The AJS is pleased to celebrate the books of AJS members as part of the AJS Honors Its Authors program.
Books will recognized throughout 2025 in a number of ways, including:
» Listed in a dedicated online catalog, including cover art and brief videos
» Featured in an AJS Honors Its Authors email newsletter
» Shared in a social media post featuring your book only
To submit your 2025 book, please click here to complete the online form.
Please note: You must
be a
current AJS member to have your book included in the AJS Honors Its Program.
As part of the online registration form, you will be asked to attach your book's cover art (JPG or PNG file format) and a 30-second video about your book (MP4 file format). You will not be able to update this form once it has been submitted,
so please have these files ready in advance of submission. Please note: These items are not required, but we do encourage you to include them. The name and photo associated with your Google account will be recorded when you upload files and submit
this form.
Hyam Plutzik and the Mosaic of Time
Victoria Aarons, Holli Levitsky, and Hilene Flanzbaum,
editors
Academic Studies Press
This original collection of essays written by scholars and poets explores the life and work of Hyam Plutzik, whose poetry came to fruition at a time of cultural change during the Holocaust and WW II.
The Story's Not Over Jewish Women and Embodied Selfhood in Graphic Narratives
Victoria Aarons
Wayne State University
Press
This edited collection considers Jewish women graphic novelists and the richly figured ways in which Jewish identity is complicated by gender, memory, generation, and place, or, the spaces—emotional, geographical, psychological—that women inhabit.
Judaism, History, and the Environment: Climate Change and Natural Disasters
Dean Phillip Bell
Bloomsbury
This book places Jewish environmental history into conversation with contemporary thinking about history, religion, and the environment to suggest new ways to understand and respond to contemporary climate change and natural disasters.
National and Transnational Paths of Latin American Jews: Modernity, Community, Society, and the State
Judit E. Bokser Liwerant
Brill
The book studies Jewish life in Latin America with a global perspective, through a dynamic past-present timeline. It combines the national, regional and transnational dimensions by analyzing central crossing axes: the national within the diasporic, and the transnational dialectically traversing both.
Contemporary Humanistic Judaism: Beliefs, Values, Practices
Adam Chalom and Jodi Kornfeld, editors
Jewish Publication Society/University of Nebraska Press
An anthology of the most important ideas and essays of Humanistic Judaism, with clear answers to "How can you be Jewish and celebrate Judaism if you don't believe in God?"
Modern Jewish Ethics Since 1970: Writings on Methods, Sources, & Issues
Jonathan K. Crane, Emily Filler, and Mira Beth Wasserman, editors
Brandeis University Press
Jewish ethics is the field of study that engages Jewish texts, ideas, history, and experience in conversations about values and virtues, justice and good judgment, human relations and responsibilities. This volume presents some of those conversations to spark many more.
How Rabbis Became Experts: Social Circles and Donor Networks in Jewish Late Antiquity
Krista N. Dalton
Princeton University Press
This book demonstrates that early rabbis were not an insular specialist group, but rather were embedded in a landscape of Jewish piety, with social relationships which sustained the production of rabbinic expertise.
Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award
Ben Hecht's Theatre of Jewish Protest
Garrett Eisler
Rutgers University Press
This book is an historical study of playwright Ben Hecht’s stage works championing Jewish causes during the World War II era. It also features full texts of the plays themselves, including We Will Never Die and A Flag is Born.
The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation
Angela Roskop Erisman
Cambridge University Press
View Video
This book takes a new look at the literary history of the Torah and the character of Moses by studying the genres used to write the complaint episodes.
On Revival: Hebrew Literature Between Life and Death
Roni Henig
University of Pennsylvania Press
This book is a critique of the discourse of language revival in modern Hebrew literature, while exploring the figurative discourse of revival in the work of Hebrew authors and thinkers working between 1890 and 1920.
