The vibe of BookishlyJewish has always been one of support – we think ALL the Jewish books deserve awards for the simple fact that their existence is never a given. Many had long, hard roads to publication due to quotas, perceived “niche” content, and other such depressing gate keeping. Any marginalized story faces barriers others don’t, which is why we have chosen to focus on reviewing and boosting them in a noncompetitive manner. However, it’s hard to ignore those lists of bests that circulate this time of year. So last year we tried to find a way to host a Reader’s Choice Award the BookishlyJewish way – inclusive and not disparaging of others.
We like to think of our Reader’s Choice Award as serving two dual functions. It lets us celebrate the Jewish books currently capturing the world’s attention, while also opening us up to requests from our readers about what they would like to see featured on our page. That means we feature huge blockbusters and tiny indies, and sometimes even one vote is enough to push a book to the top of our TBR for coverage. In that vein, this year we have just six short questions asking you to write in a favorite adult, children’s and nonfiction book you read last year and one from each category you would like to see us review next year. Neither category is limited by year of publication, so if Tevye the Milkman was the best thing you read last year go ahead and vote for it! The latter set of questions obviously excludes books we have already covered but the first does not. And as always, we ask that you not vote for any book from the bible, although bible commentaries are more than welcome.
How to vote? Click this link and sign in using your gmail! We are not collecting the emails, this allows us to limit responses to one person while the program automatically deletes/does not store the emails. And please, it’s an honors system, it’s limited to one response per person, but we understand there are ways to game that system. We ask you not to.