Samuel “Bud” Shorstein Writing Awards in Jewish Studies

Major: Great Books and Ideas Minor: Jewish Studies

Winning submission: “Jewish Particularity and French Culpability in The Last of the Just”

Gavriella explains the essay:

My topic, developed in Dr. Zachmann’s class on Holocaust Memory in France, is André Schwarz-Bart’s remarkable post-war novel, The Last of the Just (1959). I dissect the novel’s use of textual structures and tools in presenting the experiences of the titular Ernie Levy within a variety of broader narrative frameworks (national, familial, religious, etc.). I am especially interested in how the novel seeks addresses the emerging postwar divide between the individual personal narratives of many European Jews – French Jews in particular – and the more whitewashed narrative France sought to cement into its postwar national mythology as it reckoned with Vichy-era actions towards its Jews.

Major: International Studies

Winning submission: “Lou Albert-Lassard: Artist, Witness, and Resistor”

Aitana explains the paper:

Research on resistance in occupied France focuses primarily on those on the front lines. It largely excludes roles of women and particularly artists. Lou Albert “Mabull” Lasard was among the first to witness the horrors of World War II in France. My research paper examines her artistic production in the Gurs internment camp. Like many Jewish artists of the Montparnasse neighborhood of Paris, Lasard was arrested. Unlike many, she defied her circumstances and created art in the face of deportation. Lasard produced scenes of women’s rituals, landscapes of Gurs, and portraits of internees, often emphasizing barbed wire fencing. I explore how Lasard  innovated with materials and production, and I demonstrate how her work engages with her imprisonment and the political climate. By analyzing Lasard’s artworks along with camp archives, survivor testimonies, and official records, this project contributes to a broader understanding of the role of women and the arts during World War II. It shows how these neglected traces, artifacts, and archives of the internment experience are among the earliest testimonies of documentation and resistance, offering insight into the concentrationary universe and the artists within.

Major: English and French major

Winning submission: “Instruments of Alterity in the Dreyfus Affair” written for the class “The Dreyfus Affair” taught by Dr. Gayle Zachmann.

Alexander explains the paper:

“The Dreyfus Affair” was an incident at the turn of the 20th century involving allegations and imprisonment of a Jewish officer in the French Army, Alfred Dreyfus, on grounds of German espionage. France was broken into two sides, those supporting Dreyfus, the Dreyfusards, and the anti-Dreyfusards. The paper I wrote examined how caricatures at the time, and characters—with a particular focus on works of Marcel Proust—were used to illustrate alterity where it was otherwise unseen. These markers of alterity often tied the Jew and gay and Germanic together to declare the Dreyfusards as foreign and not French. This paper also examined the smaller extent to which the same was done to the anti-Dreyfusards.

Major: Honors Program, International Studies and Anthropology

Megan explains the paper:

When researching religions and examples of social change to find a topic, I noticed that a major wave of Ashkenazi immigration to the United States (U.S.) coincided with the resurgence and eventual success of the U.S. Women’s Suffrage Movement in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Raised with the Jewish principle of Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), I was eager to explore the influence of Jewish values, teachings, and experiences in this capacity, and my findings were significant. This paper has been especially important to me as the latest in a long line of Jewish woman, including my maternal great-great grandmother who fled to the U.S. during this time.

Major: Honors Program, Sociology and Gender Studies 

Graycen explains the paper:

The week after October 7th, 2023, Dr Feller called me into his office to check on me as I had missed several classes. One of the first things he said to me was “I think you should change the topic of your project”. I had been working on a broadcast on a domestic violence agency that assisted women fleeing Mexico into southern states . As passionate as I was about the topic, life changed tremendously after October 7th and it became hard to think or work on anything at all. Dr Feller and I believed that writing about October 7ths’ impact on my personal life, particularly on college campuses, would help me reflect on the tragedy in a meaningful way and channel my grief into something tangible . I spent the next three months researching the roots of the Israel- Palestine war, interviewing students affected by Columbia’s anti-Israel protests, and speaking to Jewish students on my own campus about antisemitism. This report is deeply personal to me and I hope those that listened could feel how I created it to sort of heal from such life-altering tragedies.

