The David A. Kadish Humanities Scholarship Award
The David A. Kadish Humanities Scholarship Award recognizes an undergraduate student with financial need who displays a strong interest in the study of the humanities. One scholarship in the amount of $1,000 is given each year in Spring quarter. This scholarship is funded through gift funds from David Kadish (History, ‘73).
Eligible applicants are registered UC Santa Cruz undergraduate students in good standing during the Spring quarter and declared in one of the following majors: Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism, Classical Studies, Critical Race and Ethnic Studies, Feminist Studies, German Studies, History, Italian Studies, Jewish Studies, Language Studies, Linguistics, Literature, Philosophy, or Spanish Studies.
Haas/Koshland Memorial Award
Each year, young adults are nominated and apply for the Haas/Koshland Memorial Award, a grant that funds up to $20,000 a year of personal exploration or study in Israel. Applicants do not need to be Jewish, can be first-time or return travelers to Israel, and can use the award to study, discover their passion, perform advocacy work, intern, or just explore the land, its complex social and political issues, and its rich history.
Eligibility: The award is open to young adults who are from, or attend school in, the San Francisco Bay Area and wish to broaden their personal life, academic life, or both. The applicant does not need to be enrolled in a course of study to apply.
More information can be found on the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco website.
Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Gilda Slifka Undergraduate Internship Program
The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute accepts six undergraduate and two graduate students with a demonstrated interest in women’s studies, Jewish women’s studies or topics related to Jewish women/Jewish gender issues around the world to participate in a paid residential internship program. Applications are accepted from students attending universities in the U.S. and abroad.
The Gilda Slifka Internship Program at the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute provides undergraduate students with a variety of opportunities to learn about the work of Jewish women’s studies scholars and centers, and try their hand at research in the field. Interns assist HBI-affiliated scholars and offices, and develop their own individual projects. Weekly outings to research archives and places of Jewish interest, and discussions with Jewish studies and women’s studies scholars, expose interns to various methodologies and academic frameworks. Interns live on the Brandeis University campus in housing provided by the HBI and receive a weekly stipend.
More information can be found on the Hadassah-Brandeis Institute website.
Jewish Vocational Service (JVS) Scholarship Program
The JVS Scholarship Program provides qualified Jewish students whose primary residence is in Los Angeles with need-based financial aid, in the belief that education represents the first step to career success. Scholarships are available from $500 to $5,000.
Eligibility Requirements
- Must be Jewish
- Minimum age of 16 years
- Permanent and legal resident of Los Angeles County – for a minimum of three years
- U.S. citizen or documented legal permanent U.S. resident (green card)
- Planning to attend an accredited public or private college, university or vocational school in the U.S.
- Planning to enroll full-time (minimum 12 units per term)
- Maintain a minimum 2.7 GPA for undergraduate students and a minimum 3.0 GPA for graduate students for every semester or quarter enrolled.
- Demonstrated and verifiable financial need including FAFSA (student aid report)
More information can be found on the JVS website.
Steiner Summer Yiddish Program
The Steiner Summer Yiddish Program offers motivated students the opportunity to immerse themselves in Yiddish language and culture. Participants study with renowned scholars and build a community of yidishkayt in a supportive residential setting.
In the Steiner Summer Yiddish Program, undergraduate and graduate students ages 18-26:
- take a full year of language courses in seven weeks, tuition free
- gain substantive knowledge of Central and Eastern European Jewish history and culture in seminars with leading scholars of literature, film, music, and history
- earn up to six college credits upon successful completion of the program
- experience contemporary Yiddish culture during a field trip to New York City, where they tour Yiddish-speaking neighborhoods and attend cultural events
- attend the Yiddish Book Center’s Yidstock: The Festival of New Yiddish Music
- participate in paid internships, gaining professional experience working on Yiddish-based projects (intermediate students only)
- create a community of peers from around the world in a residential environment
More information can be found on the Yiddish Book Center website.
Tikkun Volunteer and Internship Program
Tikkun is a magazine dedicated to healing and transforming the world. We seek writing that gives us insight on how to make that utopian vision a reality. We build bridges between religious and secular progressives by delivering a forceful critique of all forms of exploitation, oppression, and domination while nurturing an interfaith vision of a caring society — one whose institutions are reconstructed on the basis of love, generosity, nonviolence, social justice, caring for nature, and awe and wonder at the grandeur of the universe.