Embodying the Revolution: The Hebrew Experience and the Globalization of Modern Sports in Interwar Palestine
Ofer Idels
Rutgers University Press
Exploring Hebrew culture’s selfhood and ideology through the lens of modern sports, this study uncovers Zionism’s marginalization of athletics and offers a historiographical reconsideration of the embodied essence of the “New Jew.”
Olga Lengyel, Auschwitz Survivor: Interdisciplinary Explorations
Sheila E. Jelen, Hannah Holtschneider, Peter J. Davies, and Christoph Thonfeld
Palgrave
This book considers one of the most intriguing, but still under-researched, aspects of testimony: how the remembering and telling of an individual Holocaust survivor changes through time, through shifting contexts and with increasing age.
Above All, We Are Jews: A Biography of Rabbi Alexander Schindler
Michael A. Meyer
CCAR Press
Rabbi Alexander Schindler (1925–2000) shaped Reform Judaism, advocating for patrilineal descent, interfaith outreach, LGBTQ rights, and racial equality; his legacy is explored in this definitive biography.
Promised Lands: Hadassah Kaplan and the Legacy of American Jewish Women in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine
Sharon Ann Musher
NYU Press
View Video
This book provides a window into the lives of American Jewish women in New York City and Palestine during the interwar period by tracing the journey of Hadassah Kaplan, second daughter of Reconstructionism founder Mordecai Kaplan.
Antisemitism, an American Tradition
Pamela S. Nadell
W.W. Norton
This book investigates the manifestations of Jew hatred in the US, starting with its roots in colonial times and continuing to today.
New Hebrews: Making National Culture in Zion
Yaron Peleg
Cambridge University Press
This book considers the making of early Zionist culture through innovations in language, literature, space, identity, art and music, and the controversial legacies of these innovations today.
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Awakening to Radical Islamist Evil: The Hamas War against Israel and the Jews
Monty Noam Penkower
Academic
Studies Press and Touro University Press
This volume offers the first daily account of the war forced upon the State of Israel by Hamas’s brutal attack on its southern communities near the Gaza Strip on October 7, 2023.
Hollywood and the Nazis on the Eve of War: The Case of The Mortal Storm
Alexis Esther Pogorelskin
Bloomsbury Press
View Video
This book establishes the profound significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Europe's Jews on the eve of war.
The Jewish South: An American History
Shari Rabin
Princeton University Press
This book offers a panoramic view, from European colonization to today, of a group of people with a distinctive religious heritage and a southern history older than the United States itself.
Making and Unmaking Literature in the Warsaw, Lodz, and Vilna Ghettosos
Sven-Erik Rose
Brandeis University Press
A study devoted to how authors grappled with the destitution of ghetto existence by writing within, at the limits of, and against an array of literary scenarios, tropes, plot lines, and generic conventions.
Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism
Eli Rubin
Stanford
University Press
View Video
A comprehensive intellectual and institutional history of Chabad Hasidism, complete with fresh portraits of its leaders. Combining history, philosophy, and literature in a single narrative, Kabbalah emerges as crucially entangled in the experience of modernity and in the response to its ruptures.
Recipient of a 2024 Jordan Schnitzer First Book Publication Award
Hatred of Jews-A Failure of Holocaust Education?
Melanie Carina Schmoll
BoD
View Video
After October 7, the question almost automatically occurs: Has Holocaust education failed? In comprehensible explanations, this book shows the potential failures in Holocaust education and why the teaching of history still matters.
Devoted Resistance: Jewish Feminist Art in the US and Israel
David Sperber
Brill
This book examines the contribution of the feminist art movement, which has developed in traditional Jewish spheres, demonstrating how art, theology, feminism, and critical thinking interwind.
Feeding the Eternal City: Jewish and Christian Butchers in the Roman Ghetto
Kenneth Stow
Harvard University Press
To guarantee a supply of kosher meat in the Roman Ghetto, despite canonical prohibitions, Jewish butchers collaborated with Christians. This nuanced portrait of inter-religious relations also says much about the Roman Jewish diet.
