Current and Past Prize Recipients

2024-2025 Student Awards Winners

  • Aryan Sawant is a 2024 recipient of the Goor Prize for his paper, Caste Dismemberment through Aliyah: How Cochin Jews Used Zionism as a Tool for Social Justice. The paper builds on David Mandelbaum and Walter Fischel’s analyses of social stratification within Cochin Jewish society, with an emphasis on the analysis of lost and undiscovered documents found at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life. The paper argues that— despite internal divisions and differing motivations, Cochin Jews unified in their struggle for aliyah and lessened barriers between their respective communities.Aryan is a Political Science major at UC Berkeley. His academic and research interests focus on Dharmic communities and their interactions with other sociopolitical groups, particularly through historical and epistemological frameworks.
  • Dylan Skolnik is an undergraduate recipient of the 2024 Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, and has been awarded $2,500. His winning essay was entitled, And Where a Spurt of Our Blood Falls Will Sprout: A Jewish Theory of Identity Creation as Founded in the Lack.
  • Shirelle Maya Doughty is a graduate recipient of the 2024 Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, along with a cash prize of $2,500, for her paper, The “Sin of Writing” in the Yiddish Press: Kol mevaser (1862-73) and the Transition from Oral to Written Public Spheres.
  • Leo Franks is a graduate student winner of the 2024 Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, and has been awarded $2,500 for his paper, The anti-history of anti-antisemitism: Fred Kormis’ Holocaust sculpture.

Past Student Awards Winners

2022-23 Goor Prize winners:

  • Shirelle Maya Doughty is the graduate recipient of the 2023 Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, and was awarded $2,500 for her submission Rethinking the Relationship between Women and Haskalah Literature.
  • Hannah Hillers was an undergraduate recipient of the 2023 Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, and has been awarded $2,500. Her winning paper was entitled Iraqi Jewish Identity from the Farhud to Israeli Mizrahi Identity Building.
  • Peter Colias was an undergraduate recipient of the 2023 Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies, along with a cash prize of $2,500, for his paper The History of the Samaritan Israelites.

2022-23 Brinner Graduate Fellowship winner:

  • Oren Yirmiya was a graduate student and student instructor in the Center for Jewish Studies. He is the winner of the 2023 William Ze’ev Brinner Graduate Fellowship, receiving a cash award of $1,500.

2021-22 Goor Prize winners:

  • Madeline Wyse (G) received $2000 for “Reverent Irreverence: Retelling the Tales of the Bible and Qur’an.”
  • Meghana Kumar (UG ) received $2000 for “What Moral? Sin and Redemption in the David and Bathsheba Story”
  • Juliette Rosenthal (UG) received $2000 for her paper “Newspaper Networks: A Jewish Journalist’s Continued Connections in the Modern Mediterranean.”

2020-21 Goor Prize winners:

  • Wyatt Grauman (UG ) received $1500 for “Analysis on the Generalization of Holocaust Memory and Display”
  • Oren Yirmiya (G) received $1500 for “Forgetting World Literature: Aggadah, Wisdom, and the Crisis of Tradition in Kafka’s On Parables and Tractate Shabbat 138b-139a”

CJS Outstanding GSI Achievement Award:

  • Oren Yirmiya taught JS 39 in Spring 2020 -“Escape Artists in Jewish Popular Culture and Literature: Houdini, Kafka, Kirby, Chabon” and JS 100 in Fall 2020 – “Travelers, Immigrants, Refugees: Introduction to Jewish History and Literature”- and received very positive feedback from his students.
Appointments