AJS Honors Its Authors

Register

2022

2021

2020

2019

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

Saving Our Survivors: How American Jews Learned about the Holocaust
Rachel B. Deblinger
Indiana University Press

This book expands our understanding of how stories about the Holocaust became part of American discourse by highlighting American Jewish communal narratives in the wake of World War II.

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.

Trial Stories in Jewish Antiquity: Counternarratives of Justice
Chaya T. Halberstam
Oxford University Press

The first book on the trial story motif in ancient Jewish literature, from the trial of Jesus to Talmudic case reports. It traces a consistent counter-tradition of judges and judgment entangled in the messy world of relationship and affect.

The Jew, the Beauty, and the Beast: Gender and Animality in Modernist Hebrew Fiction
Naama Harel
Rutgers University Press

This book critically explores the entanglements between Jewishness, gender, and animality and its manifestation in modernist Hebrew fiction. Through interdiscursive analysis and close readings, the effeminate Jew is examined vis-à-vis the animalized woman.

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.

Men of Valor and Anxiety: Polish-Jewish Masculinities and the Challenge of Modernity
Mariusz Kalczewiak
Indiana University Press

This book explores how religion, class divisions, antisemitism, new domesticity, and militarization changed masculine ideas and practices in Eastern Europe between the 1890s and 1930s.

Bitter War of Memory: The Babyn Yar Massacre, Aftermath, and Commemoration
Victoria Khiterer
Purdue University Press

This book discusses the Holocaust in Kyiv and the efforts to memorialize the Babyn Yar massacre.

Homecoming: Holocaust Survivors and Greece, 1941–1946
Kateřina Králová
Brandeis University Press

The Jews of Greece returned home after having been in hiding, combatants, deportees and refugees during World War II to face isolation, anguish, deprivation, and hostility in the midst of a civil war.

Games of Inheritance: Kabbalah, Tradition, and Authorship in Jorge Luis Borges
Yitzhak Lewis
Rutgers University Press

This book demonstrates the relevance of Jewish intellectual traditions for understanding Borges’ views on authorship and literature. It explores Borges’ engagement with the Judaic, contextualizing this within Argentine debates about nationalism and literature, postcolonialism and aesthetics.

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.

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

The Making of an Anglo-Jewish Scholar: The Unconventional Life and Thought of Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838)
David B. Ruderman
De Gruyter Brill

This book is a study of the life and thought of the Polish Jewish engraver, biblical scholar, and translator Solomon Yom Tov Bennett (1767–1838), who immigrated to London where he resided for some forty years.

An Unorthodox History: British Jews since 1945
Gavin Schaffer
Manchester University Press

This book offers a new postwar history of British Jews, exploring inclusion and exclusion, looking at marginalised groups within Jewish history and culture, and offering a fresh look at Jewish activism, religiosity and Zionism.

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.

Register

2022

2021

2020

2019