Sami Rohr Prize Finalists Include Ilana Kurshan, Yair Mintzker

Talmuds, photographed in 2014. Image by JenJ17/Wikimedia Commons

By Talya Zax April 30, 2018

The finalists for the 2018 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, announced today, are Ilana Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink,” Sara Yael Hirschhorn’s “City on a Hilltop: American Jews and the Israeli Settler Movement,” Shari Rabin’s “Jews on the Frontier: Religion and Mobility in Nineteenth-Century America,” Yair Mintzker’s “The Many Deaths of Jew Süss: The Notorious Trial and Execution of an Eighteenth-Century Court Jew” and Chanan Tigay’s “The Lost Book of Moses: The Hunt for the World’s Oldest Bible.”

The Sami Rohr Prize, awarded annually by the Jewish Book Council, is awarded to fiction and nonfiction books in alternating years. Idra Novey won the 2017 award for her novel “Ways to Disappear.” The last nonfiction winner, from 2016, was Lisa Moses Leff for “The Archive Thief: The Man Who Salvaged French Jewish History in the Wake of the Holocaust.”

Both Kurshan and Tigay are contributors to the Forward. In a 2016 review for the Forward, Julia M. Klein wrote of “The Lost Book of Moses” that “Tigay deserves credit for tenacity, creativity and overcoming jet lag. His travels take him to archives, attics, basements, museums, churches and other landmarks in Israel, Jordan, the Netherlands, Germany, France, England and even Australia.” While the other finalists have not been officially reviewed in the Forward, Yehuda Kurtzer wrote that Kurshan’s “If All the Seas Were Ink” is “magnificent,” and Shulem Deen deemed Rabin’s “Jews on the Frontier” “slim but fascinating.”

Talya Zax is the Forward’s opinion editor. Contact her at [email protected] or on Twitter, @TalyaZax.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO