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Michael Twitty’s ‘Koshersoul,’ a memoir of food and identity, named Jewish book of the year
(JTA) — “Koshersoul,” chef Michael W. Twitty’s memoir about his career fusing Jewish and African-American culinary histories, was named the Jewish book of 2022 by the Jewish Book Council.
Subtitled “The Faith and Food Journey of an African American Jew,” Twitty’s book provides “deep dives into theology, identity, and, of course, food, allowing one to reexamine the way they think about the Jewish community and giving them permission and impetus to reflect on their heritage and religion in a new way,” the council said in naming “Koshersoul” the Everett Family Foundation Book of the Year.
The winners of the 72nd National Jewish Book Awards were announced Wednesday at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan as part of its inaugural Books That Changed My Life festival.
Dani Shapiro won her second National Jewish Book Award, and her first JJ Greenberg Memorial Award for Fiction, for her novel “Signal Fires.” Her first novel in 15 years traces the effects of a fatal car crash on a family over a 50-year time span.
Ashley Goldberg won the Goldberg Prize for Debut Fiction with his novel “Abomination,” about a scandal at a Jewish day school and the paths taken in its aftermath by two of its students, one secular and one religious. Miriam Ruth Black won The Miller Family Book Club Award for her novel “Shayna,” a novel of early 20th-century immigrants set in a shtetl and New York’s Lower East Side.
In other nonfiction categories, Michael Frank was the winner in both the new Holocaust Memoir category and the Sephardic Culture category for his book “One Hundred Saturdays: Stella Levi and the Search for a Lost World.” The book is based on his conversations with Levi, a Holocaust survivor who remembers the once-vibrant Sephardic Jewish community that had thrived on Rhodes, an island in the Aegean Sea.
“American Shtetl: The Making of Kiryas Joel, a Hasidic Village in Upstate New York,” by Nomi M. Stolzenberg and David N. Myers, won for best book in American Jewish studies.
Jonathan Freedland won the Biography Award and Holocaust Award for “The Escape Artist: The Man Who Broke Out of Auschwitz to Warn the World,” about Rudolf Vrba, whose eyewitness report of the death camp was largely ignored by the various allied government officials who read it. Kenneth B. Moss’ “An Unchosen People: Jewish Political Reckoning in Interwar Poland,” won the Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award in history.
Danya Ruttenberg’s “On Repentance and Repair,” a rabbi’s rumination on apologies and forgiveness in contemporary culture, won the Contemporary Jewish Life and Practice Award.
The council also honored Ellen Frankel, who served as the editor in chief and CEO of the Jewish Publication Society for 18 years, with its Mentorship Award in Honor of Carolyn Starman Hessel — given in honor of the council’s longtime director, who retired in 2014. Frankel, who herself stepped down in 2009, was cited for mentoring authors, staff and students at the Philadelphia-based publisher, as well as championing women scholars.
Other winners include:
The inaugural Hebrew Fiction in Translation Jane Weitzman Award: Mayan Eitan, “Love” (self-translated)
Children’s Picture Book Tracy and Larry Brown Family Award: Shoshana Nambi, “The Very Best Sukkah: A Story from Uganda,” illustrated by Moran Yogev
Young Adult Literature Award: Susan Wider, “It’s My Whole Life: Charlotte Salomon: An Artist in Hiding During World War II”
Middle Grade Literature Award: Stacy Nockowitz, “The Prince of Steel Pier”
Jane and Stuart Weitzman Family Award for Food Writing and Cookbooks: Benedetta Jasmine Guetta, “Cooking alla Giudia”
Berru Poetry Award in Memory of Ruth and Bernie Weinflash: Sean Singer, “Today in the Taxi”
The complete list of the 72nd National Jewish Book Award winners and finalists can be found here.
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Mistrial Declared in Case of Students Charged After Stanford Anti-Israel Protests
FILE PHOTO: A student attends an event at a protest encampment in support of Palestinians at Stanford University during the ongoing conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas, in Stanford, California U.S., April 26, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria/File Photo
A judge declared a mistrial on Friday in a case of five current and former Stanford University students related to the 2024 pro-Palestinian protests when demonstrators barricaded themselves inside the school president’s office.
Twelve protesters were initially charged last year with felony vandalism, according to prosecutors who said at least one suspect entered the building by breaking a window. Police arrested 13 people on June 5, 2024, in relation to the incident and the university said the building underwent “extensive” damage.
The case was tried in Santa Clara County Superior Court against five defendants charged with felony vandalism and felony conspiracy to trespass. The rest previously accepted plea deals or diversion programs.
The jury was deadlocked. It voted nine to three to convict on the felony charge of vandalism and eight to four to convict on the felony charge to trespass. Jurors failed to reach a verdict after deliberations.
