The Association for Jewish Studies Announces 2025 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Winners

Jewish Studies scholars recognized for publishing works preserving Jewish identities and values.

(NEW YORK, NY, December 2025) The Association for Jewish Studies has announced the 2025 winners of the prestigious Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards.

The Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards are the preeminent awards for Jewish Studies scholars, with recipients receiving academic recognition as well as a significant cash prize.

These annual awards, generously funded by Jordan Schnitzer through the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer Family Fund of the Oregon Jewish Community Foundation, honor scholars whose work embodies the best in the field: rigorous research, theoretical sophistication, innovative methodology, and excellent writing in the field of Jewish Studies.

Situated within diverse historical and cultural contexts, each of the 2025 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards winners and finalists demonstrate the complexity of individual and collective identities for Jewish communities. By exploring how gender, the evolution of language, displacement and oppressive occupation, shifting self-identification, and ever-aging traditions and memories, these eight authors demonstrate how lived experiences change the world.

The awards highlight the diversity of Jewish Studies and recognize books in four distinct categories. This year’s winners engage critical contemporary themes, from how historical trauma impacts language to the intersection of sex, social risk, and modern ethics.

The 2025 Jordan Schnitzer Book Award Recipients:

Jewish Literature and Linguistics

Winner: Hannah Pollin-Galay (University of Massachusetts, Amherst) for Occupied Words: What the Holocaust Did to Yiddish (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

Finalist: Michela Andreatta (University of Rochester) for Moses Zacuto’s Hell Arrayed: A Seventeenth-Century Hebrew Poem on the Punishment of the Wicked in the Afterlife (Centre for Renaissance and Reformation Studies, 2023).

Medieval and Early Modern Jewish History and Culture

Winner: Iris Idelson-Shein (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev) for Between the Bridge and the Barricade: Jewish Translation in Early Modern Europe (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2024).

Finalist: Rowan Dorin (Stanford University) for No Return: Jews, Christian Usurers, and the Spread of Mass Expulsion in Medieval Europe (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Modern Jewish History and Culture: Africa, Americas, Asia, and Oceania

Winner: Ayelet Brinn (University of Hartford) for A Revolution in Type: Gender and the Making of the American Yiddish Press (New York University Press, 2023).

Finalist: Rachel Gordan (University of Florida) for Postwar Stories: How Books Made Judaism American (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Philosophy and Jewish Thought

Winner: Rebecca J. Epstein-Levi (Vanderbilt University) for When We Collide: Sex, Social Risk, and Jewish Ethics (Indiana University Press, 2023).

Finalist: Yaniv Feller (University of Florida) for The Jewish Imperial Imagination: Leo Baeck and German-Jewish Thought (Cambridge University Press, 2024).

Of the awards, Jordan Schnitzer said “Each of the 14 years that we have funded the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards, I marvel at the deep, thoughtful work of the academics who have dedicated their lives to illuminate and preserve Jewish culture.”

“The spirit of the awards is to honor the noble work of dedicated professionals who share the contributions that Jewish people have made over the centuries. While the cash award is important, past winners have told me that the recognition from their peers for their years of diligent, and often lonely, work is the greatest honor,” said Schnitzer.

AJS Executive Director, Warren Hoffman, PhD, said "The AJS is grateful to Jordan Schnitzer for sustained support of the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards, one of the most prestigious book awards that one can receive in the field of Jewish Studies. These awards prominently elevate Jewish Studies scholarship around the world."

The 2026 Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards will begin accepting submissions in spring 2026 in the categories of Biblical Studies, Rabbinics, and Jewish History and Culture in Antiquity; Jews and the Arts: Music, Performance, and Visual; Modern Jewish History and Culture: Europe and Israel; and Social Science, Anthropology, and Folklore. Winners will receive a $15,000 prize; finalists will receive a $5,000 prize.

The Association for Jewish Studies is the largest learned society and professional organization representing Jewish Studies scholars worldwide, with 1,800 members in 33 countries. The mission of the AJS is to advance research and teaching in Jewish Studies at colleges, universities, and other institutions of higher learning, and to foster greater understanding of Jewish Studies scholarship among the wider public.

Jordan D. Schnitzer is a West Coast businessman, philanthropist, and globally recognized art collector.

Schnitzer is President and CEO of Schnitzer Properties, his 75-year-old family-owned commercial real estate investment and development company based in Portland, Ore. Under his leadership, the company has grown from 3.4 million to more than 31million square feet and has become one of the top 10 private real estate owners in the Western U.S.

Beyond his real estate achievements, Schnitzer is an internationally recognized art collector, and ARTnews has named him one of the world's top 200 art collectors. The Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation, with its collection of thousands of artworks, has organized and funded more than 180 exhibitions at 130 museums.

Additionally, Schnitzer serves as President of the Harold & Arlene Schnitzer CARE Foundation, which has donated over $300 million to fund hundreds of nonprofit projects that touch lives and enrich communities.

If you would like more information about the Jordan Schnitzer Book Awards or the Association for Jewish Studies, please contact Amy Ronek at (646) 883-6948 or aronek@associationforjewishstudies.org.