Eli Sharabi’s memoir Hostage, recounting his experience in Hamas captivity after the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, has been named Book of the Year by the National Jewish Book Awards on Feb. 18.
The awards, presented by the Jewish Book Council, recognize outstanding English-language books of Jewish interest.
Founded in 1950, the program is the longest-running North American awards initiative devoted to Jewish books.
Sharabi’s memoir, which details his abduction from Kibbutz Be’eri and the more than a year he spent in captivity, became a bestseller in Israel and was later released in English in the US.
“This recognition means so much to me, not only personally, but for the memory of my family and all those we lost,” Sharabi said.
“Hostage is my testimony, a story of my survival, written so others could bear witness. I hope it helps ensure that what happened is never forgotten.”
In American Jewish studies, Pamela S. Nadell won for Antisemitism, an American Tradition, a look at the forms antisemitism took in the country from the early Dutch settlers to the present day.
The Russian-born journalist Julia Ioffe took the autobiography and memoir prize for Motherland: A Feminist History of Modern Russia, from Revolution to Autocracy.
Jack Fairweather’s The Prosecutor: One Man’s Battle to Bring Nazis to Justice, the story of a Jewish judge and Holocaust survivor from Stuttgart who pursued Nazi perpetrators in post-war Germany, won the biography award.
Fiction honors went to Allison Epstein for Fagin the Thief, a retelling of the Dickens novel Oliver Twist from the perspective of its Jewish antihero.
Zeeva Bukai received the debut fiction prize for The Anatomy of Exile.
The Hebrew fiction in translation category recognized Dog, by Yishay Ishi Ron, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, which also earned a selection in the book club category. The novella’s protagonist is an Israeli combat veteran haunted by his service in one of the Gaza campaigns prior to Oct. 7.
Last year’s winner for book of the year, 10/7: 100 Human Stories by Lee Yaron, was also an account of the attacks and their aftermath.
Jewish anxieties in light of Oct. 7 are the subject of Sarah Hurwitz’s As A Jew: Reclaiming Our Story From Those Who Blame, Shame, and Try to Erase Us, which won in the contemporary Jewish life and practice category.
Hurwitz, a speechwriter in the Obama administration, provides a primer on Jewish history, texts and practices in order to counter what she calls misinformation among Jews, their allies and Israel’s critics.
“Especially amid rising anti-Semitism and Jewish authors facing increased scrutiny, Jewish books have the power to create and sustain community,” said Naomi Firestone-Teeter, CEO of Jewish Book Council.
In Hostage, Sharabi writes about the terror of his abduction and the daily struggle to survive after Hamas fighters stormed Kibbutz Be’eri.
He would spend 491 days in captivity, much of it in tunnels beneath Gaza, before being released on Feb. 8, 2025.
Throughout the ordeal, Sharabi clung to the hope of rescue, writing: “I refuse to let myself drown in pain. I am surviving. I am a hostage. In the heart of Gaza. A stranger in a strange land. In the home of a Hamas-supporting family. And I’m getting out of here. I have to. I’m getting out of here. I’m coming home.”
Awards recognizing contemporary Jewish thought and scholarship included Lawrence Grossman’s Living in Both Worlds: Modern Orthodox Judaism in the United States, 1945–2025, and Debra Kaplan and Elisheva Carlebach’s A Woman Is Responsible for Everything: Jewish Women in Early Modern Europe, which won multiple prizes, including scholarship and women’s studies.
Others won in the categories of education and Jewish identity, food writing and cookbooks, Sephardic culture, archival material, and poetry.
The winners will be honored at an awards ceremony in New York next month hosted by the entertainer Jonah Platt.
At the ceremony, journalist Sam Feedman will be presented with the council’s Mentorship Award. Freedman, a former New York Times reporter and professor at the Columbia Journalism School, taught a popular course that helped over 100 students turn their ideas into books, including When They Come for Us, We’ll Be Gone: The Epic Struggle to Save Soviet Jewry, Gal Beckerman’s 2010 history of the Soviet Jewry movement.
“He believed in me before I believed in myself, pushed me to take my work seriously, and opened doors I didn’t even know existed,” Beckerman said in a statement.
“With tough love and deep generosity, he guided me through the daunting process of writing a book as if it were his own. What he did for me, he did for dozens of writers.”
