The American Academy for Jewish Research is pleased to announce the winner of its annual Salo Baron Prize for the best first book in Jewish studies published in calendar year 2025. The prize honors:

Elizabeth E. Imber, Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism (Stanford University Press)

In Uncertain Empire: Jews, Nationalism, and the Fate of British Imperialism (Stanford University Press), Elizabeth E. Imber offers a deeply original and elegant rethinking of Jewish political life in the age of empire. She moves between Mandatory Palestine, India, South Africa, and the United Kingdom in the decades between the two world wars, situating Zionism and its alternatives within the wider political and intellectual ecology of the British Empire and developing “uncertainty” as a defining condition of Jewish thought and action. Rather than confining this uncertainty to canonical texts, Imber shows how it structured the lived political horizons of Jewish actors—intellectuals, communal leaders, and policymakers—whose commitments were formed within, and extended across, multiple imperial contexts. She also illuminates overlooked connections between Zionist thinkers and anticolonial movements elsewhere in the empire. Grounded in a wide and multilingual archival base, the book integrates individual biography with a larger analytical argument to produce a genuinely unified social history of ideas attentive to both local particularity and global structure. Beautifully written, conceptually precise, and ambitious in scope, Uncertain Empire is a pathbreaking book that will reshape how scholars understand Zionism, empire, and the broader history of Jewish political thought in the twentieth century.

Honorable Mention is awarded to:
Eli Rubin, Kabbalah and the Rupture of Modernity: An Existential History of Chabad Hasidism, Stanford University Press.

The American Academy for Jewish Research (www.aajr.org) is the oldest professional organization of Judaica scholars in North America. Its membership consists of senior scholars whose work has made a major impact on their field.

The Baron Prize honors the memory of the distinguished historian Salo W. Baron, a long-time president of the AAJR, who taught at Columbia University for many decades. It is one of the signal honors that can be bestowed on a young scholar in Jewish Studies and a sign of the excellence, vitality, and creativity of the field.