The charges were among the most serious against participants in the 2024 pro-Palestinian protest movement on US colleges in which demonstrators demanded an end to Israel’s war in Gaza and Washington’s support for its ally along with a divestment of funds by their universities from companies supporting Israel.
Prosecutors in the case said the defendants engaged in unlawful property destruction.
“This case is about a group of people who destroyed someone else’s property and caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in damage. That is against the law,” Santa Clara County District Attorney Jeff Rosen said in a statement, adding he sought a new trial.
Anthony Brass, a lawyer for one of the protesters, told the New York Times his side was not defending lawlessness but “the concept of transparency and ethical investment.”
“This is a win for these young people of conscience and a win for free speech,” Brass said, adding “humanitarian activism has no place in a criminal courtroom.”
Protesters had renamed the building “Dr. Adnan’s Office” after Adnan Al-Bursh, a Palestinian doctor who died in an Israeli prison after months of detention.
Over 3,000 were arrested during the 2024 US pro-Palestinian protest movement, according to media tallies. Some students faced suspension, expulsion and degree revocation.
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Exclusive: FM Gideon Sa’ar to Represent Israel at 1st Board of Peace Meeting in Washington on Thursday
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar speaks next to High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and Vice-President of the European Commission Kaja Kallas, and EU commissioner for the Mediterranean Dubravka Suica as they hold a press conference on the day of an EU-Israel Association Council with European Union foreign ministers in Brussels, Belgium, Feb. 24, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
i24 News – Israel’s Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar will represent the country at the inaugural meeting of the Gaza Board of Peace in Washington on Thursday, i24NEWS learned on Saturday.
The arrangement was agreed upon following a request from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will not be able to attend.
Netanyahu pushed his Washington visit forward by a week, meeting with US President Donald Trump this week to discuss the Iran situation.
A U.N. Security Council resolution, adopted in mid-November, authorized the Board of Peace and countries working with it to establish an international stabilization force in Gaza and build on the ceasefire agreed in October under a Trump plan.
Under Trump’s Gaza plan, the board was meant to supervise Gaza’s temporary governance. Trump thereafter said the board, with him as chair, would be expanded to tackle global conflicts.
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Two Men Jailed in UK for Islamic State-Inspired Plot to Kill Hundreds of Jews
Weapons seized from the home of Walid Saadaoui, 38, who along with Amar Hussein, 52, has been found guilty at Preston Crown Court of plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired gun rampage against the Jewish community, in Britain, in this handout picture obtained by Reuters on December 23, 2025. They are due to be sentenced on Friday. Photo: Greater Manchester Police/Handout via REUTERS
Two men were jailed on Friday for plotting to kill hundreds in an Islamic State-inspired attack on the Jewish community in England, a plan prosecutors said could have been deadlier than December’s mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach.
Walid Saadaoui, 38, and Amar Hussein, 52, were both convicted after a trial at Preston Crown Court, which began a week after an unrelated deadly attack on a synagogue in the city of Manchester, in northwest England.
Prosecutors said the pair were Islamist extremists who wanted to use automatic firearms to kill as many Jews as they could in an attack in Manchester.
They were found guilty little more than a week after a mass shooting at a Jewish Hanukkah celebration on Bondi Beach in which 15 people were killed.
Prosecutor Harpreet Sandhu said on Friday that, had Saadaoui and Hussein carried out their plan, it “could have been very much more serious” than the attacks in Australia and Manchester.
Judge Mark Wall sentenced Saadaoui to a minimum term of 37 years and Hussein to a minimum term of 26 years, saying: “You were very close to being ready to carry out this plan.”
Hussein refused to attend his sentencing, having refused to attend most of his trial, which Wall said reflected Hussein’s cowardice, describing him as “brave enough to plan to threaten an unarmed group with an AK-47 but not sufficiently courageous to face up to what he did.”
POTENTIALLY ONE OF DEADLIEST ATTACKS ON UK SOIL
Saadaoui had arranged for two assault rifles, an automatic pistol and almost 200 rounds of ammunition to be smuggled into Britain through the port of Dover when he was arrested in May 2024, Sandhu told jurors at the trial.
He added that Saadaoui planned to obtain two more rifles and another pistol, and to collect at least 900 rounds of ammunition.
“This would likely have been one of the deadliest terrorist attacks ever carried out on British soil,” Wall said.
Unbeknown to Saadaoui, however, a man known as “Farouk,” from whom he was trying to get the weapons, was an undercover operative who helped foil the plot.
Walid Saadaoui’s brother Bilel Saadaoui, 37, was found guilty of failing to disclose information about acts of terrorism. He was sentenced to six years in jail.