reviews - Jewish Book Council

JEWISHBOOKAWARDS
The following synopses of the NJBA winners and finalists were written by either
the Members of the judging panels in each category or the publisher of the title.
EVERETT FAMILY FOUNDATION
2009 Jewish Book of the Year Award
LOUIS D. BRANDEIS:
A LIFE
Melvin I. Urofsky
Pantheon Books
During the half-century
from 1890 to
1940, the pre-eminent
Jew in American public
life was without doubt
Louis D. Brandeis. And
almost 70 years after his
death in 1941 he remains
an iconic figure well
worth close examination.
Happily, Melvin Urofsky
has now provided us with a
comprehensive, deeply
researched and highly readable
biography of this man
who occupies so significant
a place in the history both of our nation and of American Jewry.
In the pages of Urofsky’s Louis D. Brandeis: A Life, we meet the secular
Jew from Louisville whose path takes him from Harvard Law
School to a highly successful career as a young lawyer in Boston and
then, unpredictably, to fame as an idealistic advocate who brilliantly
deploys his legal skills as the champion of reform in municipal affairs,
labor relations, banking, and big business. We watch as Brandeis
becomes the close advisor of Woodrow Wilson and we witness the furious
battle in the U.S. Senate over his nomination as the first Jewish justice
of the U.S. Supreme Court and the two decades of distinguished
service on the Court that followed. In the midst of this already crowded
www.jewishbookcouncil.org
and stormy career, again utterly unexpectedly, we see Brandeis take up
the cause of Zionism and the leadership of the nascent, fragile Zionist
movement in America, famously declaring that “to be good Americans
we must be better Jews, and to be better Jews we must be Zionists.”
Finally, in this account of the public and private life of the man that
FDR called “Isaiah,” we meet an amazing cast of historic figures with
whom Brandeis worked or fought—Oliver Wendell Holmes, Felix
Frankfurter, Dean Acheson, Chaim Weizmann,
Arthur Balfour, Robert Lafollette, Herbert Hoover,
Stephen Wise, and many others. In short, this is a
vivid biography of a man who, by force of intellect,
energy, and passionate idealism had a transforming
effect on America, on the story of Jews in America,
and on the historic course of Zionism.
JEWISH BOOKCOUNCIL
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT AWARD
RUTH GRUBER
INSIDE OF TIME: MY JOURNEY FROM ALASKA TO ISRAEL
(Basic Books)
AHEAD OF TIME: MY EARLY YEARS AS A FOREIGN CORRE-
SPONDENT
(Wynwood)
EXODUS 1947: THE SHIP THAT LAUNCHED A NATION
(Crown)
DESTINATION PALESTINE: THE STORY OF THE HAGANAH
SHIP EXODUS, 1947
(Current Books)
HAVEN: THE DRAMATIC STORY OF 1000 WORLD WAR II
REFUGEES AND HOW THEY CAME TO AMERICA
(Coward-McCann)
I WENT TO THE SOVIET UNION
(Viking Press)
Spring 5770/2010 Jewish Book World 5
Virginia Commonwealth University