Noam Zadoff’s “Gershom Scholem: From Berlin to Jerusalem and Back,” published by Brandeis University Press (BUP), won the 2018 Concordia University Azrieli Institute Award for the Best Book in Israel Studies, according to a article from BrandeisNOW.
Zadoff is an Assistant Professor of Jewish Studies and History at Indiana University Bloomington. The book is a part of the BUP’s Tauber Institute Series, a series that publishes books that take an innovative approach to the study of modern European Jewish history, thought, culture and society, according to BrandeisNOW.
The book describes the life of Scholem, including his immigration to Palestine, “where he became a central figure in the German Jewish immigrant community that dominated the nation’s intellectual landscape in Mandatory Palestine,” according to the book’s inside cover summary. It continues, “Zadoff explores how the life and work of Scholem reflect ambivalence toward Zionism and his German origins.”
The book is the fourth published by Brandeis University Press in the past eight years to have won the Best Book in Israel Studies Award.
Other winners are Boaz Neumann’s “Land and Desire,” Anita Shapira’s “Israel: A History” and Hillel Cohen’s “Year Zero of the Arab-Israeli Conflict 1929.” All winners were published in the Schusterman Series for Israel Studies.
The Schusterman Series is a series that covers multiple academic disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, political science and international relations, the arts, history and literature. The goal of the series is to further understand Israel within the context of the modern Middle East and the modern Jewish experience.
In 2015, Sven Erik Rose’s “Jewish Philosophical Politics in Germany, 1789–1848,” which was published by the BUP, was awarded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Award for Philosophy and Jewish Thought.
The awards are given by the Association for Jewish Studies and are meant to promote and recognize works of outstanding scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies, as well as to honor scholars who excel in the field. The book was also published for the Schusterman Series in Israel Studies as well as the Brandeis Series in gender, culture, religion and law.
Orit Rozin’s “A Home for All Jews: Citizenship, Rights and National Identity in the New Israeli State” is a finalist for the 2018 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards, in the category of Modern Jewish History and Culture: Europe and Israel. Rozin is an Israeli scholar and a professor of Jewish History at the University of Tel Aviv.
