Michael Gawenda’s book My Life as a Jew has won the Leslie and Sophie Caplan Award for Jewish Nonfiction at the 2024 Shalom Australian Jewish Book Awards.
27 August, 2024
My Life as a Jew wins Jewish nonfiction book award at Sydney Jewish Writers Festival
On receiving the award, Michael said, ‘It was a great honour to win this award, the most meaningful award I have received in a long life of writing. I am deeply grateful to the judges and the Caplan family. At a time like this, to have awards like this supporting Jewish writers is just so important.'
The judges praised the book as a ‘bold, fearless, unapologetic, deeply personal and deeply intelligent exploration of Jewishness, of what it is like to be a Jew in today’s world of rampant antisemitism’. They went on comment that:
‘Gawenda uses his personal experiences as a lens to trace the roots of the current explosion of antisemitic sentiments and, while doing so, he manages also to go outside of the particularities of Jewish experiences, engaging with universal questions of identity, belonging, the ethics of journalism and politics, the nature of evil and complicity. In the age of disinformation and instant opinions, it is precious to have this book whose author does not believe in euphemisms nor platitudes nor any other pseudointellectual shortcuts. Gawenda's considered tone, backed by a lifetime of research experience and natural curiosity, his humility and his writerly possession of what Hemingway so aptly called ‘a built-in, shockproof, shit detector’ all make Gawenda's writing feel like a breath of fresh air in the contemporary literary landscape.’
Scribe congratulates Michael on this achievement.
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My Life as a Jew
A multi-award-winning journalist and former editor-in-chief of a major Australian newspaper searingly explores his Jewish identity at a time when a substantial — and growing — part of the left is opposed to the very existence of Israel as a Jewish state.
Born in a displaced persons’ camp two years after the end of the Holocaust, Michael Gawenda spent his childhood and teenage years in a left-wing non-Zionist Jewish youth group in Melbourne. This shaped the sort of Jew he became — a secular Jew who loved the Yiddish language and Yiddish culture.
Gawenda went on to become a public figure during his 40 years as a journalist, including his role as editor-in-chief of The Age — the only Jewish editor-in-chief in the newspaper’s history. Throughout this time, and since, he became dismayed and pained by the growing hostility of the left to Israel and to Jews like him who were not prepared to declare themselves as anti-Zionists. This has also forced him to examine his own Jewish identity and his relationships with his Jewish friends, and to forensically examine the basis of the critiques of Israel.
At a time of rising anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, My Life as a Jew is a controversial book. It is also a vital book. It should be read by activists for Israel and Zionism, as well as for the Palestinians. It should be read by readers of all political stripes. It should be read by journalists, as it is in part about journalism and its failings. And it should also be read by people interested in the remarkable life and career of its author, Michael Gawenda.
