Co-winners

Eric Goldstein, The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race, and American Identity (Princeton UP)

Cheryl Lynn Greenberg, Troubling the Waters: Black-Jewish Relations in the American Century (Princeton UP)

Goldstein and Greenberg have done prodigious, careful research in a wide variety of sources, and have written accessible, sometimes eloquent, books dealing with nearly a century of Jewish history and American social history. Goldstein has brought the concept of “whiteness” to Jewish studies in a clearer, more direct, and even more provocative way (without trying to shock) than have earlier attempts by others. Indeed, he expands the concept of whiteness itself, and uses it creatively in many socio-cultural areas. Although Greenberg’s work is more narrowly institutional, it is a revealing and comprehensive account of the complexities of the relationship between Blacks and Jews in various historical and socio-economic contexts. Her book is full of fresh insights and demonstrates an acute, sympathetic understanding of the plight of both groups. And like Goldstein she speaks to current concerns about identity and the politics of identity.

Runner-up

Tony Michels, A Fire in Their Hearts: Yiddish Socialists in New York (Harvard).

Tony Michels’ book is exceptionally well-researched and well-written account of the many forces that helped construct Jewish immigrant socialism in all its varieties in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Michels’ evident familiarity with the Yiddish language and his indefatigable hunt for Yiddish-language sources have helped him go beyond even the very good work of Jonathan Frankel, Ezra Mendelsohn, and Steven Cassedy, and Gerald Sorin’s study of American Jewish immigrant radicals.