Press Release: Dr. David Patterson Wins 2008 National Jewish Book Award

The following press release is published as it was received by the Main Street Journal. Dr. Patterson is a regular contributor this magazine.

PRESS RELEASE

UNIVERSITY OF MEMPHIS PROFESSOR DAVID PATTERSON WINS 2008 NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD

Professor David Patterson, Bornblum Chair of Excellence at The University of Memphis, has won the 2008 National Jewish Book Award in the category of Modern Jewish Thought and Experience for his book Emil L. Fackenheim: A Jewish Philosopher’s Response to the Holocaust (Syracuse University Press, 2008). His book was selected out of many submissions after careful analysis by a panel of three judges who are all authorities in their field. It was chosen as the best written, most comprehensive and engaging book in its category. His book joins the ranks of well-respected, classic Jewish books that have received a National Jewish Book Award.

Established in 1948 by the Jewish Book Council, the National Jewish Book Awards is the longest running North American awards program of its kind in the field of Jewish literature and is recognized as the most prestigious. The awards, presented by category, are designed to give recognition to outstanding books, to stimulate writers to further literary creativity and to encourage the reading of worthwhile titles. Among the past notable Award winners are Howard Fast, Chaim Grade, Bernard Malamud, Cynthia Ozick, Chaim Potok, Philip Roth, I.B. Singer, and Elie Wiesel. On March 5, 2009, Dr. Patterson and his wife Gerri will be at the Center for Jewish History in New York with other award recipients for the awards ceremony.

Based on his personal association with Emil Fackenheim and his research into Fackenheim’s work, Dr. Patterson explores in this book how the great Jewish philosopher engaged questions of good and evil, life and meaning, and God and humanity that emerged from the Nazis’ extermination of the Jews. Fackenheim was the last in a line of Jewish philosophers to emerge from Germany, the modern center of Western philosophy, following Moses Mendelssohn, Hermann Cohen, Leo Baeck, and Martin Buber. In his book, Dr. Patterson explores Fackenheim’s rigorous pursuit of a distinctively Jewish philosophical response to the the Holocaust. Fackenheim’s writing sheds light on the tensions between Jewish thinking and elements of Western philosophy that contributed to the slaughter of European Jewry. Dr. Patterson’s book makes the revolutionary move of arguing that the road to Auschwitz began not in Berlin but in Athens, the birthplace of modern German—indeed modern Western—philosophy.

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