Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

In 2006, in celebration of Sami Rohr's 80th birthday, his children and grandchildren inaugarated the Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature to honor his lifelong love of Jewish writing.

The annual award recognizes the unique role of contemporary writers in the transmission and examination of Jewish values, and is intended to encourage and promote outstanding writing of Jewish interest.

Each year, the prize of $100,000 will aim to reward an emerging writer whose work has demonstrated a fresh vision and evidence of future potential. Recipients must have written a book of exceptional literary merit that stimulates an interest in themes of Jewish concern. Fiction and non-fiction books will be considered in alternate years.

In conjunction with this award, the Rohr family has established the Sami Rohr Jewish Literary Institute, a forum devoted to the continuity of Jewish literature.

The Prize and Institute will be coordinated and administered under the exclusive auspices of the Jewish Book Council. Winners will be selected by an independent panel of judges.

2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature

Lucette Lagnado for her memoir:
The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family's Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World

In the memoir, Lagnado chronicles her family�s heartbreaking tale of their exodus from Egypt and eventual resettling in Brooklyn. Through The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit, Lagnado has shed light on the untold stories of the nearly one million Jewish refugees across the Middle East, cast out from homelands they cherished and longed to return to until their deaths.

2008 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature Choice Award. The Choice Award is a monetary award in the amount of $7,500.

The two recipients of the 2008 Choice Awards are:

* Ilana M. Blumberg for Houses of Study: A Jewish Woman Among Books (University of Nebraska Press)

Blumberg is Assistant Professor of Humanities at James Madison College at Michigan State University.

* Eric L. Goldstein for The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity (Princeton University Press)

Goldstein is Associate Professor of History and Jewish Studies at Emory University.

Other 2008 Finalists

Michael Makovsky for Churchill's Promised Land: Zionism and Statecraft (Yale University Press)
Makovsky is Foreign Policy Director of the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Haim Watzman for A Crack in the Earth: A Journey Up Israel's Rift Valley (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Watzman is a Jerusalem based writer, translator, and journalist and is Israel correspondent for the science journal Nature.

2007

Winner: Tamar Yellin , author of The Genizah at the House of Shepher (Toby Press),

2007 Choice Award

Amir Gutfreund, author of Our Holocaust (Toby Press, translated by Jessica Cohen)

Michael Lavigne, author of Not Me (Random House)