PHILADELPHIA -- A University of Pennsylvania history professor has taken the top prize in the history category of the fifth annual Koret Jewish Book Awards. Benjamin Nathans was honored for "Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia."

The awards highlight the best new English-language Jewish books and their authors.

Nathans, the M. Mark and Esther K. Watkins Assistant Professor in the Humanities at Penn and acting associate director of Penn's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies, teaches and writes about society, politics and ethnic relations in imperial Russia and the Soviet Union as well as Russian intellectual history and modern Jewish history.

The award-winning book, published by the University of California Press, is a major reassessment of Jewish life in pre-revolutionary Russia, focusing on those Jews who lived, literally or figuratively, outside the pale of settlement. The book is being translated into Russian.

Nathans is the editor of the Russian-language Research Guide to Materials on the History of Russian Jewry (19th and Early 20th Centuries) in Selected Archives of the Former Soviet Union and the author of numerous articles on modern Jewish, Russian, and European history.

The Koret Jewish Book Awards were created by the Koret Foundation in cooperation with the National Foundation for Jewish Culture in 1998. With assets of $300 million, the Koret Foundation is one of the largest Jewish-sponsored charitable trusts in the country.

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