Naomi Sokoloff's co-edited volume wins the prestigious National Jewish Book Award

Submitted by Selim S. Kuru on

NELC Professor Naomi Sokoloff's What We Talk about When We Talk about Hebrew (And What It Means To Americans) co-edited with Nancy E. Berg (Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2018) won a Jewish Book Award in the Anthologies and Collections category.

Inaugurated in 1950, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest-running North American awards program of its kind. The Awards are intended to recognize authors, and encourage reading, of outstanding English-language books of Jewish interest. The Awards Committee presented the edited volume citing the University of Washington description that describes the book as a celebration of  "the vital­i­ty of mod­ern Hebrew, this book address­es the chal­lenges and joys of being a Hebraist in Amer­i­ca in the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry. Togeth­er these essays explore ways to rekin­dle an inter­est in Hebrew stud­ies, focus­ing not just on what Hebrew means―as a glob­al phe­nom­e­non and long-lived tradition―but on what it can mean to Americans."

What We Talk About When We Talk About Hebrew includes twelve essays by leading scholars including UW's Hannah Pressman with a detailed introduction by Sokoloff and Berg in the field of Modern Hebrew studies and based on papers presented in a UW conference "Hebrew and the Humanities: Present Tense" that was organized by Prof. Naomi Sokoloff and Dr. Hannah Pressman of the UW, and Prof. Nancy Berg of Washington University in St. Louis on May 24, 2016 in conjunction with the 2016 Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures (visit updated Stroum Lectures Archive to view these Lectures).

For a full list of 2019 Jewish Book Awards that are given in various categories see here.

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