Major: History and Religion

Winning submission: “Social Movements and Prayer,” written for the class, “Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness,” taught by Dr. Yaniv Feller.

Zayda explains the paper: “This paper was extremely important to me as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, as I was curious to see where Judaism stood when it came to queer discussion. While looking at LGBTQ+ topics, I also became particularly interested in how gendered prayers also impacted women in Judaism. Through research, I saw these two topics were both related and extremely significant to recent changes to Judaism, in both reform and conservative branches.”

Major: Biology Major and Anthropology Minor

Winning Submission: “Guatemala and the Jews: An Evolving Relationship,” written as my final project for the class, “From Immigrants to a Minority: Jews in the Americas,” taught by Dr. Katalin Rac.

Lydia explains the paper: “‘Jews in the Americas’ covered the history of Jewish people in several Latin American countries, such as Brazil, Argentina, Chile, and Mexico. I am Guatemalan on my father’s side, so Dr. Rac encouraged me to write a historiographical analysis of the limited academic sources on the history of Jews in Guatemala for my final class project. I also spoke with Alissa Guindi, whose oral history as a Guatemalan Jewish woman supplemented my literature review with personal, primary sources from the Jewish community in Guatemala. Writing this paper allowed me to incorporate my heritage into my academic work and to contribute to the visibility of the Jewish community of Guatemala.”

Major: Economics and International Studies

Course written for: 

Antisemitism and Islamophobia in Europe, and was taught by Dr. Armin Langer.

Major: History

Submission: “Ven Abus Git tsu Zin (When Fathers Give to Sons)” – Class: Jews in the Americas, taught by Professor Katalin Rac.

Major: Public Relations with a Minor in French & Francophone Studies

Winning submission: “The Antisemitic Question in a Christianized France & Interactions with Clandestine Jewish Identity” from Professor Gayle Zachmann’s class, “Studies in Antisemitism.”

Alexa explains the paper:

“I felt it was important, especially as a public relations major, to become more familiar with the complications that antisemitism presents in society. Even with a specialized look at French Judaism, Professor Zachmann’s course presented a whole new idea that puts antisemitism into perspective – it’s worth being framed differently so as to instead consider the antisemitic question rather than the Jewish one.”

Major: English and French Literature

Winning Submission: “Activating Jewish Women’s Bodies with Eugenie Foa and Helene Cixous” from a Unversity Scholars research project with Professor Gayle Zachmann

Kristin explains the paper:

“The concept for the paper was developed in Dr. Zachmann’s class on Children of the Revolution, a course centered on the writings of French Romantic authors of the nineteenth-century in the years following the French Revolution. Under her mentorship, the paper was expanded into a larger project as part of my USP research. The scope was widened to include the writings of Hélène Cixous and narrowed to focus on the ways their shared French-Jewish identities influence the way they discuss and utilize Jewish women’s bodies in their texts, each in their own manner achieving some form of literary activism. The fecundity of this topic has opened up numerous pathways to continue with in the future, and I look forward to exploring it further as part of my Senior Honors Thesis.”

Major: English and History

Winning Submission: A New Stonehenge, compiled in LIT4483 (WWII from the Margins) with Instructor Min Ji Kang, although the work is equally indebted to Professors William Logan and Ange Mlinko and their poetry workshops.

Alejandro explains his project: 

“The poems in A New Stonehenge—more so than Alejandro’s other works—often act as ars poeticas, questioning the authority of poetry to interpolate the Holocaust into the modern and personal. Like Plath’s, the father in “The Mudroom” emulates the German soldier: “One twilight, we walked barefoot in the snow/ as punishment. ‘Your shoes got to be in rows,’/ my father had yelled, calling to mind/ the Ars moriendi; but I was too proud/ to die.” Working within this tradition, the collection displays a sense of urgency. How should one remember, as Celan called them, the drowned?

