The Winners of the 2016 National Jewish Book Awards

The Jewish Book Council announced its 66th annual selections for the National Jewish Book Awards winners and finalists today. Among them is Daniel Gordis, whose book Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn took home top honors for Book of the Year. In October, Gordis wrote about his approach to and motivation for writing the book, pondering if it was “possible to write a book about Israel where conflict is not the fulcrum of the Jewish state's history?” (Gordis also wrote eloquently last year about the death of Shimon Peres, and Yom Kippur in Israel, amid heightened violence.) The Jewish Book Council has also awarded novelist Michael Chabon with its Modern Library Achievement Award for Moonglow, reviewed here by Adam Kirsch who called the book “Chabon's Apollo mission to the past, launched with the same combination of ingenuity, dedication, and wonder.”