There are many volunteer and internship opportunities at Tikkun. We are looking for students and recent college graduates who would like to work on healing and repairing the world now (tikkun olam).
More information can be found on the Tikkun magazine website.
Israel Project’s Tower Tomorrow Summer Fellowship
The Tower Tomorrow Fellowship offers a select group of university students (undergraduate and graduate) a challenging summer aimed at educating future journalists, writers and advocacy professionals in research, analysis, writing for publication, strategic communications and media management.
Working with world-class writers and media professionals, Fellows will learn about coverage of Israel and the region, meet with journalists, scholars, and diplomats, and undertake an intensive eight-week course.
For more information, please visit the Tower Tomorrow Fellowship website.
The Mollie Cass Sater Memorial Scholarship in Jewish Studies
Dr. William F. Sater has been giving back to UC Santa Cruz annually since 1990 in honor of his daughter Rachel Sater (Kresge, ‘93). In 2020, Professor Sater established this scholarship endowment in tribute and memory of his mother, Mollie Cass Sater. The Mollie Cass Sater Memorial Scholarship in Jewish Studies shall be awarded to one or more undergraduate students with financial need who display a strong interest in Jewish Studies.
If you are a UC Santa Cruz undergraduate student with financial need who displays a strong interest in Jewish Studies, you may be eligible for this award. You must be a registered student in good standing during the spring quarter and declared in one of the Humanities Division majors.
Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature & Culture
The Uriel Weinreich Program in Yiddish Language, Literature, and Culture, established in 1968, is the oldest intensive Yiddish summer program in the world. The 6-week program offers classes from beginner to advanced levels and a wide variety of cultural and enrichment activities. Under the auspices of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research and Bard College, the program offers peerless instruction in the Yiddish language and an in-depth exploration of the literature and culture of East European Jewry and its diaspora communities.
More information can be found on the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research website.
Yiddish Book Center Fellowship Program (Recent Graduates)
The Yiddish Book Center Fellowship Program offers recent college graduates a yearlong professional experience in Yiddish language and Jewish cultural work. Fellows spend a year as full-time staff members, learning valuable professional skills and contributing to the Center’s major projects, working closely with colleagues and supervisors.
More information can be found on the Yiddish Book Center website.
UCSC Jewish Studies Undergraduate Research Awards
The Jewish Studies Program invites submissions for the 2023-2024 Jewish Studies Undergraduate Research Awards. To encourage and reward outstanding research and writing on Jewish themes by undergraduates at UC Santa Cruz, the Awards Committee will select four outstanding essays, senior theses, websites, exhibits, or articles that represent distinguished examples of undergraduate scholarship in the field of Jewish Studies. All majors are encouraged to apply.
Submissions should be sent to the Department of History via email attachment (historyundergrad@ucsc.edu) by Friday, May 24th, 11:59pm. A letter of support from a faculty sponsor is recommended, but not required.
Questions may be directed to Jewish Studies Academic Advising Coordinator, Bruce Thompson.
Past Recipients
2021 – 2022
Keely Gwynne, “The Imperceptible Jew: Crypto-Jewish Comedy in American Media” examines how and why American Jewish writers and artists have cannily disguised the Jewish roots of their art, and the Jewish identities of their characters, in one medium after another over the course of the past century. It encompasses an impressive range of media and a huge span of American Jewish cultural history. Its examples include comic book superheroes, stand-up and sketch comedians (Sid Caesar, Mel Brooks, Nichols and May), and the television situation comedy from The Goldbergs (1950s) through Seinfeld (1990s) and Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000s).
Sage Michaels, “Between Two Worlds: The Roles and Experiences of Jewish Women in Weimar Germany” examines the conflicts German- Jewish women faced during the turbulent period between the two world wars of the first half of the twentieth century. How could traditional Judaism’s emphasis on the web of family and community responsibilities be reconciled with the striving of the “new woman” for self-reliance and independence, especially in a context of rising anti-Semitism? The paper draws on literary and cinematic representations of Jewish women, as well as the principal Jewish women’s magazine of the period, to illuminate these tensions. And it shows how one of the most famous Jewish women of the era, the philosopher Hannah Arendt, found inspiration in the life of Rahel Varnhagen, the Jewish salonnière who had faced a similar predicament a century earlier.
