Two Brandeis alumni won 2011 National Jewish Book Awards, and two other Brandeis alumni were honored as finalists, in a contest sponsored by The Jewish Book Council, which announced the results in a Jan. 10 press release.

The National Jewish Book Awards "recognize[s] outstanding books of Jewish interest" in 14 categories and is in its 61st year, according to the press release.

Jonathan Krasner '88 Ph.D. '02 won the American Jewish Studies Celebrate 350 Award, for The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education, which is about the modernization of Jewish education in the early 20th century. Deborah Dash Moore '67, co-editor of Gender and Jewish History, won the Anthologies and Collections award.

Krasner said in an interview with the Justice that his motivation for writing his book was dissertation work with Prof. Jonathan Sarna (NEJS). His dissertation concerned the textbooks used in Jewish religious schools, which led him to become interested in the textbooks' authors and Jewish education in general.

Krasner was likewise inspired by a meeting with the centenarian Jewish educator Sam Dinin. "I realized that if I didn't tell the story, and I didn't think anybody else was going to, and many of these individuals like him had made a really big contribution to American Jewish life and their story had kind of been forgotten, so I wanted to tell it," he said.

Krasner said that there was a lot to learn "about American Jewish identity from looking at education because how parents decide to educate their kids can tell us a lot about what they think is important in terms of Jewish life and what they think is less important."

Krasner, whose book The Benderly Boys and American Jewish Education was recently published by Brandeis University Press, is currently an assistant professor of American Jewish history at Hebrew Union College—Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati and has an Ed.M. from Harvard University. He served as the editor in chief of the Justice during his senior year as an undergrad at Brandeis.

Moore stated that her friend and colleague, the late Yale Historian and activist Paula Hyman, was her motivation for creating a collection of original essays on Jewish feminist history and scholarship. Moore and Hyman were graduate students together studying Jewish History at Columbia University and co-editors of Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia.

When asked to highlight one essay from Gender and Jewish History, Moore chose one about Margaret Sanger's decision to open the first American birth control clinic in the Jewish neighborhood of Brownsville in Brooklyn, N.Y. in 1916, because married Jewish women were more accepting of birth control.

Moore, a professor at the University of Michigan, fondly recalled her undergraduate career, including taking a history course with Prof. David Hackett Fischer (HIST), who is still teaching at Brandeis. She added that she never took a course with a female professor at Brandeis but is happy that women can now freely pursue careers in academia.

Moore's next book is City of Promises, a three-volume history of Jews in New York City that she is editing and will be published in September.

The Eichmann Trial, by Deborah Lipstadt M.A. '72 Ph.D. '76, was a finalist in the Holocaust category.

Lipstadt, a professor at Emory University, said that she sought to highlight the role of firsthand survivor testimony in Adolf Eichmann's trial, as opposed to the preference for documents that were less emotional during the Nuremberg Trials, and to highlight the trial's importance in anticipation of its 50th anniversary.

Eliyana Adler M.A. '95 Ph.D. '03 was a finalist in Women's Studies for In Her Hands: The Education of Jewish Girls in Tsarist Russia. She is currently a research associate at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Three Brandeis University Press books were finalists. Moses Mendelssohn: Writings on Judaism, Christianity and the Bible, edited by Michah Gottlieb, was a finalist in the Anthologies and Collections category; Sephardi Family Life in the Early Modern Diaspora, edited by Julia Lieberman, in Sephardic Culture; and Sexual Violence Against Jewish Women during the Holocaust, edited by Sonja Hedgepeth and Rochelle Saidel, in Women's Studies.

The Jewish Book Council honored Myra Hiatt Kraft '64, a former board member of the organization and Brandeis trustee, with the establishment of the Myra H. Kraft Memorial Award in Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice.

A ceremony will be held to honor the winners at the Center for Jewish History in New York City on March 14.