The AJS is pleased to celebrate the books of AJS members as part of the AJS Honors Its Authors program.
Books are recognized in a number of ways, including:
» Listed in a dedicated online catalog, including cover art and brief videos
» Featured in an AJS Honors Its Authors email newsletter
» Shared in a social media post featuring your book only
Speaking of Hebrew: What Language Does for American Jews
Sharon Avni
Wayne State University Press
Drawing on extensive fieldwork and interviews, this book examines how debates about Hebrew illuminate American Jewish identity, authenticity, and belonging, revealing language ideologies that shape contemporary Jewish life.
Catalysts of Connectedness: The Transformative Power of Critical Experiences in Identity Formation
Adina L. Bankier-Karp
Springer
Why do some Australian Jews stay deeply connected while others drift away? This book uncovers the hidden dominoes and dimmer switches that shape identity—and transform belonging across generations.
Who Is American? Belonging and the Question of Jewish Citizenship
Lila Corwin Berman
Princeton University Press
This book is a groundbreaking history of how modern American citizenship has worked—and not worked—for Jews in the United States.
Queering Jewish Cultural Heritage in Europe: Iridescently Yours
Miranda L. Crowdus and Sacha Kagan, editors
Routledge
This interdisciplinary study at the intersection of Jewish Studies, Queer Studies, Ethnomusicology and other disciplines, develops more inclusive, polyvalent, and iridescent practices in the handling and management of Jewish cultural heritage in Europe.
The Fiction of the State: The Partitions of Poland and the Beginning of Modern Jewish Literature
Ofer Dynes
Stanford University Press
This book offers a new history of the emergence of modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature. It reveals how Jewish fiction participated in the remaking of the political order in partitioned Poland.
A Lingering Legacy: The Afterlife of Yiddish in German-Jewish Culture, 1818–1938
Aya Elyada
Stanford University Press
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This book explores the afterlife of Old Yiddish literature in the works of modern German-Jewish authors, translators, and intellectuals, highlighting its ideological underpinnings and cultural implications.
Jean Améry: Identity, Time, Failure
Ilit Ferber
Oxford University Press
The first comprehensive philosophical study of Jean Améry's oeuvre, repositioning him as a major twentieth-century thinker whose reflections on exile, aging, and voluntary death form a sustained meditation on identity, time, and failure.
Emotion in the Jewish Mystical Tradition
Lawrence, Fine, Joel Hecker, and Ruth Kara Ivanov-Kaniel,
editors
Littman Library of Jewish Civiization
This edited volume, with contributions by leading scholars, explores a neglcted topic in the study of Jewish mystical tradition, through the lens of the history of emotions.
Galicia as a Literary Idea: Jewish Eastern Europe in the Writings of Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern
Kata Gellen
University of Toronto Press
Following the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the province of Galicia inspired the literary imagination of two writers, Joseph Roth and Soma Morgenstern, who explored the place of Jewish tradition in modernity.
Maimonides' Moral Psychology: The Emotions, The Virtues, and the Good Life
Alexander Green
Oxford University Press
This book explores how contrasting emotional paradigms— of love, moderation, courage, humility, anger, justice, and compassion—reflect Maimonides’ competing visions of nature, virtue, and the good life.
West of the Ghetto: Jewish Women, Old San Francisco, and American Literary Culture
Lori Harrison-Kahan
Wayne State University Press
This book repositions the American West as a generative space for turn-of-the-twentieth-century Jewish literature by telling the stories of five fascinating but forgotten women writers from California.
Jewish Revenge and the Holocaust: History, Memory, and Imagination
Laura Jockusch
Bloomsbury Academic
A critical exploration of the history and imagination of "Jewish revenge," both as an antisemitic stereotype used by Nazi perpetrators and as a coping response of Jews during and after the Holocaust.
Kinesthetic Peoplehood: Jewish Diasporic Dance Migrations
Hannah Kosstrin
Oxford University Press
This book is about how Jewish migrations manifest in the body, and how American audiences understand Israel through the dance that they see when movements indicate minoritarian Jewish subjectivities.
Mishnah Commentators: Biographies, Commentaries, and Methodologies
Yosef Marcus
Herzog College
Contrasting thousands of Talmudic commentaries, few independent Mishnah explanations exist. This study explores why specific scholars chose this unique path and what their works reveal about centuries of Mishnah study.
God Bless the Pill: The Surprising History of Contraception and Sexuality in American Religion
Samira K. Mehta
The University of North Carolina Press
This book traces the remarkable story of how mid-twentieth-century Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish voices promoted the use of birth control and made it more accessible for many Americans.
Gentile Women in Qumran: Female Converts in the Dead Sea Scrolls
Carmen Palmer
De Gruyter
This book examines whether and how female converts may have entered the Qumran movement affiliated with the Dead Sea Scrolls.
Gestating Judaism: The Corporeal Technologies of American Jewish Religion
Cara Rock-Singer
University of Chicago Press
This book develops a new analytic technique called ethnodrashy (a combination of rabbinical midrash and sociological ethnography) to explore the centrality of reproductive bodies to the intellectual, political, and spiritual life of American Judaism.
Recipes for the Melting Pot: The Lives of The Settlement Cook Book
Nora L. Rubel
Columbia University Press
This book is a cultural biography of a 1901 charitable cookbook originally compiled to teach immigrant girls American cooking, tracing its evolution into a Jewish culinary touchstone.
Encounters: Dialogue, Antisemitism, and the Israeli-Palestinian Divide
Benjamin E. Sax
Bloomsbury
More than a study of antisemitism, the book is both a guide for practitioners of interreligious dialogue and a historical exploration of how Jews and others have defined antisemitism across centuries.
Older Jews and the Holocaust: Persecution, Displacement, and Survival
Joanna Sliwa, Christine Schmidt, and Elizabeth Anthony,
editors
Wayne State University Press in association with the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
This landmark book brings together sixteen scholars to explore the experiences of older Jewish adults before, during, and after the Holocaust and challenge the narratives focused solely on destruction.
Poetic Grief: Form and Remembrance after National Socialism
Simone Stirner
Fordham University Press
A comparative study that advances a new understanding of post-Holocaust poetry by centering the relation between poetic form and the affective experience of grief.
When She Remembered: Seven Women Who Transformed French Holocaust Memory
Ashley Valanzola,
Indiana University Press
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This book showcases an intertwined group of seven influential women, both well-known and lesser-known, who shaped the production of Holocaust memory in France from 1945 to the present.
Judaism Mediated: Learning About Jewishness Through the Cultural Arts
Laura Yares and Sharon Avni
NYU Press
This book explores how Jews and non-Jews learn about Judaism through participation in cultural, digital, and leisurely spaces. It examines audience engagements with five different Jewish cultural arts settings.
