The Program in Judaic Studies is delighted to congratulate Jonathan Gribetz, Professor of Near Eastern Studies and the Program in Judaic Studies, on winning a 2024 National Jewish Book Award for his latest book, Reading Herzl in Beirut: The PLO Effort to Know the Enemy (Princeton University Press, 2024). He will receive the Jewish Book Council’s Gerrard and Ella Berman Memorial Award in History at a ceremony in Manhattan in March.

In Reading Herzl in Beirut, Gribetz tells the story of the PLO Research Center from its establishment in 1965 until its ultimate expulsion from Lebanon in 1983. He explores why the PLO invested in research about the Jews, what its researchers learned about Judaism and Zionism, and how the knowledge they acquired informed the PLO’s relationship to Israel.

Gribetz is a professor in the Department of Near Eastern Studies and in the Program in Judaic Studies at Princeton University. He teaches about the history of Zionism, Palestine, Israel, Jerusalem, and religion and nationalism in the modern Middle East. His first book, Defining Neighbors: Religion, Race, and the Early Zionist-Arab Encounter (Princeton University Press, 2014), investigated the mutual perceptions of Zionists and Arabs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, showing the prominent place of religious and racial categories in the ways in which these communities imagined and related to one another.

Jew­ish Book Coun­cil is a non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tion ded­i­cat­ed to edu­cat­ing, enrich­ing, and strength­en­ing the com­mu­ni­ty through Jew­ish lit­er­a­ture. The National Jewish Book Awards were established by JBC in 1950 in order to recognize outstanding works of Jewish literature. They are the oldest awards of their kind.

Read more on the Department of Near Eastern Studies' website.