Until his retirement in August 2020, Emeritus Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Queens College CUNY, Samuel Heilman held the Harold Proshansky Chair in Jewish Studies at the Graduate Center. He is author of 15 books some of which have been translated into Spanish and Hebrew, and is the winner of three National Jewish Book Awards, as well as a number of other prestigious book prizes, and was awarded the Marshall Sklare Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for the Social Scientific Study of Jewry, as well as four Distinguished Faculty Awards at the City University of New York.He has been a Fulbright Fellow and Senior Specialist in Australia, China, and Poland, and lectured in many universities throughout the United States and the world. He was for many years Editor of Contemporary Jewry and is a frequent columnist at Ha Aretz and was one at the New York Jewish Week. Since his retirement, he and his family have resided in Jerusalem.
Jewish Ledger
Book of the Year awarded to Rabbi Jonathan Sacks for Morality
NEW YORK, N.Y. – Jewish Book Council announced the winners of the 2020 National Jewish Book Awards, now in its 70th year. The winners include
Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks z”l, which was named the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year. Rabbi Sacks’s final book draws on his own experiences, as well as texts by Jewish philosophers and scholars, to illustrate the importance of changing our world by shifting our focus to the collective good. This book will help ground Sacks’s legacy as one of the great Jewish thinkers of the 21st century.
The National Jewish Book Awards selected the late Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ “Morality: Restoring the Common Good in Divided Times” as the most notable Jewish book of 2020.
Sacks, a prolific author and a leader in modern Jewish thought, has won several prizes at the awards program, which the Jewish Book Council has operated since 1950. But this one will likely be his last: The awards committee chose to posthumously honor Sacks, who died in November 2020 at the age of 72.
Other big winners included Laura Arnold Lieberman, who won awards in three categories for the historical study “The Art of the Jewish Family: A History of Women in Early New York in Five Objects” and the Monday Morning Cooking Club, a group of recipe writers in Australia who snagged a food writing award for their cookbook “Now For Something Sweet.” Publishing agent Deborah Harris won the Jewish Book Council’s Carolyn Starman Hessel Mentorship Award.