After three straight years without a National Magazine Award nomination, The Nation last year was nominated and won an Ellie in the reviews and criticism category. This year it’s nominated for two more NMAs, another nod in the reviews and criticism category, as well as one in the public interest category. Today, as part of an ongoing series showcasing this year's NMA nominees, Media Life excerpts passages from two of The Nation’s pieces that were nominated.

Public Interest
One of The Nation’s nominations is for public interest, for Joshua Kors’ two-part series “How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits,” which ran in the April issue, and “Specialist Town Takes His Case to Washington,” which ran on Oct. 15. Here’s an excerpt of “How Specialist Town Lost His Benefits”:

In the Army’s separations manual it’s called Regulation 635-200, Chapter 5-13: “Separation Because of Personality Disorder.” It’s an alluring choice for a cash-strapped military because enacting it is quick and cheap. The Department of Veterans Affairs doesn’t have to provide medical care to soldiers dismissed with personality disorder. That's because under Chapter 5-13, personality disorder is a pre-existing condition. The VA is only required to treat wounds sustained during service.

Soldiers discharged under 5-13 can’t collect disability pay either. To receive those benefits, a soldier must be evaluated by a medical board, which must confirm that he is wounded and that his wounds stem from combat. The process takes several months, in contrast with a 5-13 discharge, which can be wrapped up in a few days.

If a soldier dismissed under 5-13 hasn’t served out his contract, he has to give back a slice of his re-enlistment bonus as well. That amount is often larger than the soldier’s final paycheck. As a result, on the day of their discharge, many injured vets learn that they owe the Army several thousand dollars.

One military official says doctors at his base are doing more than withholding this information from wounded soldiers; they’re actually telling them the opposite: that if they go along with a 5-13, they’ll get to keep their bonus and receive disability and medical benefits. The official, who demanded anonymity, handles discharge papers at a prominent Army facility. He says the soldiers he works with know they don't have a personality disorder. “But the doctors are telling them, this will get you out quicker, and the VA will take care of you. To stay out of Iraq, a soldier will take that in a heartbeat. What they don’t realize is, those things are lies. The soldiers, they don't read the fine print,” he says. “They don’t know to ask for a med board. They’re taking the word of the doctors. Then they sit down with me and find out what a 5-13 really means—they’re shocked.”

Reviews and Criticism
The Nation’s other Ellie nod is in the reviews and criticism category, for which it took home an NMA last year. This year the magazine’s nominated for three reviews by William Deresiewicz: “Cafe Society,” from the May 14 issue, “The Imaginary Jew,” from May 28 and “Fuku Americanus,” from November 26. Here’s an excerpt from “The Imaginary Jew”:

While there are young Jewish writers aplenty, no important voice has emerged to speak about contemporary Jewish life. Jonathan Lethem’s “The Fortress of Solitude,” perhaps the finest recent novel by a young Jewish writer, is not about being Jewish at all; it’s about the quintessentially American subject of race. But there have always been Jewish writers who have chosen to speak about things other than being Jewish (most notably, in the Bellow-Roth generation, Norman Mailer and J.D. Salinger). What's really telling about the current state of Jewish fiction is that even those prominent young writers who do speak about Jewish experience don't speak about contemporary experience.

In other words, they don’t speak about their own experience. The most celebrated of these authors are probably the two under review here and Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer’s “Everything Is Illuminated” reaches back to the Holocaust and the grandparental generation (as does Daniel Mendelsohn’s acclaimed recent memoir “The Lost”). Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is set in New York and Prague during the war; his new novel, a work of counterfactual history like Roth’s “The Plot Against America,” in an imaginary Jewish autonomous region in the Alaskan panhandle. About half the stories in Nathan Englander’s PEN/Malamud Award-winning “For the Relief of Unbearable Urges” are set in the Orthodox world of his youth, but the two strongest are allegorical tales of European persecution, and his new novel takes place in Argentina during the “dirty war” of the late 1970s.

There’s nothing wrong with any of this, but the phenomenon does cry out for explanation. It’s hard enough giving reasons why someone chooses to write something, let alone why he chooses not to, but Chabon’s work offers a clue. The narrator-protagonist of his first novel, “The Mysteries of Pittsburgh,” is the son of a Jewish gangster. The narrator-protagonist of his second novel, “Wonder Boys,” is a gentile married to a Jew, and his account of her family’s Passover Seder draws its brilliance and wicked humor from his outsider’s defamiliarizing gaze. Chabon’s detective novella “The Final Solution” centers on the relationship between a young German-Jewish refugee and Sherlock Holmes. “Gentlemen of the Road,” the tale just serialized in The New York Times Magazine, follows a group of adventurers in the tenth-century Jewish kingdom of the Khazars. It’s safe to say that Chabon likes his Jews exotic or, more to the point, wants to recharge Judaism with a sense of the exotic, a sense that the horizon of Jewish experience is wider than the boundaries of middle-class American life. As for Englander, who grew up on Long Island, he recently quipped in an interview about his new work that “in terms of personal experience, my only other option was to set this novel at the Roosevelt Field mall.”