BIAJS Book Prize 2025
We are delighted to announce the BIAJS book prize winner and two honourable mentions for 2025:
The 2025 winner:
Anna Koch, Home after Fascism: Italian and German Jews after the Holocaust. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2023.
Anna Koch’s book Home after Fascism is a brilliant comparative historical study that examines how Jews who survived the Holocaust attempted to return to and rebuild their lives in the countries that had previously persecuted them—specifically, East Germany, West Germany, and Italy. The book draws on a wide range of primary sources, including memoirs, interviews, correspondence, and archival records, to illuminate the personal and collective struggles of Jewish returnees in the immediate postwar years. This highlighting of personal experiences makes the book a very engaged and fascinating account of Jewish Holocaust survivors’ return to their former homes and an analysis of how they saw their countries. It is wonderfully written and based not only on a broad array of sources, but also on innovative concepts such as the one of emotional communities which contributes to a particular emotional depth of the book. Anna Koch’s book makes a considerable and outstanding contribution to post-Holocaust history and to our understanding of survivors’ search for home. Full publisher details about the book are available here.
Honourable mention:
Marina Sapritsky-Nahum, Jewish Odesa: Negotiating Identities and Traditions in Contemporary Ukraine. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2024.
Marina Sapritsky-Nahum’s careful, in-depth study of Jewish lives and identities in Odesa is a vitally important contribution to our understanding of changing Jewish realities in Ukraine. Based on extensive field work, Jewish Odesa brings together history and present, and the local and international developments that shaped the Jewish community. Full publisher details about the book are available here.
Honourable mention:
Jane Brooks, Jewish refugees and the British nursing profession: A gendered opportunity. Manchester University Press 2024.
Jewish Refugees and the British Nursing Profession is a wonderful study that centers the experiences of Jewish women at the heart of the making of modern health services in Britain. Drawing on a wide range of sources, Jane Brooks tells a vivid story of resilience and care in modern British and Jewish history. Full publisher details about the book are available here.
About the prize: The BIAJS annual book prize was established in 2018 to recognize and promote outstanding scholarship in the field of Jewish studies in the broad sense. Each year BIAJS awards a prize of £1000 for the best monograph submitted, with the focus alternating between books on the ancient to medieval period and early modern to modern period. Next year’s category (2026) for the annual BIAJS book prize will be ancient to medieval. Around November 2025 we will invite submissions for next year’s prize focused on topics relating to the ancient to medieval period. More information about past winners and eligibility can be found in our website and previous years’ mailings.