Jewish Book Council, founded in 1943, is the longest-running organization devoted exclusively to the support and celebration of Jewish literature.
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Bruce Jay Friedman lived in New York City. A novelist, short story writer, playwright, memoirist, and screenwriter, he was the author of nineteen books, including Stern (1962), A Mother’s Kisses (1964), The Lonely Guy’s Book of Life (1978), and Lucky Bruce: A Literary Memoir (2011). His best-known works of stage and screen include the off-Broadway hit Steambath (1970) and the screenplays for Stir Crazy (1980) and Splash (1984), the latter of which received an Academy Award nomination. As editor of the anthology Black Humor (1965), Friedman helped popularize the distinctive literary style of that name in the United States and was widely regarded as one of its finest practitioners. According to the New York Times, his prose is “a pure pleasure machine.”