2015 Research Award Winners

Yeshuv & Israel

Lilach Rosenberg
Bar-Ilan University
“Be Fruitful and Multiply? Births and Abortions in the Jewish Community of Mandatory Palestine, 1920–1948”

Creative Arts

Helène Aylon
The Jewish Museum
“Kadosh Kadosh Kadosh: All Rise for Women on a Beit Din”

Ellen Cassedy
Yiddish Book Center Translation Fellowship Program
“A Change of Place: Yenta Mash’s Women”

Joy Ladin
Yeshiva University
“‘I Am What I Will Be’: Meeting God at the Burning Bush of Becoming”

Sarah Swartz
“Walls and Bridges: Stories from a Daughter of Holocaust Survivors”

Rona Yefman
Columbia University
“The Radio Lady 1948 / Netiva Ben Yehuda”

Linda Zisquit
Bar-Ilan University
“From the Notebooks of Korach’s Daughter”

History

Matan Boord
Tel Aviv University
“Masculinities and Family Among Urban Members of the Zionist Labor Movement in Mandate Palestine”

Sonia Gollance
University of Pennsylvania
“Harmonious Instability: (Mixed) Dancing and Partner Choice in German-Jewish and Yiddish Literature”

Rachel Gordan
Hadassah Brandeis Institute SIR
“Alfred Kinsey and the Making of a Post-WWII American Jewish Sexuality”

Geraldine Gudefin
Brandeis University
“Navigating the Civil and Religious Worlds: Jewish Immigrants & Marital Laws in France and the United States (1881–1939)”

Robin Judd
The Ohio State University
“Jewish Brides, Soldier Husbands, and Strategies for Reconstruction, 1943–1955”

Melissa Klapper
Rowan University
“American Jewish Women’s Travel Narratives, 1865–1939”

Laura Leibman
Reed College
“From Slave to Merchant Princess: How Early American Jews Used Religion to Shift their Race”

Benjamin Steiner
Brandeis University
“The Rothschild Ketubah: The Modern Voice of Traditional Jewish Marriage”

Rebecca Winer
Villanova University
“‘Sweet Milk’: Wet-nurses, Mothers and Christian, Jewish and Muslims Relations in the Medieval Crown of Aragon, c. 1250–1400”

Biography

Pnina Abir-Am
WSRC, Brandeis University
“Jewish Teenage Girl ‘Illegal Immigrant’ Turned High Tech Inventor: Ora Kedem’s Trajectory from Central European Refugee to Leadership in Israeli Scientific Institutions”

Judaism

Shana Strauch Schick
Haifa University
“From Dungeon to Haven: The Cultural-Historical Contexts of Competing Theories of Gestation in Leviticus Rabbah and the Babylonian Talmud”

Film & Video

Diana Groó
University of Theatre and Film Arts Budapest
“The Blood Libel / The Lawyer”

Gender, Culture, Religion & Law

Ayelet Libson
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem
“Beyond the Fault Line: Revisiting Rabbinic Divorce Law”

Rivkah Lubitch
“Memoir about Life as an Advocate on the Beit Din in Israel”

Families, Children and the Holocaust

Golan Moskowitz
Brandeis University
“Wild, Outside, in the Night: Maurice Sendak, Queer American Jewishness, and the Child”

Diaspora Studies

Rachel Bernstein
Brandeis University
“On the Market: A Study of Millennial Jewish Young Adults Seeking Identity”

Ronit Irshai
Bar-Ilan Univesity
“A Jubilee Book in Honor of Prof. Tamar Ross”

Katka Reszke
Hadassah Brandeis Institute SIR
“The Meshugene Effect”