Home

On a path that began with studying Hebrew and Yiddish during the summer months, and European history as an undergraduate at Rutgers University, Kenneth Moss parlayed his interests into a prestigious Jewish literature award with a lucrative cash prize.

Moss, who was raised in Metuchen and has spent the past seven years as an assistant professor of modern Jewish history at Johns Hopkins University, was one of two winners announced this week of the Jewish Book Council's Sami Rohr Prize For Jewish Literature. Normally a $100,000 prize, the council split the top and runner-up prizes between two authors this year, earning Moss and Sarah Abrevaya Stein $62,500 apiece.

Over the span of 10 years, following his 1999 doctoral dissertation at Stanford University on Hebrew and Yiddish during the Russian Revolution, Moss wrote the book that earned him this award, "Jewish Renaissance in the Russian Revolution." The work explores Eastern European Jewish nationalists' efforts to create a self-consciously modern, post-traditional Jewish culture during the Russian Revolution and Civil War from 1917-21.

While it's evident today that Hebraists and Yiddishists have radically different ideologies, Moss explained, his book shows how they in fact began their movements on the "same soil of Jewish nationalism" before their "divorce." Hebrew and Yiddish "nationalists" both had the ideal of reconstructing Jewish life through language, he said.

"This is sort of the last hurrah of when Hebrew and Yiddish culture are both centered in Eastern Europe," Moss said of the Russian Revolution.

Moss said his work breaks new ground by incorporating Hebrew and Yiddish history into the same book. He studied both languages, during ulpan school for Hebrew for three summers in Israel, and three subsequent summers at the YIVO Institute's Weinreich Program for Yiddish. He said his study of European history at Rutgers then gave him the necessary background for a deeper understanding of Jewish history, where he honed in on interests in the cultural, political, and social history of Jews in Imperial Russia, East-Central Europe, the British mandate of Palestine, and Israel.

Hebrew and Yiddish nationalists "are people for whom, broadly speaking, religion of any sort was irrelevant," Moss said. Therefore, Moss' book tries to shed light on what it means to create a Jewish culture that's not based on traditional text, but rather on the Russian and Polish cultural elements of poetry, art, and educational institutions, he said. By having access to a large Orthodox Jewish society in Eastern Europe -- contrasted with secular culture -- Hebrew and Yiddish nationalists were able to have a dialogue with past Jewish culture and their surrounding environment, Moss said.

The decline of Yiddish and the rise of modern Hebrew, also explored in Moss' book, both began during the interwar period but really took force once Hebrew was established as the official language of the state of Israel, Moss said, because Hebrew was then a language that was needed in everyday life. For practical reasons, Jewish Poles needed Polish and Lithuanian Jews needed Lithuanian -- not Yiddish, Moss said.

"The real difference is that Hebrew gets a land," he said.

Moss' wife Anne, a Russian scholar who also teaches at Johns Hopkins, helped him when he came across difficult Russian texts that needed to be translated for the book. "The Unchosen People," Moss' next book, will be about how Jews of interwar Poland struggled to come to terms with becoming a national minority, he said.

Moss celebrated his bar mitzvah at Congregation Neve Shalom in Metuchen and graduated from Metuchen High School. He said he left Rutgers a year before the arrival of Dr. Yael Zerubavel, director of the Allen and Joan Bildner Center for the Study of Jewish Life, took the study of Jewish history at the school to new heights.

The Rohr prize winners were chosen from a pool of 25 entries published during 2008 and 2009, which were subject to a yearlong review by a panel of judges. The 2010 award ceremony will be held in Jerusalem on March 31. Founded in 2006, the prize "recognizes writers who have demonstrated a fresh vision and evidence of future potential," according to a Jewish Book Council press release.

"The term 'embarrassment of riches' was coined to describe the situation we encountered," renowned author Rabbi Joseph Telushkin, one of the judges for the prize, said in a statement. "Our admiration for these two books and writers -- and for the three other finalists as well -- eventually made it so hard to choose one over the other that we finally decided we couldn't. They both deserve to win."