AJS Dissertation Completion Fellowship Competition

Fellowship Recipients

Carrie CiFers
University of Virginia, Department of Religious Studies
“Deciding Dinah: An Investigation in the Narrative Ethics of Genesis 34 and Its Re-Presentation in Jubilees, Josephus’ Judean Antiquities, and Joseph and Aseneth”

Molly Theodora Oringer
UCLA, Department of Anthropology
“Spatial Relations: Post-War Rehabilitation and the Afterlives of Jewish Terrains in Lebanon”

Steven Weiss Samols
University of Southern California, Department of History
“Capturing Difference, Making History: The Photobook as a Jewish Artifact”

Rebekah Van Sant-Clark
University of Oxford, Department of Theology and Religion
“Re-presenting Dislocation: The Poetics of Exile and Wilderness in Ancient Jewish Texts”

Honorary Fellow

Patrick Angiolillo
New York University, Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
“Praying By the Name: Divine Epithets in Ancient Jewish Prayer”

Finalists

Sarah Greenberg
Cornell University, Department of Government
“‘The Law Is Not in Heaven’: Authority and Covenant in Jewish Political Thought”

Philip Keisman
CUNY Graduate Center, Department of Modern European History
“‘If in a Town With a Post Office, Go to the Local Post Office’: A German-Jewish Mission to Civilize in the Central European Borderlands””

Fellowship Recipients

Maggie Carlton
University of Michigan, Department of History
"Mothering the Race: Racial Uplift and Motherhood in Interwar Detroit"

Matthew Dudley
Yale University, Department of History
"Into the Anti-Archive: Jewish Law, Family, and Ottoman Imperial Administration in the Early Modern Cairo Geniza"

Rebekah Haigh
Princeton University, Department of Religion
"Scripting Identity: (En)Gendering Violence in the War Scroll and the Book of Revelation"

Honorary Fellows

Shirelle Doughty
University of California, Berkeley, Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures
"Women and Haskalah: Rethinking Women's Role in the Development of Modern Hebrew and Yiddish Literatures"

Eliav Grossman
Princeton University, Department of Religion
"The New Mishnah: Rabbinic Literature Between Late Antiquity and Early Islam"

Fellowship Recipients

ANNA BAND
University of Chicago, Department of History 
“At Home in My Room: Jewish Spaces of Longing and Belonging in World War I through Weimar Berlin”

BENNY BAR-LAVI
University of Chicago, Department of History 
“Figures of Godless Immanence: Judaism and Islam in the Christian Political Discourses of Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Europe”

AMANDA SIEGEL
University of California, Berkeley,Department of Comparative Literature 
“Jewish-Argentine Literature: Its Origins, Its Others, and Its ‘Afterlives’”

HANNAH ZAVES-GREENE
New York University, Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies
“Able to Be American: American Jews and the Public Charge Provision in United States Immigration Policy, 1891–1934”

Honorary Fellows

DANIELLA FARAH
Stanford University, Department of History 
“Forming Iranian Jewish Identities: Education, National Belonging, the Jewish Press, and Integration, 1945–1981”

NICOLE FREEMAN
The Ohio State University, Department of History
“Our Children Are Our Future: Child Care, Education, and Rebuilding Jewish Life in Poland after the Holocaust, 1944–1950”

The AJS also recognizes the following finalists:

SAMUEL CATLIN
University of Chicago, Department of Comparative Literature and the Divinity School
“The Rest is Literature: Midrash, Secularism, and the Institution of ‘Theory’”

SAMUEL SHUMAN
University of Michigan, Departments of Anthropology and Judaic Studies
“Cutting Out the Middleman: Displacement and Distrust in the Global Diamond Industry”

SOPHIA SOBKO
University of California, Berkeley, Graduate School of Education
“Weaponized as White: The Contradictions of White, Soviet Jewish Assimilation in the United States”

DIKLA YOGEV
University of Toronto, Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies
“Police Legitimacy among the Haredim in Israel”

ROBIN BULLER, Department of History, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
“Sephardi Immigrants in Paris: Navigating Community, Culture, and Citizenship between France and the Ottoman Empire, 1918–1945”

