Ben-Gurion University's Dr. Aviad Moreno wins a National Jewish Book Award
Prof. Iris Idelson-Shein was a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award
Ben-Gurion University's Dr. Aviad Moreno has won a National Jewish Book Award for his book Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas: Hispanic Moroccan Jews and Their Globalizing Community. The Jewish Book Council announced the winners Wednesday evening.
Dr. Moreno was awarded The Sephardic Culture Mimi S. Frank Award in Memory of Becky Levy.
Prof. Iris Idelson-Shein's book Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe was a finalist for the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award for Scholarship.
Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas, published by Indiana University Press, explores how the 30,000 Jews in northern Morocco developed a sense of kinship with modern Spain, medieval Sepharad, and the broader Hispanophone world that was unlike anything experienced elsewhere. The Hispanic Moroccan Jewish diaspora, as this group is often called by its scholars and its community leaders, also became one of the most mobile and globally dispersed North African groups in the twentieth century, with major hubs in Venezuela, Argentina, Brazil, Peru, Spain, Israel, Canada, France, and the US, among others.
Migration and diaspora scholars often focus on nostalgia and national and cultural ties to a single primary homeland—in this case, Morocco. However, Moreno's book analyzes how migration processes and ethnic identity formation over decades led this community to develop layered historical ties to multiple homelands. Drawing on an array of sources from across this diaspora, including personal and official correspondence, newspapers and bulletins, radio shows and online platforms, Dr. Moreno explores how such multiple narratives of ancestry interconnected the diaspora, empowering its hubs worldwide throughout the twentieth century and beyond.
By investigating these mechanisms of diaspora formation in a small community that once shared the same space in Morocco, Entwined Homelands, Empowered Diasporas challenges national accounts of the broader Jewish diasporas and adds complexity to the annals of multilayered ethnic communities on the move.
Between the Bridge and the Barricade, published by University of Pennsylvania Press, explores how translations of non-Jewish texts into Jewish languages impacted Jewish culture, literature, and history from the sixteenth century into modern times. Offering a comprehensive view of early modern Jewish translation, Prof. Idelson-Shein charts major paths of textual migration from non-Jewish to Jewish literatures, analyzes translators’ motives, and identifies the translational norms distinctive to Jewish translation. Through an analysis of translations hosted in the Jewish Translation and Cultural Transfer (JEWTACT) database, Idelson-Shein reveals for the first time the liberal translational norms that allowed for early modern Jewish translators to make intensely creative and radical departures from the source texts—from “Judaizing” names, places, motifs, and language to mistranslating and omitting material both deliberately and accidently. Through this process of translation, Jewish translators created a new library of works that closely corresponded with the surrounding majority cultures yet was uniquely Jewish in character.
The Jewish Book Council announced the winners of the 74th National Jewish Book Awards with the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan as part of the JCC’s Books That Changed My Life Festival. The National Jewish Book Awards is one of Jewish Book Council’s longest-running programs. This year JBC worked with over 120 judges who considered over 700 submissions.
The National Jewish Book Awards were established by Jewish Book Council in 1950 in order to recognize outstanding works of Jewish literature. They are the oldest awards of their kind.
