s ‘Jewish Lives’ series wins National Jewish Book Award

The “Jewish Lives” series, a set of short biographies, was named the Jewish Book of the Year by the Jewish Book Council.

The series, which has been issued for the past four years by Yale University Press, was among the 2014 National Jewish Book Awards winners announced Wednesday.

It marked the first time that the Book of the Year award went to a series.
Among the other winners:

* “The Betrayers,” by David Bezmogis, the JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for fiction.

* “The Mathemetician’s Shiva,” by Stuart Rojstaczer, Outstanding Debut Fiction.

* “Spinoza: The Outcast Thinker,” by Devra Lehmann, for Children’s and Young Adult Literature.

* “The Patchwork Torah,” written by Allison Ofanansky and illustrated by Elsa Oriol, for Illustrated Children’s Book.

* “The Golden Age Shtetl,” by Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, in the History category.

* “The Koren Ani Tefillah Siddur,” by Jay Goldmintz and Jonathan Sacks, for Modern Jewish Thought and Experience.

* “A Question of Tradition: Women Poets in Yiddish, 1586-1987,” by Kathryn Hellerstein, for Women’s Studies.

* “Outside the Bible, 3-Volume Set: Ancient Jewish Writings Related to Scripture,” edited by Louis H. Feldman, James L. Kugel and Lawrence H. Schiffman, for Scholarship.

The awards will be presented March 11 in New York. A complete list of the winners can be seen on the Jewish Book Council’s website.

The council has given out the annual awards recognizing outstanding books of Jewish interest since 1948.