BAR GUZI, Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University
“Insisting on God: Naturalistic Theism in Twentieth-Century American Jewish Thought”

NECHAMA JUNI, Department of Religious Studies, Brown University
“Halakhic Women: Gender, Practice, and Obligation in American Orthodox Judaism”

TAMAR MENASHE, Department of History, Columbia University
“The Imperial Supreme Court and Jews in Cross-Confessional Legal Cultures in Germany, 1495–1690”

CHAYA NOVE, Department of Linguistics, CUNY Graduate Center
“Phonetic Contrast in New York Hasidic Yiddish Vowels”

REBECCA POLLACK, Department of Art History, CUNY Graduate Center
“Contextualizing British Holocaust Memorials and Museums: Form, Content, and Politics”

MIRIAM SCHULZ, Department of Germanic Languages, Columbia University
“Gornisht iz nit fargesn, keyner iz nit fargesn: Soviet Yiddish Culture, the Holocaust, and Networks of Memory, 1941–1991”

BEATA SZYMKOW, Department of History, Stanford University
“The Emergence of Polish Lwow: Violence and State Building in a Multiethnic City, 1918–1939”

MIRIAM-SIMMA WALFISH, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University
“Rabbis, Parents, and the Dynamics of Cultural Transmission in the Babylonian World”

MATTHEW BRITTINGHAM, Department of Religion, Emory University
“‘Our Jewish Workingmen May be Proud of Our Torah and of Our Religion’: Jewish Immigrants, Judaism, and the Yiddish Mass-Market (1900–1930)”

PRATIMA GOPALAKRISHNAN, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University
“Domestic Labor and Marital Obligations in the Ancient Jewish Household”

SARA HALPERN, Department of History, The Ohio State University
“‘These Unfortunate People’: The International Humanitarian Response to European Jewish Refugees in Shanghai, 1945–1951”

CHEN MANDEL-EDREI, Department of Comparative Literature, University of Maryland
“Planned Encounters: The Aesthetics and Ethics of Modern Hasidic Narratives—A Historical and Literary Perspective”

ADI NESTER, Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Colorado, Boulder
“People of the Book: Biblical Music Dramas and the Hermeneutic Formation of Collectivity”

NOAM SIENNA, Department of History, University of Minnesota
“Making and Reading Jewish Books in North Africa, 1700–1900”

DANIELLE WILLARD-KYLE, Department of History, Rutgers University
“Living in Liminal Spaces: Refugees in Italian Displaced Persons Camps, 1945–1951”

MEIRA WOLKENFELD, Department of Talmud, Yeshiva University
“Scent and Self: The Sense of Smell in the Cultural World of the Babylonian Talmud”

The AJS ALSO RECOGNIZES THE FOLLOWING FINALIST:

C. TOVA MARKENSON, Departments of Theatre and Drama, Northwestern University
“Performing Jewish Femininity: Prostitution and Protest on the Latin American Yiddish Stage (1900–1939)”

AYELET BRINN, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Miss Amerike: The Yiddish Press’s Encounter with the United States

GEOFFREY LEVIN, Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Another Nation: Israel, American Jews, and Palestinian Rights, 1949–1977

DANIEL MAY, Department of Religion, Princeton University
After Zion: Exception, Plurality, and Tragedy in Twentieth Century Jewish Political Thought

MARIS ROWE-MCCULLOCH, Department of History, University of Toronto
The Holocaust in a City under Siege: Occupation, Mass Violence, and Genocide in the Russian City of Rostov-on-Don, 1941–1943

ADRIEN SMITH, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Stanford University
The Functions of Yiddish: Jewish Language and Style in the Late Soviet Union, in Comparative Perspective

ALLISON SOMOGYI, Department of History, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
“Mine Was Not Hell, It was Purgatory”: Female Diarists and Jewish Life in Budapest under the Arrow Cross Regime, October 1944–February 1945

M ADRYAEL TONG, Department of Theology, Fordham University 
“Given As A Sign”: Circumcision and Bodily Discourse in Late Antique Judaism and Christianity

