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. Alumna Jaclyn Granick has been awarded the 2021 JDC-Herbert Katzki Award in the category Writing based on Archival material for "International Jewish Humanitarianism in the Age of the Great War" (Cambirdge University Press 2021).
Jaclyn Granick's book
reveals the untold story of how American Jews reinvented modern humanitarianism during the Great War and rebuilt Jewish life in Jewish homelands. In 1914, seven million Jews across Eastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean were caught in the crossfire of warring empires in a disaster of unprecedented proportions. In response, American Jews developed a new model of humanitarian relief for their suffering brethren abroad which continued in peace-time. As they constructed a new form of humanitarianism and re-drew the map of modern philanthropy, they rebuilt the Jewish Diaspora itself in the image of the modern social welfare state.
“This book began as a master’s thesis, and then a doctoral thesis in the International History Department of the Graduate Institute under the supervision of Prof. Davide Rodogno. Something that made the project unique from the start was its international history approach to Jewish history: asking international questions from the start, looking around in archives in Geneva and in many other lands, and never seeing a nation-state as the default container for historical narratives. By piecing together thousands of archival documents and publishing the monograph, I feel as if I rescued a forgotten story of a recognizable, modern world, but one in which worrying trends were already evident, and which was soon thereafter destroyed by the Holocaust. This award recognizes meticulous multi-archival research and brings to a broader readership my telling of this crucial historical narrative. That broader readership, in this case, will largely be American Jews, who may be able to discover their own history in its pages and reflect anew on different possible futures.”
Attend here the Award Ceremony taking place 6 April 2022 online at 7 pm: