Four authors, including Israeli journalist and October 7 survivor Amir Tibon, have been named as finalists for the 2026 Sami Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature, in association with the National Library of Israel.
The ceremony, which will be the 20th year the Sami Rohr Prize has been awarded, is planned for July in Jerusalem.
One of the selected authors will receive a $100,000 prize, which is presented annually to an emerging writer with potential to continually contribute to the world of Jewish literature.
The finalists are:
Laura Hobson Faure, the author of “Who Will Rescue Us? The Story of the Jewish Children who Fled to France and America during the Holocaust” (Yale University Press). Hobson Faure, a professor of modern Jewish history at Université Paris 1-Panthéon-Sorbonne, wrote about the complex rescue efforts for Jewish children who fled Nazi-occupied territories to France and later to the United States.
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American sociologist Shaul Kelner already won a National Book Award for his book “A Cold War Exodus: How American Activists Mobilized to Free Soviet Jews” (NYU Press), which details how activists used creative, grassroots tactics to convince the US government to pressure Moscow and allow emigration.
Contributing New Yorker writer Jordan Salama’s book “Stranger in the Desert: A Family Story” (Catapult), which was inspired by his family’s Arab-Jewish story and journeys through the Argentine Andes.
Tibon, a Haaretz journalist who won a 2024 National Jewish Book Award for his book “The Gates of Gaza: A Story of Betrayal, Survival, and Hope in Israel’s Borderlands” (Little, Brown and Company), which chronicles his family’s experience of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attack on Kibbutz Nahal Oz and how his father, Noam Tibon, a retired IDF major general, came to fight off the terrorists and rescue his son, daughter-in-law, and two young granddaughters.
The Sami Rohr Prize and the National Library began their association in 2022, together developing joint programming and initiatives for authors.
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