Jewish Book Council Lauds Editor Steven Katz
Latest in Judaism history series and Holocaust anthology net national awards
Last month, good news came to Steven Katz twice in one day.
His editing of The Cambridge History of Judaism, Volume 4: The Late Roman-Rabbinic Period was recognized with a win in the 2007 National Jewish Book Awards in the Reference category. And an anthology he coedited, Wrestling with God: Jewish Theological Responses During and After the Holocaust, was selected as runner-up in Anthologies and Collections.
“I was actually in Israel at the time,” says Katz, director of BU’s Elie Wiesel Center for Judaic Studies. “First, I heard that one book had won, and then I heard the other was a runner-up. It’s a huge honor.”
“The Late Rabbinic Period represents a truly monumental accomplishment,” according to the NJBA judges. “It will be consulted for many years to come by the scholarly specialist and general reader alike.”
Volume four of The Cambridge History of Judaism was six years in the making, says Katz, a College of Arts and Sciences professor of religion and holder of the Alvin J. and Shirley Slater Chair in Jewish Holocaust Studies. The 1,200-page tome covers the period from 70 CE to the rise of Islam in 640 CE. The text explores the major historical, political, and cultural developments in Jewish history, including the growth of rabbinic Judaism and of classical rabbinic sources such as the Mishnah, the Jerusalem Talmud, and the Babylonian Talmud. The previous three installments in the Cambridge series trace Jewish history from Persia to the third century.
The Times Higher Education Supplement is one of several publications to applaud the text: “There are in this volume a good number of essays that are outstandingly clear and informative, wisely constructed, and well documented.”
The focus of Katz’s other text, Wrestling with God, is rooted squarely in the modern era, offering a selection of ultra-Orthodox writing penned during and after the Holocaust. The perspectives of Israeli, American, and European authors on the genocide are represented, as well. The anthology covers “just about every significant theological position that has been articulated by a Jewish thinker in response to the Holocaust,” he writes in the introduction.
“One of the main questions the book poses,” Katz says, “is, where was God at Auschwitz? The anthology offers many different views on this question.”
Katz was first honored with an NJBA in 1984, for Post-Holocaust Dialogues. He has also edited four books on mysticism printed by Oxford University Press: Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (1978), Mysticism and Religious Traditions (1983), Mysticism and Language (1992), and Mysticism and Sacred Scripture (2000). His latest work, The Shtetl: New Evaluations (2007), is the first in a series of books stemming from international conferences held at Boston University.
Begun shortly after World War II and the longest-running North American awards program of its kind, the NJBA is administered by the Jewish Book Council, a nonprofit organization devoted to the promotion of Jewish-interest literature. Past winners include Howard Fast, Chaim Grade, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Elie Wiesel (Hon.’74), BU’s Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and winner of the 1986 Nobel Peace Prize.
Caleb Daniloff can be reached at cdanilof@bu.edu.
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