(JTA) — Progressive Jewish author Peter Beinart has won the 2026 PEN America Literary Award for nonfiction for his latest book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.”

Beinart, who has long been an outspoken critic of Israel, is the editor-at-large of the leftist Jewish Currents magazine and a professor at CUNY’s Newmark School of Journalism. His book offers a harsh critique of the American Jewish community’s relationship with Israel and response to the war in Gaza.

“This book is about the stories Jews tell ourselves that blind us to Palestinian suffering,” Beinart wrote in a Substack post announcing the book’s release in September 2024. “It’s about how we came to value a state, Israel, above the lives of all the people who live under its control. And it’s about why I believe that Palestinian liberation means Jewish liberation as well.”

In a statement, the judges of the PEN America award said the book “offers a model for writing a new story when inherited narratives no longer hold.”

The award offered the latest evidence of a shift for PEN America when it comes to Israel, which has polarized the literary and cultural world in recent years.

Founded in 1922, PEN America is a writers’ and free-expression advocacy group that defends the rights of authors and opposes censorship. The group has long opposed cultural boycotts of Israel, including in a December 2023 letter calling on art institutions “not to police speech nor deprive audiences of artists’ work,” earning it increasing ire from progressives. The group’s CEO left amid tensions in 2024, and last year it published a report accusing Israel of committing a genocide in Gaza.

The group named two new leaders in February, who ran into nearly immediate challenges when the group took fire for defending an Israeli comedian, Guy Hochman, who had performances canceled in Canada. The group took the unusual step of rescinding its defense of Hochman.

Now, the award to Beinart offers a signal that the group is supportive of his brand of Israel criticism. Recipients of the PEN/Galbraith Award for Nonfiction, which includes a $10,000 prize, must have published a book in the last calendar year that possesses “notable literary merit and critical perspective that illuminates important contemporary issues,” according to the PEN America website.

Beinart has also faced some of the free-speech challenges that are PEN America’s raison d’etre. Last year, appearances to promote his book in Israel drew calls for cancellation from both voices on the right, who believe his positions cross at times into antisemitism, and from left-wing allies who said he should commit to boycotting Israel. Beinart apologized to his left-wing critics for speaking in Tel Aviv.

Beinart’s award is the latest example of a book sharply critical of the West’s response to the war in Gaza gaining major literary recognition, following a similar nonfiction winner at the National Book Awards in November.

The announcement of Beinart’s selection for the prestigious award comes as the war in Gaza has reverberated across the literary world, sparking protests against some pro-Israel writers and debate among Jewish writers and institutions over the best way to respond.

In recent years, the award has been given to “In The Shadow of Liberty” by Ana Raquel Minian, which documents the history of immigrant detention in the United States, and “The Inheritors: An Intimate Portrait of South Africa’s Racial Reckoning,” by Eve Fairbanks.

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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(JTA) — Donald Trump officially became the first non-Israeli to receive the Israel’s top civilian prize on Wednesday — but he wasn’t on hand to receive his honor.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that Trump would get the Israel Prize after meeting with him at his Florida estate, Mar-a-Lago, in December.

“We decided to break a convention, or create a new one, and that is to award the Israel Prize, which in almost our 80 years we’ve never awarded to a non-Israeli, and we’re going to award it this year to President Trump,” Netanyahu said at the time. He added, “It’s going to be awarded to President Donald J. Trump for his tremendous contributions to Israel and the Jewish people.”

Israel’s education minister, who oversees the prize, extended the invitation officially in early February. But even though Trump indicated at one point that he could attend the award ceremony, held annually on Independence Day, he was absent on Wednesday when it took place.

Trump has delighted in his support from Israelis, many of whom have viewed him as unusually willing to go to bat for Israeli interests. A video played at the ceremony in Jerusalem showed him meeting with Netanyahu, speaking to the Israeli parliament last year and announcing the historic normalization deals with Arab countries negotiated during his first administration.

But conditions changed sharply since Netanyahu announced the prize. In February, Trump joined Netanyahu in launching a war on Iran that has been unpopular in the United States. Reports that Netanyahu persuaded him to enter the war, which Trump has ceased despite not achieving the varied goals he offered, have deepened anti-Israel sentiment among Americans, including Trump’s base.