Maia Zelkha, “Pens of Iron: Echoes of the Psalms of David in the Poetry of Samuel ha-Nagid and Yehuda Amichai,” compares the poetry of Shmuel ibn Naghrela (993-1056), better known as Samuel HaNagid (“Samuel the Prince”), the greatest Hebrew poet in eleventh-century al-Andalus (Islamic Spain), and Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000), the greatest Israeli poet of the twentieth century. But whereas his great predecessor in medieval Spain was a successful general, who inevitably identified himself with King David, Amichai was a weary veteran of three wars, conscious of the profound distance between himself and the biblical archetype of the warrior-king. Amichai, Ms. Zelkha shows, was a skeptical, ironic poet, conscious of himself not as an avatar of King David, but rather as a humble citizen-soldier, adding his wry, colloquial voice to a long tradition of poetry in Hebrew that extends over nearly three thousand years.
2020 – 2021
Lucy DaSilva, “The Blacklist Revisited: Walter Bernstein’s Memories of the McCarthy Era”
Taylor Garvey, “Opposites Attract: Sexuality in Jewish Comedy Media”
Maya Gonzalez, “Remember Us: Holocaust Representations in European-Jewish Émigré Film, 1942-1945”
2019 – 2020
Maya Gonzalez, “The German Weaponization of Jewish Victims: Jewish Complicity and ‘Privilege’ during the Nazi Occupation of Greek Salonica”
Sam Knobel, “Fortune’s Choice: Salonican Jews and the Paths to Modernity”
Miriam Stone, “Jewish Comedy in Kafka’s Short Stories: ‘A Report to an Academy’ and ‘The Burrow’”
Samantha Stringer, “Sami Michael’s Double Exodus: Iraqi-Jewish Communist Politics in Transition to Israel”
2018 – 2019
Michele Cole, “‘I Remain an Irishman…and a Jew’: Conflicting Identities of Ireland’s Jewish Politicians”
Rachel Ledeboer, “Who’s Strong and Brave, Here to Save the American Jewish Way?”
Nomi Nonacs, “’Egged on Like Seder Plates’: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend and the Jewish American Princess”
Avery Weinman, “Reverberations from the ‘Earthquake’: Collective Memory and Why Mizrahi Israelis Vote for the Israeli Right”
2017 – 2018
Robin Kopf, “Knishes and Quips: How Jewish Female Comedians Have Sparked Laughter and Change”
Ian Kussin-Gika, “Kinderlach and Communists or A Comparison Between Soviet Ethnic Policy and Labour Zionism Through the Lens of the Infamous JAO”
Avery Weinman, “Revisiting Isaac: Meaning in an Unexceptional Life”
2016 – 2017
Alex Brocchini, “A Study in Disenchantment: The Politics of Moroccan and Varsovian Jewry 1940-1950”
Alex Brocchini’s writing reflects clarity of argument, structure, and rigorous research culminating in a thorough synthesis of complex ideas. He is the only person to date who has written a paper comparing Moroccan and Polish Jewish political engagement in the 1940s and 1950s. It is an unusual comparison, but a persuasive and fruitful one, distinguished by thorough research and engagement with critical questions for the field of Jewish studies, and particularly with the tension between communist universalism and Jewish particularism in the wake of the Holocaust.
Leona Lkova, “Precarious Positions of Power: Sephardic Jews in Late Eighteenth to Mid-Nineteenth Century Morocco”
From the advent of their regime in the early seventeenth century, the Alawid sultans of Morocco employed members of wealthy Spanish-speaking Sephardic Jewish families as consuls, translators and traders in their commerce with Christian Europe and the Americas, furnishing them with letters of permission to travel and exclusive rights to export certain goods. Leona Lkova’s outstanding paper explores the rise of “Court Jews” in Morocco, as well as the reasons why their privileged status was so precarious. The author exhibits a keen eye for fascinating case histories, as well as mastery of both primary sources and the scholarly literature on the subject.
Gabriella Estevam, “New York Gothic: A Close Reading of ‘A Wedding in Brownsville’”
This outstanding essay on one of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s uncanny post-Holocaust ghost stories combines close attention to the protagonist’s reveries with an incisive interpretation of his narrative arc: a journey into a kind of limbo where the boundaries between reality and fantasy, the living and the dead, dissolve. Close reading reveals that the protagonist’s crossing of the East River from Manhattan to Brooklyn is a passage into an infernal realm: Singer’s equivalent of the gothic transposed to New York. Dr. Margolin, at the end of his life, is haunted by a sense of personal failure, by the sorry state of American Judaism, but even more by memories of all those who had been “tortured, burned, gassed.” And yet in death he finds a kind of personal redemption: he is reunited with the lost love of his youth at a wedding feast attended by the ghosts of the dead. The essay captures the poignant, bittersweet quality of Singer’s irony: “He belongs with those who belong nowhere.” And: “He sorrows for more days and a fountain of youth, but it is not until his veins run dry that he lives out his dreams.”
