Wednesday, October 3, 2012

Kiev Fellowships Announced

from the George Washington University website: "Kiev Judaica Research Fellowship Winners Announced The I. Edward Kiev Judaica Collection of the George Washington University Libraries is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2012-2013 Kiev Judaica Collection Research Fellowships. Awarded every two years, the Fellowships provide stipends of $750 for a GW undergraduate and $2,500 for a graduate, post-graduate, or independent scholar to conduct research using the Kiev Judaica Collection. The Senior Fellowship has been awarded this year to Professor Barry Trachtenberg , director of the Judaic Studies Program at the University of Albany, State University of New York. Prof. Trachtenberg will make use of the bibliographic and other resources of the Kiev Collection in the completion of his book-length study on the Algemeyne Entsiklopedye, the first comprehensive encyclopedia in Yiddish, launched in Berlin in 1932 on the eve of the Nazi period. Prof. Trachtenberg, who received his doctorate from the University of California, Los Angeles, has lectured and published widely on the history of Yiddish scholarship. "I'm thrilled to have been awarded the Kiev Fellowship. The staff and diverse Yiddish and Hebrew-language resources of the Kiev Judaica Collection will be of tremendous help with my research project on the Yiddish encyclopedia," said Dr. Trachtenberg. The recipient of this year’s Kiev Junior Fellowship is Ms. Aviv Becher, a Judaic Studies and English major at GW. Her planned Honors thesis in Judaic Studies and English will examine the relevance of modern Hebrew poetry to Jewish religious life in Israel and the Diaspora. In the course of her interdisciplinary research, Ms. Becher will be able to make use of a variety of Hebrew, literary and liturgical materials in the Kiev Collection. Ms. Becher stated: “I am grateful for the opportunity to deepen my studies of Modern Hebrew poetry by tracing historically the theological roots of the discipline in the Kiev Collection. The Collection is such an asset to the university and I feel fortunate to have such free access to its holdings.” These awards mark the second iteration of the Kiev Fellowships. The first Senior Fellow was Dr. Jonathan Skolnik, Assistant Professor of German at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, who worked on German, Hebrew, and Yiddish Writers in 1920s Berlin, focusing in particular on German-Jewish poet Else Lasker-Schüler. The first Junior Fellow was Ms. Robin Janofsky, a GW History major and pre-Law student, who wrote about the American Jewish community’s relationship to Abraham Lincoln; her Honors thesis is now held in the Lincoln Presidential Library. Established by Dr. Ari and Phyllis Kiev in 1996, the Kiev Judaica Collection is based on the private library of Dr. Kiev’s father, Rabbi Dr. I. Edward Kiev (1905-1975), one of the preeminent Judaica librarians of the 20th century. Housed since 1998 in the Kiev Room of the Gelman Library, the collection contains more than 28,000 volumes, along with Jewish graphic art, archives, recorded music, ephemera, artifacts and ritual objects. For more information visit http://library.gwu.edu/collections/kiev"

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