The Koret Jewish Book Award is an annual award that recognizes "recently published books on any aspect of Jewish life in the categories of biography/autobiography and literary studies, fiction, history and philosophy/thought published in, or translated into, English." The award was established in 1998 by the Koret Foundation, in cooperation with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture, to increase awareness of the best new Jewish books and their authors.[1]
Professor Samuel Zipperstein of Stanford University oversaw the awards from their creation until 2005,[2] when the Koret Foundation decided to increase public interest in the awards by honoring books that were less academic and more accessible to readers. Jewish Family & Life!, a non-profit organization, was selected to manage the awards. Its CEO, Rabbi Yosef Abramowitz, stated that he hoped to transform the awards into something akin to Oprah's Book Club.[3] The History category and the Biography, Autobiography or Literary Study category were eliminated and replaced with a new category, Jewish Life & Living.
The Koret Jewish Book Award is one of the highest honors for authors of works on Jewish subjects.[4]
| 1999 | Katschen & The Book of Joseph | |||
| Starting Out in the Evening | ||||
| 2000 | A Journey to the End of the Millennium | |||
| 2001 | The Human Stain[5] | |||
| 2002 | Isaac Babel, Nathalie Babel (editor) | The Complete Works of Isaac Babel[6] | ||
| 2003 | Drohobycz, Drohobycz and Other Stories: True Tales from the Holocaust and Life After | |||
| 2004 | Foiglman [7] | |||
| A Love Made Out of Nothing & Zohara's Journey | ||||
| 2005 | The Persistence of Memory | |||
| width=75 | 2006 | Her Body Knows[8] |
| width=75 | 2006 | Rochel Berman | Dignity Beyond Death |
| width=75 | 1999 | Miriam Bodian | Hebrews of the Portuguese Nation: Conversos and Community in Early Modern Amsterdam |
| 2000 | Chava Weissler | Voices of the Matriarchs: Listening to the Prayers of Early Modern Jewish Women | |
| 2001 | Jewish Enlightenment in an English Key: Anglo-Jewry's Construction of Modern Jewish Thought | ||
| 2002 | New York Jews and the Decline of Urban Ethnicity -- 1950-1970 | ||
| 2003 | Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia | ||
| 2004 | The Jewish Enlightenment | ||
| 2005 | Elisheva Baumgarten | Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe |
| width=75 | 1999 | Rethinking Modern Judaism Ritual, Commandment, Community | |
| 2000 | David Patterson | Along the Edge of Annihilation: The Collapse and Recovery of Life in the Holocaust Diary | |
| 2001 | Searching for a Distant God: The Legacy of Maimonides | ||
| 2002 | When a Jew Dies: The Ethnography of a Bereaved Son | ||
| Moses Hess and Modern Jewish Identity | |||
| 2003 | Absorbing Perfections: Kabbalah and Interpretation | ||
| 2004 | The Zohar, Pritzker Edition, Volumes I and II | ||
| 2005 | Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition | ||
| 2006 | Betraying Spinoza[9] |
| width=75 | 2000 | Spinoza: A Life | |
| 2001 | Quarrel & Quandary: Essays | ||
| 2002 | How I Came Into My Inheritance and Other True Stories | ||
| 2003 | Reading the Women of the Bible | ||
| 2004 | Marc Chagall and His Times: A Documentary Narrative | ||
| 2005 | A Tale of Love and Darkness |
| width=75 | 2005 | Karen Hesse, Wendy Watson (illustrator) | The Cats in Krasinski Square | |
| 2006 | Howard Schwartz, Kristina Swarner (illustrator) | Before You Were Born |
German writer W. G. Sebald received a special Koret award in 2002 for his contributions to literature. Steven J. Zipperstein, the director of the Korets, cited Sebald's novel Austerlitz as a particularly impressive work. Sebald died several months before the awards ceremony.[6]
In 2006, Jonathan Safran Foer's novel Everything is Illuminated received JBooks.com's People's Choice award for the best Jewish work of fiction of the previous decade, as determined by 1,500 voters in an online contest.[8]