The Natan Fund, a philanthropic foundation that supports cutting-edge Jewish and Israeli nonprofits, will announce tonight the launch of the Natan Book Award, a groundbreaking new award to support the writing, marketing and publicity of a new nonfiction book on Jewish themes. David Brooks, political and cultural commentator for The New York Times, PBS NewsHour and National Public Radio, and a member of Natan, will announce the opening of the Award application process at tonight’s “Investing in Change” event celebrating Natan’s 10th anniversary, where Brooks will be moderating a conversation between prominent investors Stanley Druckenmiller (Duquesne Family Office) and Natan board members David Einhorn (Greenlight Capital) and Boaz Weinstein (Saba Capital).
The Natan Book Award Committee will be chaired by journalists Jeffrey Goldberg (national correspondent for The Atlantic and author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror) and Franklin Foer (editor-at-large for The New Republic and author of the forthcoming Jewish Jocks: An Unorthodox Hall of Fame). Brooks, Goldberg, and Foer are all members of Natan, a giving collaborative whose members determine the foundation’s strategic agenda and make all of its grant decisions collectively.
“The Natan Book Award provides Natan with a vehicle for bringing its support for creative and meaningful new initiatives into the intellectual arena,” says Brooks. “In ten years of grantmaking, Natan has helped to galvanize innovation across the Jewish and Israeli social sectors. The Book Award will leverage that experience on behalf of a gifted author with groundbreaking ideas.”
The Book Award offers up to $50,000 in two stages: the first provides up to $15,000 to an individual author to support the writing process; and the second provides up to the total of the remaining funds to craft a customized digital and in-person marketing and publicity strategy for the book at the time of its publication. The second stage will leverage Natan’s networks across the Jewish, nonprofit and philanthropic communities.
“We want to be able to support a writer as he or she is creating an important new work,” explains Goldberg, “but we also want to make sure that that work attracts real attention and gets into the hands of people who might not be the traditional audiences for Jewish books. Our ultimate goal is to catalyze new conversations about the past, present and future of the Jewish people.”
Committee member Simon Lipskar, President of Writers House, one of the largest literary agencies in the world, is one of the architects of the publishing and marketing element of the Award. “There’s so much good work out there, but to break through the noise these days you need to put a lot of creative, dedicated, and flexible muscle behind getting the book in people’s hands. The Natan Book Award will take a groundbreaking approach to what a book award should be in the 21st century, devoting resources to finding audiences for extraordinary authors rather than simply giving already-discovered and lauded books a victory lap.”
The other members of the Book Award committee, all of whom are Natan Fund members, are Matthew Hiltzik, President and CEO of Hiltzik Strategies, a strategic communications and consulting firm; Tali Rosenblatt-Cohen, a freelance writer and former literary agent; and Tali Farhadian Weinstein, an attorney with the U.S. Department of Justice.
Submissions for the inaugural Natan Book Award are due December 3, 2012. Eligibility rules and application procedures can be found at natan.org/html/bookaward.html
About: The Natan Fund inspires young philanthropists to actively engage in Jewish giving by funding innovative projects that are shaping the Jewish future. Natan believes that educated, engaged, and entrepreneurial philanthropy can transform both givers and nonprofit organizations.
In its first decade, Natan has given $7.8 million to over 125 emerging nonprofits and social entrepreneurs around the world. The Natan board underwrites Natan’s operating expenses, so 100% of all contributions goes towards the nonprofit organizations that Natan supports with its grants.
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This is a great concept with a troubling gender aspect to it. David Brooks is having a conversation with three men, no women, about writing? Yes, there are two women on the committee — the last to be noted in the article — but the greatest status and voice are given exclusively to men.
The publishing world is already so male dominant, with the NY Times book reviews giving preferences to both male writers and male reviewers (see Jennifer Weiner on this issue — http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/20/jennifer-weiner-female-reviews_n_1219454.html). It would be a shame if Natan perpetuated this gender inequality in what ought to be a program open to ALL writers…
Elana Sztokman
Elana,
Thanks for your comment and for the great link. David Brooks will be announcing the launch of the new Book Award at tonight’s event in his opening comments, but the conversation is neither with writers nor about writing.
The Book Award is open to all writers working on nonfiction books on Jewish themes, regardless of sex, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or anything else. We’re eager to find breakthrough books that can catalyze new communal conversations.
Felicia Herman, Executive Director
The Natan Fund
Thanks Felicia
This looks like a great project, and we all know that Natan does great work….
Looking forward to hearing about the announcement
B’vracha,
Elana
Felicia — Hope you saw the article in the Forward about serious gender bias in the literary world. Considering this event was launched with an ALL MALE PANEL, I hope that Natan is paying some heed to this issue
Best,
Elana
Literary Gender Wars Rage On
By Sarah Seltzer
Last year, I spent a lot of time writing about the literary feud known as “Franzenfreude,” which occurred when the plaudits received for Jonathan Franzen’s novel “Freedom” inspired a big conversation about gender, genre and the marketing, reviewing and treatment of books in the media.