Trump reportedly planned at one point to accept the prize with a videotaped address, but he did not offer one during the ceremony.

The award for Trump came amid Independence Day festivities that featured an unusual honor for a different non-Israeli head of state. Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, who has been a vocal defender of Israel, became the first foreign leader to light a torch as part of the celebrations.

The only other non-Israeli citizen to be honored with an Israel Prize did not receive the standard one, but instead got a designation for non-citizens. In 1992, Zubin Mehta, the non-Jewish longtime music director of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, won a special prize for his contributions to the state. This year, Mehta announced that he was canceling his upcoming appearances in Israel, citing “of my objection to Mr. Netanyahu’s way of treating the whole Palestinian issue.”

This article originally appeared on JTA.org.

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Michael Tilson Thomas, composer, conductor and longtime music director of the San Francisco Symphony, died Wednesday April 22. The cause was brain cancer. He was 81.

Thomas, the recipient of 12 Grammy Awards, a Peabody and Kennedy Center Honor, was born Dec. 24, 1944, the son of Ted Thomas, a stage manager and producer for Orson Welles’ Mercury Theatre and Roberta Thomas (née Meritzer), a middle school history teacher and a founding staff writer for Newsweek. On his father’s side, his grandparents were the legendary Yiddish Theater actors Boris and Bessie Thomashefsky.

“They were like Taylor and Burton, basically, of Yiddish theater,” Tilson recalled in a 2025 interview on CBS Sunday Morning. Their sex appeal, he told Lesley Stahl, sometimes got the pair in trouble.

Thomas was a musical prodigy, working with Igor Stravinsky and Jascha Heifitz as a young pianist. In his telling, no one wanted him to pursue the arts as a career.

“Nobody, absolutely nobody, wanted me to go into show business or into anything remotely connected with performing arts,” Thomas said. “They didn’t want me to be exposed to such vagaries of the uncertainty of being a show biz person.”

But Thomas made his mark in the world of classical music as a conductor, pianist and composer. In 1969, before he graduated from the University of Southern California where he studied piano, composition and conducting, he won the Koussevitzky Prize for outstanding student conducting at Tanglewood. Soon after, he became a pianist and assistant conductor for the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

Much like Leonard Bernstein, to whom he was often compared, Thomas’ reputation grew when, at 24, he stepped in to replace a more established maestro, taking the baton mid-performance from the Symphony’s music director William Steinberg in a 1969 performance in New York. (Steinberg took ill after conducting Brahms’ Second Symphony.) In 1971, not yet 30, he became music director of the Buffalo Philharmonic.

Thomas’ theater pedigree was in evidence in his conducting philosophy. He told The New York Times in 2014 that he tended “ to think of an orchestra more like a repertory theater company.”

Thomas was known for pushing boundaries within a sometimes stuffy orchestral world. He was openly gay when virtually no one else in classical music was. He strived to make the music accessible for everyone as a co-founder of the New World Symphony in Miami and, in the internet age, through his work with the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, whose members auditioned via video. Leading the San Francisco Symphony from 1995 to 2020, he highlighted the work of American composers through the American Mavericks Festival concert series.

Accomplished as an educator and conductor, Thomas was a prolific composer, often on Jewish themes. He wrote the 1990 cantata From the Diary of Anne Frank (he won a 2021 Grammy for a recording of the work) and 1995’s Shówa/Shoáh, which lamented both the tragedy of the Hiroshima bombing and the Holocaust.

In 2005, Thomas paid tribute to his theatrical forebears in Thomashefskys: Music and Memories of a Life in the Yiddish Theater, which debuted at Carnegie Hall, and later aired on PBS. He was a regular on public access television, hosting the series Keeping Score, which explored the work of composers and geared toward school-age audiences.

Thomas, who was diagnosed with brain cancer in 2021, gave his final performance on April 26, 2025 at the San Francisco Symphony in honor of his 80th birthday. He was aware the performance would be his last, describing it as a “generous and rich” coda.

“At that point, we all get to say the old show business expression,” Thomas wrote on his website. “‘It’s a wrap.’”

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