Mirjam Zadoff’s Next Year in Marienbad Wins Salo Baron Prize

Next Year in MarienbadCongratulations to Mirjam Zadoff. Her book, Next Year in Marienbad: The Lost Worlds of Jewish Spa Culture won this year’s Salo Baron Prize the best first book in Jewish studies. This is the second year in a row that the Baron Prize, awarded by the American Academy for Jewish Research, has gone to a Penn Press book. The prize will be presented to Zadoff and another author at the upcoming AJS Conference in December.

Here’s a quote from the American Academy for Jewish Research prize announcement:

With extraordinary flair and competence, Zadoff brings to life a forgotten universe, the turn-of-the-century spas of Bohemia that were frequented by a wide array of European Jews, Germans and Eastern Europeans, secular and Hasidic, Yiddishist and Zionist. She employs a dizzying range of sources in multiple languages to reconstruct the social and cultural worlds of Jews at the spas. Her use of innovative thematic units allow her sources to come alive, and she has seamlessly integrated relevant theoretical scholarship.

Mirjam Zadoff teaches Jewish history and culture at the University of Munich.