A history of New York Jewry took Jewish book of the year honors in the 2012 National Jewish Book Awards.
The three-volume “City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York,” published by the New York University Press and edited by Deborah Dash Moore, won the Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year award, the Jewish Book Council announced Jan. 15.
Author and Nobel Prize-winning neuropsychiatrist Eric R. Kandel was the recipient of the Jewish Book Council’s Lifetime Achievement Award and will deliver the keynote address at the awards event on March 14 at the Center for Jewish History in New York.
Another winning anthology was “Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame,” edited by Franklin Foer and former Tablet Magazine editor Marc Tracy.
In the American Jewish Studies category, Laura Arnold Leibman’s “Messianism, Secrecy and Mysticism: A New Interpretation of Early American Jewish Life” took top honors, while Brandeis University professor and JTA board member Jonathan Sarna was among the finalists for his book, “When General Grant Expelled the Jews.”
Journalist and critic Francesca Segal took top fiction honors with “The Innocents,” a love and coming of age story based on Edith Wharton’s “The Age of Innocence.”