KORET AWARDS 12 ACADEMICS WITH PUBLICATION SUBSIDIES

(San Francisco) — A dozen academic authors have been awarded $3,000 publication subsidies through the Koret Foundation's Jewish Studies Publications Program, it was announced today, bringing to 79 the number of subsidies awarded since the program's inception in 1998.

The winners, young professors seeking publication of their doctoral dissertations, which will help propel their academic careers, were selected from more than 100 applicants. They come from all over the United States and Canada.

Changes in the publishing industry have made it increasingly difficult to release even important, original research. The Koret awards, now totaling $258,000, have helped to produce 65 books in the field of Jewish Studies. The subsidies are designed to help launch the academic careers of the most promising young scholars in Jewish Studies by providing publishers with assistance to produce and distribute these scholars' work.

In addition, Koret's grants aim to advance the field of Jewish Studies at the university level, and to increase the availability of substantive research to an educated public.

The 2004 winners and topics of Koret's Jewish Studies Publications Program subsidies are listed below, with publisher if a contract has been secured:

  • Dr. Maria Benjamin Baader, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada "Gender, Judaism, and Bourgeois Culture in Germany, 1800-1870," to be published by Indiana University Press;
  • Dr. Carol Bakhos, University of California, Los Angeles, "Ishmael on the Border: Rabbinic Portrayals of Abraham's First Born," to be published by the State University of New York Press;
  • Dr. Monique Rodrigues Balbuena, University of Oregon, "Diasporic Sephardic Identities: A Transnational Poetics of Jewish Languages";
  • Dr. Glenn Dynner, Sarah Lawrence College, "Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewry" to be published by Oxford University Press;
  • Dr. Sharon Gillerman, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Los Angeles and University of Southern California, "Engendering the Jewish Social Body: Family, Welfare and Reproduction in the Weimar Republic";
  • Dr. Emily Gottreich, University of California, Berkeley, "Jewish Space and the 'Islamic City': A History of the Mellah of Marrakesh";
  • Dr. Joshua Holo, Graduate Theological Union, "Byzantine Jewry in the Mediterranean Economy";
  • Dr. Barbara Mann, Jewish Theological Seminary of America, "A Place in History: Modernism, Tel Aviv and the Creation of Jewish Urban Space," to be published by Stanford University Press;
  • Dr. Marcus Moseley, Johns Hopkins University, "Being for Myself Alone: Origins of Jewish Autobiography," to be published by Stanford University Press;
  • Dr. Samuel Moyn, Columbia University, "Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas and Interwar Philosophy";
  • Dr. Shachar Pinsker, University of Michigan, "Old Wine in New Flasks: Rabbinic Intertexts and the Making of Modernist Hebrew Fiction";
  • Dr. Marci Shore, Indiana University, "Caviar and Ashes: A Warsaw Generation's Life and Death in Marxism, 1918-1968"

Since its inception in 1979, the Koret Foundation has awarded more than $280 million in grants focused on a range of areas including education reform and youth development, community and cultural development, and policy analysis that responds to socioeconomic challenges. In addition, Koret has launched a series of initiatives that are revitalizing and strengthening the Bay Area's educational, policymaking, and cultural institutions, as well as the economy in Israel.

Over its first quarter-century, Koret's funding philosophy has evolved from traditional grantmaking to innovative, entrepreneurial approaches to fundamental contemporary issues. Underlying the philosophy of the Koret Foundation has been the vision of founder Joseph Koret, whose unyielding commitment to democracy's freedoms enabled him to achieve the American dream.

Contact: Director of Communications, Koret Foundation, 415-882-7740