This year, the Center for Jewish Studies awarded three students with the Harry and Cecile Starr Prize in Jewish Studies. The Prize is by faculty member nomination only, for an outstanding senior thesis or Ph.D. dissertation in Jewish and Hebrew studies by a Harvard student.
Best dissertation in the field of Jewish and Hebrew Studies prepared by an undergraduate:
Julia Maria Tellides ’24
Senior, Leverett House
Joint Concentration: History and Classics; Secondary Field: Classical Civilizations
Nominated by Professors Paul Kosmin and Derek Penslar
“Defending ‘the Jerusalem of the Balkans’: Resilience and Disempowerment in Interwar Jewish Thessaloniki”
Abstract:
This thesis reconstructs the interwar history of the Jewish community in Thessaloniki, a
group comprising over 90,000 people that represented one of Europe’s few majority Jewish cities
during that era.
Divided into three parts, each chapter centers on a key anti-Jewish policy
enforced by the Greek government and the Jewish community’s resistance against these
discriminatory measures. The first chapter investigates the government’s 1917 urban
redevelopment scheme aimed at demolishing the city’s Jewish quarter. The second chapter
examines the enactment of the Sunday Closing Law of 1924, which targeted Jewish businesses.
The third chapter explores the government’s campaign to expropriate the city’s ancient Jewish
cemetery in 1931. Despite concerted efforts through domestic and international avenues to
challenge these laws, the Jewish community repeatedly failed to achieve substantial redress,
highlighting their escalating marginalization during the interwar period. Drawing from archives
of international Jewish humanitarian organizations, this study offers a novel and comprehensive
analysis of the Jewish community’s efforts to mobilize through diaspora networks. Engaging
with existing scholarship on interwar history, this thesis reinforces broader narratives
surrounding the inadequacy of minority rights and universal citizenship in safeguarding
persecuted groups through the case study of Jewish Thessaloniki.
Outstanding doctoral dissertation in Jewish and Hebrew studies:
Roy Farrell Ginsberg, Ph.D.
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
Nominated by Professor Saul Zaritt
“Building the Ratn-Farband: Monumentalizing the Soviet Utopian Project through Yiddish Art and Literature”
Abstract:
This dissertation considers literary monuments, such as Peretz Markish’s Di kupe (The Mound, 1921), and places them in conversation with the literal Soviet monumentalization projects of the 1920s and 30s.
I analyze poetry alongside architecture and sculpture to demonstrate how writers modified versification and manipulated the aural and visual elements of texts to create literary works that resemble the monumental structures of human history, from the Tower of Babel to the metallurgical plants of the Urals. In my architectural analysis, I focus on Iosif Chaikov’s work on the propylaea leading to the entrance of the Soviet pavilion at the 1937 Paris Exposition and argue that the pavilion functioned as a reimagined Temple—a monument to Soviet industrial ideology—and was intended to exist as a physical representation of an ostensibly realized workers’ utopian project, consecrated by the hammer and sickle of the USSR. My research examines Yiddish art and literature as a major part of early Soviet culture and determines how Yiddish culturalists borrowed aspects from their earlier, more Jewish-inflected work to contribute to the formulation of a universal industrial utopian aesthetic. Through exploring the universal monumentality of these texts and artworks, I situate the legacy of Yiddish within the greater canons of Comintern and Soviet literature and culture.
Outstanding doctoral dissertation in Jewish and Hebrew studies:
Terry Curt Iles, Ph.D.
Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations
Nominated by Professor Andrew Teeter
“The Compositional Poetics of the Book of Isaiah’s Nations Cycle: Recursive Symmetry and Analogy in Isaiah 13–27”
Abstract:
In this dissertation, I seek to understand and elucidate the organizing principles and argument of the collection of prophecies about foreign nations in Isaiah 13–27.
The study is oriented toward the compositional poetics of the collection, the way in which scribal tradents fashioned discrete and diverse oracles into a literary collection. The dissertation foregrounds the nature and function of literary structure in the collection. To signal this object of study, I propose a change in terminology from speaking of the Oracles against the Nations, which implies a focus on prophetic speech rather than prophetic literature, to the Nations Cycle. I argue that the book of Isaiah’s Nations Cycle is organized according to the principle of recursive symmetry, expressed particularly through concentric triads at multiple textual levels. The symmetrical patterning of the cycle’s structure invites a comparative reading strategy in which individual passages are read on analogy with others. This is essential for understanding the cycle’s arguments regarding the relationship between the past and the future and between Judah and the nations.