The Jewish Week | Books

Jewish Book Council Names Sami Rohr Prize Finalists
Friday, January 27, 2012

NEW YORK (JTA) – The Jewish Book Council announced its five finalists for the 2012 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.

The $100,000 prize, presented annually since 2007, is awarded to fiction and non-fiction writers in alternating years, with this year’s focus on non-fiction.

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Auslander’s “Hope: A Tragedy,” .
The Audacity Of ‘Hope’
Tuesday, January 17, 2012 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer

When Shalom Auslander, a lapsed Orthodox Jew, came out with his wickedly funny memoir “Foreskin’s Lament” in 2007, he was often mischaracterized as a New Atheist. It was clear he shared a similar disdain for religion with atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, but he never declared himself a non-believer. 

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The poster advertising the film version of “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.”
The Holocaust And 9/11: Universal Truths?
Tuesday, January 10, 2012 | Eric Herschthal | Staff Writer

Perhaps it should be no surprise that some of the same criticisms that met Jonathan Safran Foer’s novel about Sept. 11, “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” published in 2005, are now being leveled against the new film adaptation. Like the book, the film has drawn strong, often biting rebukes from critics who feel it exploits some of Sept. 11’s most harrowing images—the picture of the falling man leaping to his death, in particular—and universalizes a unique tragedy.

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Hoffman's research for her latest novel, set at Masada during the Jewish rebellion against the Romans, went far beyond Josephus'
Masada, The Novel
Tuesday, December 27, 2011 | Diane Cole | Special To The Jewish Week

Masada: the very name of the towering mountain fortress overlooking the Judean Desert and the Dead Sea conjures images at once historic, mythic, and symbolic. King Herod built it between 37 and 31 B.C.E. as a royal refuge, and decorated it with splendiferous mosaics. But it is best known as the final refuge of 960 Jewish zealots who, in 73 C.E., committed suicide en masse, rather than succumb to a massacre by besieging Roman soldiers who were part of the army that had already quashed the Jewish rebellion and destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem.

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