2026 Research Award Recipients
HBI awards grants to support research or artistic projects in Jewish women’s and gender studies across a range of disciplines. Awards are made to graduate students, early career, and established researchers. The proposals are subject to review by members of HBI’s Academic Advisory Committee and a subset of this group acts as the final Research Awards Selection Committee.
The HBI Research Awards are funded by gifts from the HBI Board of Advisors. The M. William Levin and Janice Metz Levin Research Awards on Gender and Jewish-Black Relations supports junior scholars whose work explores gender and Black-Jewish relations. The Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Awards on Women, Gender and the Holocaust supports scholarship on women, gender and the Holocaust. This year, HBI granted eight awards totaling $40,000.
Translating Women in Exile: Mascha Kaléko’s Der Gott der kleinen Webfehler (The God of Small Weaving Mistakes)
Elisabeth Becker-Topkara, Max Weber Institute for Sociology, Heidelberg University
This award is funded by the Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Awards on Women, Gender and the Holocaust
This project will produce the first English translation of Mascha Kaléko’s major prose work, Der Gott der kleinen Webfehler (The God of Small Weaving Mistakes), restoring a silenced Jewish woman’s voice to literary history while examining how gender shaped experiences of Holocaust-era persecution and exile. The proposed translation addresses critical gaps in available Holocaust literature by Jewish women, providing English-speaking audiences with direct access to primary source material that counters the male-dominated canon.
Paper Brigade: A New Musical About Literature and Resilience
Debra Caplan, Baruch College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York
Cecelia Raker, Independent
This award is funded by the Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Awards on Women, Gender and the Holocaust
Paper Brigade is a new musical inspired by the true story of the women of the Vilna Ghetto’s Paper Brigade, a group of writers, teachers, and intellectuals who risked their lives to save Yiddish literature from Nazi destruction. The show tells the stories of two women who risk everything to save each other, their daughter, and Vilna’s irreplaceable archive of Yiddish culture during and after the Holocaust. It is a story about cultural resistance, the power of art in the face of fascism, and an extraordinary bond between two women in a time when women’s stories and contributions were all too often erased.
Between Laws: Legal Culture, Gender, and Jewish Identity in the Medieval Mediterranean, 1250-1492
Sarah Ifft Decker, Rhodes College
Jewish leaders in the medieval Mediterranean saw self-governance as crucial to the strength and cohesion of their community. However, ordinary Jews developed a complex array of relationships to the legal institutions of the majority. This project explores the interplay between halakhah (Jewish law) and Christian-dominated notarial culture in the western Mediterranean in the 13th-15th centuries, with a focus on how Jewish women navigated between legal systems.
It Was the Women: Gender and Academic Migration in the United States, 1967-1993
Kirsten Fermaglich, Michigan State University
This project will use gender to explore the post-World War II wave of academic Jewish migration that brought families to Michigan in the 1960s/1970s. Although these families had migrated from New York and Chicago to East Lansing because of the men’s academic work, it was the religious lives of women and children that reshaped the experience of American Judaism, in one case, inspiring the creation of an alternative synagogue. The few historical studies of Jewish migration within the United States have focused primarily on peddlers and suburbanites, while studies of Jews entering academia after World War II have emphasized their intellectual lives, ignoring their impact on Jewish communities around the country. Using archival research and oral histories, this research will trace these untold stories in American Jewish history.
The Beggar Bar: A Graphic History
Sheer Ganor, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Golan Moskowitz, Tulane University
This project explores the little-known history of the Beggar Bar, a cabaret bar that was founded by Valeska Gert and that operated in Manhattan between 1941-1945. Gert, a German-Jewish avant-garde dancer and shock artist, was forced to flee her homeland due to the threat of Nazi violence. The bar became a gathering site for bohemians, outcasts and voyeurs who enjoyed the chaotic atmosphere that Gert carefully curated there. Moving beyond existing scholarship that focuses primarily on Gert’s aesthetic contributions, this work approaches the Beggar Bar as a queer and Jewish space. The study pays close attention to the bar’s embeddedness both in its immediate geography of Greenwich Village as well as in the imagined landscape of the German-Jewish diaspora that emerged in the 1930s. Rooted in elaborate historical research and source analysis, this project takes on the format of graphic history, fitting with Gert’s creative approach to life.
Daughters, Migrants, and (Sex)Workers: Prostitution in the World of Eastern European Jewry
Aleksandra Jakubczak, Center for the Study of Antisemitism, Technical University of Berlin
This project explores the roles of Jewish women who engaged in sex work in their families, communities, and the economy in Eastern Europe between the 1870s and 1930s. Drawing on the latest trends in the study of commercial sex, it reconceptualizes Jewish sex workers as active participants in the labor market and household economies, as well as migrants. This approach departs from previous studies that simplified sex work as the trafficking of women, echoing contemporary reformers and Jewish organizations fighting against so-called “white slavery.” This reconceptualization allows for a better understanding of the lives of Jewish women in commercial sex.
Listening Beyond Speech: Feminist Approaches to Silence and Gesture in Holocaust Women’s Testimonies
Laura Miñano Mañero, University of Valencia
This award is funded by the Ilse Hertha Strauss Rothschild Research Awards on Women, Gender and the Holocaust
This project asks how Jewish women’s Holocaust testimonies narrate sexual and gendered violence through silence, hesitation, gesture, and multilingual expression. Its specific aim is to reframe silence not as absence but as a gendered, strategic form of agency, expanding the category of “testimony” to include embodied and para-verbal forms of narration. The project contributes to scholarship on Gender and the Holocaust by centering women’s oral histories that resist explicit disclosure, while also addressing the archival marginalization of Sephardic, Spanish- and Ladino-speaking survivors.
The Yemeni Women of Kinneret
Ayelet Tsabari, Independent
The research involved in this project will culminate in a historical novel that will trace the untold stories of the Yemeni women of Kinneret—a farming community comprised of Yemeni Jews who settled by the Sea of the Galilee in 1911—and intersect them with the stories of women from neighboring community of Ashkenazi Jews (the famed Kvutzat Kinneret). It will explore how the prejudiced treatment of Yemeni farmers by Kvutzat Kinneret, resulting in the traumatic expulsion of the Yemenis after 18 years at the site, affected lasting relationships and fueled ethnic tensions in Israel. It will also explore the ways women negotiated the fraught relationship, while also facing gender-based discrimination within their own communities, and examine how the erasure of Yemeni narrative, memory, and history in Kinneret shaped the community and informed notions of Yemeni identity in Israel today.