The Edward Lewis Wallant Award is one of the oldest and most prestigious Jewish literary awards in the United States. The annual award recognizes a writer, preferably unrecognized, whose published work of fiction is deemed to have significance for American Jewish history and culture.
Join us for a discussion with Benjamin Resnick, author of Next Stop, and winner of the 2025 Edward Lewis Wallant Award. A dessert reception will immediately follow the program.
This event is co-sponsored by the Avon Free Public Library and the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford.
Benjamin Resnick is the rabbi of the Pelham Jewish Center in New York. Ordained at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, he lives in Pelham with his wife and two children. His non-fiction has appeared in the Washington Post, The Forward, Tablet Magazine, and elsewhere. His first novel, Next Stop, was a finalist for the Sami Rohr Prize For Jewish Literature.
In Next Stop, Resnick deploys speculative and fantastical elements including a black hole swallowing Israel, unexplained global anomalies, and dystopian upheaval as powerful metaphors for rupture: the rupture of homeland, the rupture of safety, the rupture of history, the rupture of memory. At the same time, Next Stop remains grounded in the most intimate and human of dramas: a family trying to survive and to love even as the world collapses around them. By blending magical realism, sci-fi, dystopia, and Jewish text, Resnick gives us a Jewish future in which historical patterns of persecution and displacement are refracted through an alternative, deeply uncertain Jewish future, expanding what Jewish fiction can do.
THis event will be held at the Mandell JCC of Greater Hartford
Attendance is free, but you must register at mgcjs@hartford.edu
About the Award: The award was established shortly after the untimely death in December 1962 of Edward Lewis Wallant, gifted author of The Human Season and The Pawnbroker. Dr. Irving and Fran Waltman of West Hartford were prompted to create this memorial because of their admiration for Edward Wallant’s literary ability. A panel of four critics serves as judges. They seek out a writer whose fiction bears a kinship to the work of Wallant. Among those who have received the award in past years are: Ayelet Tsabari, Rebecca Dinerstein, David Bezmozgis, Kenneth Bonert, Joshua Henkin, Edith Pearlman, Julie Orringer, Sara Houghteling, Eileen Pollack, Ehud Havazelet, Leo Litwak, Chaim Potok, Cynthia Ozick, Curt Leviant, Thane Rosenbaum, Myla Goldberg, Jonathan Rosen, and Nicole Krauss.