ALEX WEISBERG, Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, New York University
Before There Was Nature: Land, Ethics, and New Materialism in the Early Rabbinic Sabbatical Year Laws

SHLOMO ZUCKIER, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University
Flesh and Blood: The Reception of Biblical Sacrifice in Selected Talmudic Sources in Comparative Context

The AJS also recognizes the following finalist:

SARAH WOLF, Department of Religious Studies, Northwestern University 
The Rabbinic Legal Imagination: Between Praxis and Scholasticism in the Babylonian Talmud

AJ BERKOVITZ, Department of Religion, Princeton University
The Life of Psalms in Late Antiquity

SANDRA FOX, Departments of Hebrew & Judaic Studies and History, New York University
‘Here, We're Real Jews’: Nationalism, Simulation, and the Production of ‘Authentic Jews’ in Postwar American Jewish Summer Camps, 1945-1980

JENNIFER GRAYSON, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
Jews in the Political Life of Abbasid Baghdad, 908-1258

YAAKOV HERSKOVITZ, Department of Near Eastern Studies, University of Michigan
Linguistic Limbo – Writing and Rewriting in Hebrew and Yiddish

DANIEL HERSKOWITZ, Department of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford
The Jewish Reception of Martin Heidegger's Philosophy

ELIZABETH IMBER, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University
Jewish Political Lives in the British Empire: Zionism, Nationalism, and Imperialism in
Palestine, India, and South Africa, 1917-1948

TAMARA MORSEL-EISENBERG, Department of History, University of Pennsylvania
Reorganizing Halakhic Knowledge : Rabbinic Responsa in Early Modern Europe, The
Disruption of a Religious Scholarly Culture

The AJS also recognizes the following finalists:

MICHAEL ROM, Department of History, Yale University
Between Democracy and Dictatorship: Jewish Politics and National Identity in Brazil, 1945-1985

VINCENZO SELLERI, Department of History, CUNY Graduate Center
The Juridical Communities of the Kingdom of Naples: Jewish-Christian Municipal Life in Fifteenth-Century Apulia

TERESA WALCH, Department of History, University of California, San Diego
Degenerate Spaces: The Coordination of Space in Nazi Germany

AVIV BEN-OR, Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, Brandeis University
The Possibilities of an Arab-Jewish Poetics: A Study of the Arabic and Hebrew Fiction of Shimon Ballas and Sami Michael

SARAH GARIBOVA, Department of History, University of Michigan 
Memories for a Blessing: Jewish Mourning Practices and Commemorative Activities in Postwar Belarus and Ukraine, 1945-1991

BRENDAN GOLDMAN, Department of History, Johns Hopkins University 
Jews in the Latin Levant: Conquest, Continuity and Adaptation in the Medieval Mediterranean

SONIA GOLLANCE, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Pennsylvania 
Harmonious Instability: (Mixed) Dancing and Partner Choice in German-Jewish and Yiddish Literature

SIMCHA GROSS, Department of Religious Studies, Yale University 
Empire and Neighbors: Babylonian Rabbinic Identity in Its Imperial and Local Contexts

YAEL LANDMAN, Department of Bible, Yeshiva University 
The Biblical Law of Bailment in Its Ancient Near Eastern Contexts

JASON LUSTIG, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles 
'A Time to Gather': A History of Jewish Archives in the Twentieth Century

The AJS also recognizes the following finalists:

MAX BAUMGARTEN, Department of History, University of California, Los Angeles 
From Watts to Rodney King: Peoplehood, Politics, and Citizenship in Jewish Los Angeles, 1965-1992

MARC HERMAN, Department of Religious Studies, University of Pennsylvania 
Enumeration of the Commandments in the Judeo-Arabic World: Approaches to Medieval Rabbanite Jurisprudence

CONSTANZE KOLBE, Department of History, Indiana University 
Trans-Imperial Networks: Jewish Merchant Mobility Across and Beyond the Mediterranean in the Nineteenth Century

JAMES REDFIELD, Department of Religious Studies, Stanford University 
The Sages and the World: Categorizing Culture in Early Rabbinic Law