Here’s a brief history of the ongoing conversation.
Jennifer Weiner and Jodi Picoult spoke up and complained about the undue love “white male literary darlings” like Franzen and Jeffrey Eugenides receive; Picoult said commercial fiction was ignored, while Weiner argued that commercial fiction by men was given more credence than that by women. Several literary authors responded, grumbling about these perennial bestsellers grumbling about them, but then the VIDA numbers came out, which surveyed bylines by gender, revealing a stark gender problem in big literary establishments. Meg Wolitzer, whose novel “The Wife” satirically skewered “white male literary darlings” years ago, weighed in this spring with a piece called “The Second Shelf,” in which she complained that literary writers face gender bias, too. She noted that Eugenides’ lauded effort “The Marriage Plot,” which concerns the romantic and intellectual lives of some Brown students in the ‘80s, would have had a much different color, and presentation, were its author a she.
Now we’re up to date, and Eugenides himself continued the fray, throwing down against Picoult in a recent interview with Salon as “The Marriage Plot” comes out in paperback.
Towards the end of their interview, Salon’s David Dayen proffers Wolitzer’s question about whether “The Marriage Plot” would have had a pink or frilly cover if he had been a woman. Eugenides replies that he’d read Wolitzer’s piece and thought she might have a point. Maybe.
…I wondered about that, if that might be true, if women get treated differently in the way that their covers are marketed. You know, it’s possible.
To me, it was a little bit … I didn’t really know why Jodi Picoult is complaining. She’s a huge bestseller and everyone reads her books, and she doesn’t seem starved for attention, in my mind — so I was surprised that she would be the one belly-aching. There’s plenty of extremely worthy novelists who are getting very little attention. I think they have more right to complain. And it usually has nothing to do with their gender, but just the marketplace.
These comments, now ricocheting around the web, have been debunked piece by piece over at NPR’s “Monkey See” blog in a piece by Linda Holmes which basically calls Eugenides out for using the entire panoply of excuses offered by people of privilege who want to avoid serious engagement with a thorny issue. The NPR piece, subtitled “how not to answer hard questions,” takes Eugenides to task for suggesting that Picoult (and Weiner, we assume) only wanted the spotlight for themselves, rather than perhaps raising valid structural critique:
The implication is that Jodi Picoult’s only conceivable and justifiable reason for calling out what she sees as systemic unfairness is to get attention for herself, but that he can critique literary culture objectively despite being utterly a creature of it.
If we assumed that she, as a writer, couldn’t see that culture other than through its treatment of her, surely we would have to be equally suspicious that his feeling that all is well might be related to how the existing system works for him.
For Eugenides, indeed all is well and the system really does work. Part of that is because he’s a good writer, on a craft level, and his books are well written and innovative. But he’s also a white man writing well-received literary novels, and that puts him on the tippy-top of the literary hierarchy. (Picoult tweeted earlier that the bottom would have been a woman of color writing commercial genre fiction.)
Furthermore, I’m suspicious of Eugenides’ understanding of gender because I found the “Marriage Plot” sexist at a core level. If we compare the space given to the novel’s three main characters, the lion’s share is devoted to the intellectual lives of the two male heroes, Leonard and Mitchell. We follow Leonard’s scientific experiments and Mitchell’s religious and philosophical awakenings for pages, and pages (and chapters).
Then we get a handful of pages of Madeleine, the lynchpin center of the love triangle whose intellectual work on nineteenth-century novels is meant to provide the title of Eugenides’ novel, at a feminist literature conference about Jane Austen and the Brontës. That’s it for her life of the mind.
The New York Times’ critic noticed this right off the bat:
“They didn’t once ask if she had a boyfriend,” Madeleine happily thinks about a couple of fellow aspirants who befriend her at an academic conference — yet it is all the novel asks.
To add insult to injury, practically the only other female character in the book is a stereotypical bratty feminist who is — unknowingly — dating a gay man. Finally, the love scenes, as Anna Breslaw brilliantly noted at the Hairpin, resemble Twilight just a little too closely.
Would Eugenides have gotten away with some of these flaws writing as a woman? Perhaps. But would an equivalently flawed novel by a “Jillian Eugenides” be taken so seriously by every male critic in the nation so that even while critiquing its flat portrayal of their gender as a whole, they nonetheless praise her rigorous prose style and contribution to the form (not to mention her searing gaze, as Dayen notes of Eugenides)?
Of course not.
Lingering literary bias is far from the worst of the world’s problems. Still, the Eugenides response is emblematic of a much bigger issue. It never ceases to amaze me how many white men are willing to believe without interrogation that they achieved success all on their own and didn’t benefit from a rigged system.
Read more: http://blogs.forward.com/sisterhood-blog/163562/literary-gender-wars-rage-on/#ixzz27tGiVQUS