2026 Gala Dinner

Please save the date of October 6, 2026 for the LBI Gala honoring acclaimed novelist Nicole Krauss, the author of international bestsellers including Forest Dark, Great House (a finalist for the National Book Award), and The History of Love, among other books. Her work revolves around topics of memory, identity, loss, and trauma; through her novels, she has investigated the experience of exile and ways that texts and stories uphold cultural memory across generations. Join us as we celebrate our shared commitment to preserving the past for the sake of the present and the future, at Temple Emanu-El, a storied institution of German-speaking Jewry in New York. LBI President David G. Marwell will present the Leo Baeck Medal to Nicole Krauss, featuring remarks by Adam Gopnik. Nicole Krauss has been called “one of America’s most important novelists and an international literary sensation” by the New York Times, “a contemporary master” by Esquire, and “one of American’s greatest writers” by the Financial Times. She is the author of the international bestsellers, Forest Dark, Great House (a finalist for the National Book Award and the Orange Prize) and The History of Love, which won the Saroyan Prize for International Literature and France’s Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger, and was short-listed for the Orange, Médicis, and Femina prizes. Her first novel, Man Walks Into a Room, was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book of the Year. Her short stories have been published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, Harper’s, Esquire, and Best American Short Stories, and were collected in To Be a Man, which received the Wingate Award. Her next novel willl be published in 2027. She was the inaugural Writer-in-Residence at the Zuckerman Mind, Brain and Behavior Institute at Columbia University, and has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy in Berlin, and the Cullman Center at the New York Public Library. Her books have been translated into 38 languages. Adam Gopnik is an internationally bestselling author and longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, where he has spent more than three decades writing fiction, memoir, criticism, humor, and reported pieces, including serving as the magazine’s Paris correspondent. He is the author of numerous acclaimed books, most recently All That Happiness Is (2024), as well as A Thousand Small Sanities, The Real Work, At the Strangers’ Gate, and Paris to the Moon. His work has earned three National Magazine Awards, the George Polk Award for Magazine Reporting, and France’s distinctions of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters and Chevalier of the Legion of Honour. Gopnik is celebrated for his wit, insight, and engaging reflections on literature, history, culture, and contemporary life. If you have any question or would like to learn more about the 2026 Annual Dinner, please email us at [email protected]. We use cookies on our site to enable functionality and analyze traffic. By clicking “I Accept” or “X” on this banner, or using our site, you consent to the use of cookies unless you have disabled them in your browser settings. To learn more, view our Privacy Policy.