The Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies is intended to support, encourage, and stimulate research in the field of Jewish Studies at UC Berkeley. It was established in 1977 by Anne Goor in memory of her husband, Benjamin, and renamed upon her death in 2005. Prizes are awarded annually for the best undergraduate and graduate essays.
The William Ze’ev Brinner Graduate Student Fellowship was established in the spring of 2014 in honor of the late Professor Ze’ev Brinner who taught Arabic and Islamic studies in the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Berkeley from 1956 until his retirement in 1991, and served as Chair of the Department several times. In keeping with the Brinner family’s preference, the strongest candidates will have an intercultural or interfaith focus to their work.
2019-2021
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Chloe Piazza (G): (received $2,000)
“Yentl the Yeshiva Boi”
- Walker Laughlin (UG): (received $2000)
“We Must Love It as a Second Fatherland………”
2018-2019
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Jennifer Stover-Kemp (G): (received $1,500)
“Pan-Idolatry in Exodus 34:11-17: Theorizing the Productive Nature of Forgetting within Hermeneutic Culture”
- Yael Segalovitz Eshel (G): (received $1,500)
“The Tel Aviv School and Maximalist Reading: A.B. Yehoshua and the Israeli Anxiety of Social Disintegration”
- Gilad Barach (UG): (received $1000)
“So lovely to see you, Rabbi: Heschel and Adorno, Morals in the Hands of the Production Apparatus”
- Sarah Goldwasser (UG): (received $1000)
“The Rhetoric of Buried Testimony: Memory and Absence from the Warsaw Ghetto”
- Andrew Kuznetsov (UG): (received $1000)
“The Hasid and the Jewish Revolutionary: Time and Juxtaposition in Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry”
2017-2018
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Alan Elbaum (G): (received $1,500)
“Sick of Body and Sick of Heart: The Experience of Illness among the Jews of Medieval Egypt”
- Sheer Ganor (G): (received $1,500)
“Forbidden Words, Banished Voices, Jewish Refugees, at the Service of BBC Propaganda to Wartime Germany”
- Lexie Polevoi (UG): (received $1,500)
“The “Shadow” Leader: Rewriting the Role of Biblical Miriam”
- Zachary Handler (UG): (received $1,500)
“Between Rome and Jerusalem: The Identity of Tiberius Julius Alexander”
2016-2017
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Jennifer Kemp (G): (received $1000)
“Canon and Utopia: An Examination of the Pentateuchal Passover Traditions”
- Danny Luzon (G): (received $1000)
“The Non-Autobiographical “I” in Henry Roth’s Late Autobiographical Fiction”
- Simone Stirner (G): (received $1000)
“Between two strides of a traveler: Kafka’s miniatures and the temporality of small form”
- Balark Mallik (UG): (received $1000)
“Shifting Sands on the Eve of War: European Involvement in the Zionist Movement in the Late 19thCentury”
2015-2016
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Danny Luzon (G): (received $1,000)
“Debating American Yiddish Literature in Theory: Modernist Representation and the Future of Yiddish for Lamed Shapiro and Yankev Glatshteyn”
- Raphael Magarik (G): (received $1,000)
“Milton’s Phylacteries: Textual Idolatry and the Beginnings of Critical Exegesis”
- Nathan Wexler (UG): (received $,1000)
“Yeshayahu Leibowitz & Abraham Joshua Heschel: Political Critique as Theology in Post-Holocaust Judaism Mitzvah as an Antidote to Modernity”
2015-2016
William Ze’ev Brinner Graduate Student Fellowship Recipient:
- Ayelet Even-Nur (G): a PhD candidate in the Near Eastern Studies Department. Her main research interests are contemporary Palestinian and Israeli poetry and art, and the way the interplay of language and body influences our understanding of these two forms and their effects on cultural patterns.
2014-2015
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Sheer Ganor (G): (received $2,00)
“The Wiedergutmachung Network – German Jews on the Junction of Memory and Bureaucracy”
- Danny Luzon (G): (received $2,00)
“Traveling Landscapes, Imagined Centers: Hebrew and Yiddish Literary Spaces in Weimar Berlin”
2013-2014
Anne and Benjamin Goor Prize in Jewish Studies Winners:
- Nicholas Baer (G): (received $1,000)
- Anna Elena Torres (G): (received $1,000)
- Elijah Granet (UG): (received $1,000)
- Lisa Levin (UG): (received $1,000)
2013-2014
William Ze’ev Brinner Graduate Student Fellowship Recipient:
- Rachel Friedman (G): a Ph.D. student in the Near Eastern Studies Department.