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Greenberg Center Names Wallant Award Winner
Posted 1/27/2005
The Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies has named Jonathan Rosen as the 2005 recipient of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award for his book, Joy Comes in the Morning (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004).
He will be formally presented with the Wallant Award at an event on May 17 at the university.
The New York Times said of Rosen’s latest work, “What a pleasure it is to see such a serious and yet playful novel in this hot-button time for religion….Not since E.L. Doctorow’s City of God have we seen such a literary effort to plumb the nature of belief – in Jewish-American culture, in Talmudic study, in prayer, in sex, in the very soundness of one’s own mind.”
The Wallant Award is now one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. Established 42 years ago by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford, the Wallant Award is presented to an American Jewish writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew. The award honors the memory of Edward Lewis Wallant, author of The Pawnbroker and other works of fiction, who died prematurely in 1962.
Rosen joins a distinguished list of award recipients, including Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Chaim Potok, Myla Goldberg and Dara Horn. He is the author of the novel Eve’s Apple and the nonfiction book The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has been translated into German, Hebrew, Italian and Dutch. Rosen is the 2004 recipient of the Chaim Potok Award, given to “a next-generation North American Jewish author of fiction whose work carries forward the Jewish experience with exceptional creativity and originality.”
In 1990, Rosen created the Arts & Letters section of The Forward, which he oversaw for 10 years. He is presently editing a series of short books on Jewish subjects for Nextbook\Schocken. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker and several anthologies.
He will be formally presented with the Wallant Award at an event on May 17 at the university.
The New York Times said of Rosen’s latest work, “What a pleasure it is to see such a serious and yet playful novel in this hot-button time for religion….Not since E.L. Doctorow’s City of God have we seen such a literary effort to plumb the nature of belief – in Jewish-American culture, in Talmudic study, in prayer, in sex, in the very soundness of one’s own mind.”
The Wallant Award is now one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. Established 42 years ago by Dr. and Mrs. Irving Waltman of West Hartford, the Wallant Award is presented to an American Jewish writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for the American Jew. The award honors the memory of Edward Lewis Wallant, author of The Pawnbroker and other works of fiction, who died prematurely in 1962.
Rosen joins a distinguished list of award recipients, including Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Chaim Potok, Myla Goldberg and Dara Horn. He is the author of the novel Eve’s Apple and the nonfiction book The Talmud and the Internet: A Journey Between Worlds, which was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year and has been translated into German, Hebrew, Italian and Dutch. Rosen is the 2004 recipient of the Chaim Potok Award, given to “a next-generation North American Jewish author of fiction whose work carries forward the Jewish experience with exceptional creativity and originality.”
In 1990, Rosen created the Arts & Letters section of The Forward, which he oversaw for 10 years. He is presently editing a series of short books on Jewish subjects for Nextbook\Schocken. His essays have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker and several anthologies.
