HBI Nurtures Field of Jews and Gender With Annual Research Awards
Jan. 15, 2016
By Amy Sessler Powell
Benjamin Steiner spent a summer as a 2013 graduate intern at the HBI, researching the Lieberman clause in the ketubot of the Conservative movement. He nurtured his interest in this topic as he completed his master's degree at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
Now, as a doctoral candidate at Brandeis in American Jewish History, Steiner recently received a junior research award for "The Rothschild Ketubah: The Modern Voice of Traditional Jewish Marriage."
"My time at the HBI was the start of my academic journey. Looking back it seems like one step led to another, and I’m really grateful for their continued support," Steiner said.
At the same time, Helenè Aylon, who will be honored in February with the Women's Caucus for Art's Lifetime Achievement Award for her illustrious career exploring the intersectionality among her feminism, the Orthodox Judaism of her upbringing, and her place in a war-torn world, also received a senior research award for "Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh: All Rise for Women on a Beit Din."
Steiner and Aylon's awards are just two of the 25 research awards the HBI will support over the following year with a total of $75,000. Together, they show the range of support offered by these awards to nurture the careers of junior scholars and to offer continued support to those already established in the field of Jews and gender.
To choose the annual research awards, HBI works with its Academic Advisory Committee ead the proposals and comment over a review period. The process culminates with a daylong meeting at HBI in December to discuss the best proposals. Final decisions are made by Prof. Sylvia Barack Fishman, HBI's co-director and chair of the AAC, along with Prof. Shulamit Reinharz, HBI's founding director, Dr. Lisa Fishbayn Joffe, associate director of HBI and director of the HBI Project on Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law, and HBI academic programs manager, Deborah Olins.
AAC members praise the HBI for offering awards that support the mission of developing fresh ideas about Jews and gender. Professor Jonathan Sarna, past president of the Association for Jewish Studies, the Joseph H. & Belle R. Braun Professor of American Jewish History and Chair of the Hornstein Jewish Professional Leadership Program at Brandeis University said, "these awards have been of great importance in providing assistance and offered publicity to those working in the field of women and gender studies; they have provided encouragement and recognition to those entering the field; and, they have nurtured a generation of scholars."
The research awards divide into sub-categories that include History, Israel and the Yishuv; Families, Children and the Holocaust; Diaspora Studies; Judaism; Gender, Culture, Religion and the Law; Biography; Film and Video; and Arts. Fishman, also the Joseph and Esther Foster Professor of Judaic Studies, explained that, "by supporting the most excellent researchers and artists who focus on Jews and gender, over the past decade and a half, HBI has played a critical role in building the fields of Jewish women's and gender studies."
AAC member Debra R. Kaufman, Professor Emerita and Matthews Distinguished University Professor at Northeastern University said, "Because younger scholars are often the ones in need of support systems early in their careers (if they are to succeed and/or stay in their chosen fields) and because gender is less likely to be as valued an area of research, HBI awards simultaneously provide (through the review system) a form of mentoring toward its applicants and an exploration of topics for which there is little, if any, research/scholarship. In short, the awards encourage, through feedback and grants, the creative and often feminist approach to making heretofore invisible men and women visible and neglected topics a valued pursuit."
Elana Sztokman>, in a blog for Fresh Ideas, once described the HBI junior research award she received in 2006, as a key component of her early writing career. The award, for a study of the identities of Orthodox men, grew into her first book, "The Men’s Section: Orthodox Jewish Men in an Egalitarian World," published in the HBI Series on Jewish Women along with her second co-written with Dr. Chaya Rosenfeld Gorsetman, titled, "Educating in the Divine Image: Gender Issues in Orthodox Jewish Day Schools." Both books received National Jewish Book Awards.
"I am enormously grateful to HBI and indebted to the organization for sending me on this incredible journey, and for turning me into a writer," Sztokman wrote.
Fishman noted that the "sustained relationships between HBI and Research Award recipients add up to far more than the sum of their parts. In reunions in the United States and Israel, Research Award recipients have testified how profoundly their relationships with HBI — and with each other — have nurtured and transformed their professional lives."
Concluded Sarna, "Practically everyone who has worked in the field of Jewish women’s studies has benefited from an HBI fellowship at some time or another. The very fact that there is such a field owes much to HBI and its efforts."
Amy Sessler Powell is the HBI Communications Director.