Alejandro says, ‘Commemorating Celan’s ‘drowned’ [those who lost their lives to the Holocaust] may seem like a tango with the abstract, especially as eye-witnesses, including the Romanian poet, pass. Trauma and empathy, though, are innately human. We may never fully understand the extent of Jewish trauma, but personalizing that trauma further extends our empathy into the modern context, which was my goal with A New Stonehenge.’

Alejandro serves as president of Tea Literary & Arts Magazine and intends to pursue his MFA in poetry. His work has been published under the alias Alex Manuel in I-70 Review and Hawai`i Pacific Review.“

Major: Political Science, Economics, Spanish

Winning Submission: “Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Crisis as a Springboard for Change,” written for a class with Professor Patricia Sohn.

Katrina explains her paper: “I wrote my qualitative research paper, “Gender and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict: Crisis as a Springboard for Change,” under the guidance of Dr. Patricia Sohn for the Political Science Junior Fellows program in the Fall 2020 semester. I chose this topic because conventional wisdom gives comparatively little focus on the complexity of international conflict on women, and I realized that the role of women in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is much more complex than what traditional literature interprets it to be. I found that the literature on women and their role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict differed in its estimation of the manners in which the conflict affects them: (1) the traditional notion that women are socially fragile; (2) women are doubly marginalized; and (3) women use the conflict as a springboard to carve out their rights. Rather than dismiss the consequences of conflict on such a large section of the afflicted populace, increased research and investigation on women ought to be encouraged and normalized.”

Major: Economics

Winning Submission: “French Anti-Semitism and the Dreyfus Affair” for a class with Professor Gayle Zachmann

Alex explains her paper: 

“My paper tracked and analyzed the usage and damage caused by negative Jewish stereotypes in France from the mid-1800s until the end of the Dreyfus Affair in 1906. France’s military defeat in the Franco-Prussian War and an economic recession in the late nineteenth-century led to widespread dissatisfaction among the French public and antisemitism was used as a means of deflecting blame for these struggles. The Dreyfus Affair catalyzed these sentiments and seemingly set the stage for the widespread antisemitism that would be experienced throughout the first half of the twentieth century.

I graduated with my B.A. in Economics and a minor in French & Francophone Studies in the Spring of 2021. I have accepted an offer of admission from the Economics M.A. program here at the University of Florida and will graduate in the Spring of 2022. Upon completion, I plan to pursue further graduate studies and eventually work at the international level in the field of natural resource management with a focus on expanding access to sustainable clean drinking water around the world.”

Major: History

Winning Submission: The Red Dreidel, a game that Miranda created for a class with Professor Seth Bernstein.

Juan explains his project:

“The Red Dreidel is a point and click historical narrative which takes you down the path of Soviet-Jews from the origin of the Soviet Union until the end of the second World War. It is an immersive experience filled with historical images, songs, and choices which allow players to feel involved in a short yet realistic experience. Every choice that the player makes will affect their chosen character’s life going forward and show the many different experiences of Soviet-Jews and the consequences of picking between traditional Judaism, and the Soviet state. With twelve different endings this game stands to tell the many stories of those who embraced the Soviet system, those who chose family, fought against the fascists, and the victims who suffered at the hands of tyranny.

Juan Miranda will graduate UF in December 2021. He plans to continue his studies in Central Eastern European history with a focus on Poland and the Warsaw Uprisings that happened in 1943 and 1944. “The multiple resistance movements that fought for their freedom against Nazi tyranny as well Soviet tyranny, are groups that need their stories told. I plan on teaching history not only as a Professor, but in other medias such as film. As a Cuban and a historian, I believe that the many stories of struggles need to be told and the arts will be key in this.”