The Sydney Taylor Shmooze

On January 6, 2021, the Association of Jewish Libraries held a Zoom event to do a deep dive into the history, practices, and significance of the Real Sydney Taylor Book Award (est. 1968) and of the new Mock Awards created in 2020. You can watch the hour-long program here.

    As we are sure you remember, The Sydney Taylor Shmooze is a mock award blog created to encourage discussion of books eligible for the Sydney Taylor Book Award. The purpose is to grow awareness of the genre and of the criteria for the Award, and to help readers critically consider Jewish literature for youth. Well, now we've experienced almost a full year of Jewish kidlit together and it's time to think about handing out some mock awards! Here's what you can expect in the upcoming months: We will continue posting book reviews for eligible 2020 titles through the end of the December, 2020. Monday-Friday January 4-8, 2021 Voting Round 1 . Anyone may vote (except for current members of AJL's Sydney Taylor Book Award committee). Voters may select one favorite title in each of three categories (Picture Books, Middle Grade, Young Adult). Every book reviewed on the blog this year will be on the ballot. Monday-Friday January 11-15, 2021 Voting Round 2 . The top books th...

The Sydney Taylor Shmooze is off to a great start, and at this time we are opening our reviewing program to additional volunteers. There are still over fifty books left to evaluate this year, and we need you! Please fill out this form to be considered as a reviewer for The Shmooze. A review on a mock award blog is a little different than one in a review journal. The main focus is on how or if the book meets the criteria for the award. We currently do not have access to publisher review copies for this blog, so we do ask that reviewers try to locate the books in a local or Judaic library. If you decide to purchase your own copy, we suggest supporting your local independent bookseller or using Bookshop.org .

The Sydney Taylor Shmooze won’t be very shmoozy if we only talk to ourselves. What we’re looking for is a lot more voices and perspectives. What we need is reviewers. A review on a mock award blog is a little different than one in a review journal. The main focus is on how or if the book meets the criteria for the award. We currently do not have access to publisher review copies for this blog, so we do ask that reviewers try to locate the books in a local or Judaic library. If this sounds like something you’d be interested in doing, please fill out this form . Many thanks!

We are delighted to welcome you to The Sydney Taylor Shmooze . We couldn’t be more excited to be starting this blog and to have you as a part of it. Here at the Shmooze , we’ve been following mock award blogs such as Heavy Medal and Calling Caldecott from their infancy. It feels amazing to join the club at last and talk about our favorite topic, Jewish children’s books. Book awards are tricky things. Sometime the most buzzed about books lose. Sometimes obscure books win. Awards are incredibly challenging to predict, no matter how many award committees you’ve been on in the past. Sometimes it’s hard to guess the final result even when you’re in the room. The fun of mock award blogs is they allow for thoughtful discussion of many more titles than those few that will make the final list. They let us think about the criteria , explore the books and find things we didn’t see at first. In the end, it’s okay if we don’t guess the winner. What will matter is being able to share so m...