Hagley’s Roger Horowitz Earns Top Prize from American Historical Association

Hagley Museum and Library announced today that Roger Horowitz, director of Hagley’s Center for the History of Business, Technology and Society, received the distinguished Dorothy Rosenberg Prize in history of the Jewish diaspora for his book, Kosher USA: How Coke Became Kosher and Other Tales of Modern Food.

The Dorothy Rosenberg Prize recognizes the most distinguished work of scholarship on the history of the Jewish diaspora published in English during the previous calendar year. The prize is awarded annually by the American Historical Association.

Members of the selection committee included: Deborah Dash Moore of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; Julia Phillips Cohen of Vanderbilt University; and Matthias B. Lehmann of the University of California, Irvine. Horowitz was praised by the committee for his work combining “an analysis of Jewish legal questions, modern industrial developments, advertising campaigns, and domestic trends in a fascinating and sweeping study that leaves few aspects of twentieth-century American Jewish history untouched.”

Earlier this year Kosher USA was named an outstanding academic book by Choice magazine and received the National Jewish Book Award in American Jewish Studies.

“We’re so proud of Roger’s scholarly accomplishments,” said Erik Rau, director of Library Services. “His work at Hagley, which includes promoting the collections to researchers and managing Hagley’s grants-in-aid program, requires credibility that can be earned only through the esteem of other scholars. By having been awarded a major prize that recognizes his scholarship using materials here, Roger has strengthened Hagley’s efforts to raise awareness of its collections.”

Horowitz is a historian of American business, technology, and labor and an expert on the nation’s food. In addition to Kosher USA, he is the author of two other books, Putting Meat on the American Table: Taste, Technology, Transformation and Negro and White, Unite and Fight!: A Social History of Industrial Unionism in Meatpacking. He also serves as secretary-treasurer of the Business History Conference, the leading academic organizations for business historians, and teaches at the University of Delaware.