Koffler Centre of the Arts

The Koffler Centre of the Arts is delighted to present two virtual panels featuring shortlisted Vine Awards authors on November 10 and November 12, 2020.

The second panel panel celebrates the 2020 Vine Awards shortlisted history writers – Zelda Abramson, Matti Friedman, John Lynch, and Heidi J.S. Tworek – in conversation with juror Allan Levine. Tune in for an insightful discussion on a series of counter-narratives told from both national and global historic perspectives.

Listen to the talk on SoundCloud:

Koffler Centre of the Arts · The 2020 Vine Awards: History Panel

The conversation has been transcribed for accessibility purposes. Please click here to view.

Vine Awards Jury Quotes: History

Zelda Abramson & John Lynch, The Montreal Shtetl: Making Home After the Holocaust (Between the Lines)
The Montreal Shtetl is a well researched and engaging narrative about identity and belonging in a not-always-pretty period in Canadian Jewish history. – Vine Awards Jury

Matti Friedman, Spies of No Country (Signal, McClelland & Stewart)
Spies of No Country reads like a spy-thriller page-turner, replete with all the suspense of double identities and the close calls of betrayals--except that this is not a work of fiction. Well researched, and offering up much intriguing and gritty detail, it is the unveiling of several intricately woven true stories of the earliest days of Mossad, and the pivotal, but until now obscured, role of the four Arab jews who laid the underground work for the imminent birth of the country of Israel. – Vine Awards Jury

Heidi J.S. Tworek, News From Germany: The Competition to Control World Communications, 1900-1945 (Harvard University Press)
Heidi Tworek has produced a well-researched, accessible and thought-provoking study of the power of information and how it was manipulated by both the Weimar Republic and the Nazi regime. The book’s significant lessons resonate with current battles over “fake news” and the role of the media in a democracy. – Vine Awards Jury

About the Panelists

Zelda Abramson is Professor Emerita, Sociology Department Acadia University. As a public sociologist, she strives to combine academic research with social activism. The daughter of Holocaust survivors who settled in Montreal after the War, Zelda grew up immersed in the spoken and unspoken challenges survivors faced as they immigrated and assimilated into Canadian society. Her commitment to public sociology, and her particular interest in reconstructing overlooked stories and voices, led her to undertake this research on the lives of Jewish immigrants to Montreal after WWII.

John Lynch is a woodworker and designer with a keen interest in social history and creative writing.

Matti Friedman’s 2016 book Pumpkinflowers: An Israeli Soldier's Story was chosen as a New York Times Notable Book and as one of Amazon's 10 Best Books of the Year. It was shortlisted for the 2017 RBC Taylor Prize and Writers' Trust Prize, and won the Canadian Jewish Literary Award and the Vine Award. Matti's first book, The Aleppo Codex, won the 2014 Sami Rohr Prize, the ALA's Sophie Brody Medal, and the Canadian Jewish Book Award for History, and was translated into seven languages. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and elsewhere. He is a former Associated Press correspondent and a regular contributor to Tablet Magazine and the Jewish Review of Books.

Heidi J.S. Tworek is assistant professor of international history at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. Heidi has co-edited two volumes – Exorbitant Expectations: International Organizations and the Media in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries and The Routledge Companion to the Makers of Global Business. Her writing has been published in English and German in major magazines and newspapers, including Foreign Affairs, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Politico, and The Globe and Mail. Heidi also appears regularly on national radio and television in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany.

Allan Levine has written fourteen books including Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience (2018), Toronto: Biography of a City (2014) and King: William Lyon Mackenzie King: A Life Guided by the Hand of Destiny (2011), which won the Alexander Kennedy Isbister Award for Non-Fiction. His book Coming of Age: A History of the Jewish People of Manitoba (2009) won the McNally-Robinson Book of the Year and the Best History Book Award at the Canadian Jewish Book Awards in 2010, and was the co-winner of the J.I. Segal Prize in Canadian Jewish History. His most recent book, Details are Unprintable: Wayne Lonergan and the Sensational Café Society Murder, was published in August 2020.

To see the full 2020 Vine Awards shortlist, click here. For info on the Non-Fiction Panel on November 10, click here. The Vine Awards winners will be announced this year at an online Awards Ceremony on November 18, 2020 on the Virtual J platform. To register, click here.

All 2020 Vine Awards shortlisted titles can be purchased from Ben McNally Books.

The Vine Awards for Canadian Jewish Literature is a national awards program that honours both the best Canadian Jewish writers and non-Jewish Canadian authors who deal with Jewish subjects in Fiction, History, Non-Fiction, Young Adult/Children’s literature, and Poetry. Each winning author receives a prize of $10,000. The 2020 Jury – comprised of authors Judy Batalion, Allan Levine, and Shani Mootoo – reviewed 55 entries to the Fiction, History, Non-Fiction and Young Adult/Children’s categories.