The marquee prize is the Boris Smolar award for investigative journalism, named for a Russian immigrant who worked briefly for the Forward and then was editor-in-chief of JTA for nearly 40 years. Lev Golinkin, himself an immigrant/refugee from the Ukrainian city of Kharkiv, took first place for his monumental work fastidiously documenting the more than 1,500 statues and streets named for Nazis and their collaborators that still exist around the world.
"I stumbled onto this form of Holocaust revisionism while covering the far-right," Lev said when I asked where he got the idea for the project. "It shocked me because I naively thought we couldn't be at the point where people openly put up statues to Holocaust perpetrators. It also shocked me that so few were speaking about this."
Lev is a freelancer who writes for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Politico Europe, Time Magazine and many other places, so we were incredibly lucky to have him devote so much time to this accountability project, which includes separate lists detailing Nazi monuments in 16 countries, including the U.S. We first published it around Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2021, prompting a Belgian town to remove from its town square a plaque honoring Latvian soldiers who were part of the SS, and Lev has been tirelessly updating it ever since.
"It makes me feel Jewish to do this," he said. "I keep thinking about those who were hunted down and murdered, and how they would feel knowing their murderers were being celebrated and given parades."
Louis Keene, our Los Angeles-based reporter and host of our California Briefing newsletter, won four awards, including first places in feature writing and sports reporting for oral histories of, respectively, "the most epic summer camp prank ever" and Yeshiva University's basketball team's historic winning streak. He noted that the oral history format was popular in sports and culture journalism and has "flourished online because, well, you don't run out of space on the page," and that he sees it as a way for "fans who can't get enough of a topic to sort of stuff their face with it."
The camp story was one Louis had been personally obsessing over since it happened back in 2005, when, as he put it, "I was a high schooler home for the summer and word of the caper my friend had pulled off at Camp Ramah trickled back to LA." When the prankster's cousin got married last summer, Louis said, "the stories came spilling out from people who weren't even there." Around the same time, I gathered the Forward editors for a three-day strategy session and urged the reporters to dig into longer-term projects, and Louis set about tracking down a variety of sources who'd been at Ramah all those years ago.
"I generally maintain emotional detachment from the articles I write, but I was deeply moved to hear the prank's ringleaders wishing they could take it back," Louis said. "Their sensitivity all these years later in a way attests to the values they learned and practiced at camp, and suffused this lighthearted tale with the richness of hindsight."
Behind every award-winning byline is the invisible hand — and heart — of an empathetic editor, and this one benefited from the thoughtful stewardship of Lauren Markoe, who runs our news coverage, and said she "was taken aback" when it arrived in her inbox.
"It was not news, it was not on his beat, its theme was not, on its face, Jewish, and it was about six times as long as the typical Forward story," Lauren recalled. Then she dug in.
"Sometimes other people's tales from camp or college just don't make sense in the telling: you had to be there," she said. "Yet Louis had, with plentiful and vivid images and second-hand recollections, managed to make me feel as if I were an insider to this story. He made me care about what had happened many years ago at a camp 3,000 miles away."
Lauren had one question for Louis: "Does this story really need to be 7,000 words?" Yes, he said emphatically and without hesitation.
It didn't, actually. Lauren cut it by almost half, with the sensitivity of a skilled surgeon. "We owed the reader a more compact version," she explained, "something that could be read in a single sitting." Together, they delivered a piece the AJPA judges said did what the very best feature stories do: "surprise, delight, and make the reader think."
In our digital age, one of the most important journalism skills is crafting headlines — that's how we get readers to engage with our work among the myriad of options on the internet. One of my favorite parts of my job is watching our staff workshop headlines via Slack, a true hive mind at work. PJ Grisar, a culture reporter, won for this trio of awesome headlines:
"Often my best headlines are the ones I don't think too much about," PJ said. "A lot of times this is a collaborative process. My editor, Adam Langer, is very good at generating headlines, and I sometimes forget who did what."
On Shatner, PJ said, "it is really just my sentiment laid out: the news is upfront, the parenthetical tells you my view on it." Shatner, he said, "is kind of pompous" and frequently abusive on Twitter. So, "not to dissect the frog too much, but I'd want to let space — imagined in Star Trek as a more enlightened realm where divisions between people and species break down — know that such a difficult personality is coming its way."
On Larry David, PJ said he started with a straightforward "What the Talmud has to say about Larry David's latest gaffe," and Adam pushed him to punch it up with "the coffee and the KKK dude," the specifics. "The lesson here: sometimes the most direct headline is the best," he said. "A question is always good, too. It tells the reader what the article is out to answer."
PJ also picked up a feature writing honorable mention for one of my favorite things we published in 2021, “How Jewish is Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah?’ A Forward investigation in 9 verses." The germ of this project was planted when former President Donald Trump played the song (twice) at the Republican National Convention in 2020, and watered when President Joe Biden used it at his pre-inaugural memorial for people felled by COVID-19.
"At this point — seeing this presented in two diametrically opposed contexts, but both somehow misbegotten — I figured I had to do a story," PJ explained. "What does this song mean? Were Jews right to object or claim or have this kind of proprietary attitude? I knew Leonard Cohen's was not the version most people know. Had it transcended him? Does it matter what he meant?
"Cut to me reading Alan Light's book on "Hallelujah;" I believe he was the first person I spoke to. Light actually was inspired to write it while attending Kol Nidre services at Beit Simchat Torah, so he had a Jewish experience of it," PJ continued. "Daniel Kahn sang this song in Yiddish — a Jewish language. I had to have him. I interviewed the cantor from Leonard Cohen's home synagogue and learned that Cohen liked a version of IDF soldiers singing it in Hebrew.
"It goes on like this, and it kept going. Anytime it showed up in a Jewish context I tried to track down the people involved."