Joseph Maggs, “Benjamin, Scholem, and the Crisis of Modernity”
Joseph Maggs’s outstanding essay illuminates the great critic Walter Benjamin as a modernist Jewish writer, triangulating him with his friend Gershom Scholem’s Zionism on the one hand and Franz Kafka’s “theology passed on by whispers” on the other. What kind of Jewish identity or consciousness was available to Benjamin in a “disenchanted world,” a world in which the best one could hope for was to “eavesdrop on tradition”? How did Benjamin combine historical materialism with his idiosyncratic theology? The author’s answer is extraordinary for two reasons: first, the depth and sophistication of his knowledge of German and Jewish intellectual history; second, the astonishing range of his extracurricular reading in both primary and secondary sources.
Shana Pava, “Marranism Revealed: Ritual, Religion, and Resistance in Iberian Crypto-Judaism”
In writing on Yosef Haim Yerushalmi’s 1971 tome From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto: Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics, Shana Pava’s outstanding paper tackled one of the most difficult and densely written texts in the field of Sephardic Jewish studies. Her engagement with the text stands out for the intensity of its excavation among Yerushalmi’s primary sources, a critical engagement with the text’s shortcomings (notably the critical place of converso women in maintain Crypto-Jewish practices), and significant outside research into Sephardic and converso religious texts and customs of the period.
Jason Tomczak, “Entre Civilisations”
Jason Tomczak’s paper is an outstanding study of the life and work of the Tunisian-French-Jewish writer Albert Memmi, tracing his melding of literature, philosophy, and sociology as he crossed the boundaries of the French, Jewish, and Arab worlds. Beginning with an incisive analysis of Memmi’s first book, the autobiographical novel Pillar of Salt (1955), the paper traces the development of Memmi’s characteristic themes: isolation and exile, the dialectic of colonizer and colonized, racism and dehumanization, the conflict between Jews and Arabs, and the lure of philosophy as an alternative to the confusion of identity.
2015 – 2016
Marina Budrys, “Behind Closed Doors: The Publicization of the Private or How Does The Jewish Comedian Expose the Man Hiding Behind the Bathroom Door”
Hannah Macias, “Women’s Labor Movements in Early 20th Century Yishuv Palestine and Lower East Side New York”
Alexandra Terry, “Contentious Commandments: Arguing Over the Rules in A Serious Man and Curb Your Enthusiasm“
2014 – 2015
Noah Barerra-Stanford, “Jewish Folk Medicine from the Baal Shem Tov to An-sky and Beyond”
Amanda Botfeld, “Head Over Heart”
Elizabeth Ho, “Assimilation and Identity Preservation: The Paradox of the Kaifeng Jews”
Ariel Wexler, “The Jewish Food Movement”
Sophie Cox, “Jewish Ambivalence in Larry David’s ‘Curb Your Enthusiasm’”
Other Awards Received
Noah Barerra-Stanford: Deans’ Undergraduate Achievement Awards, Division of the Humanities; History Department Undergraduate Education Committee Award
2013 – 2014
Elizabeth Ho, “Film and the Holocaust: The Mystery of Goodness”
Jessie Jannsen, “Seven Portraits of Death in Isaac Bashevis Singer’s Shosha“
Bailey Mezan, “‘We are running away and Mount Sinai runs after us’
Andrea Pulido, “The Jew Abides”
Other Awards Received
Hana Rothstein – Haas/Koshland Memorial Award
Guy Herschmann, Humanities Undergraduate Research Award
2012 – 2013
Jessica Gala, “Creation and Love: Where They Meet in the Hidden World of Women”
Katherine Orton, “Branches of Identity in America: One Family’s Story”
Sharice Hyde, “Jewish Mysticism in ‘Tailors’ Dummies’”
Aaron Uecker, “The Ancient Near Eastern Conquest of Israel & Judah: Relation Incentives Between Empire and Marginal Kingdoms”
Other Awards Received
Catherine Damon – Haas/Koshland Memorial Award
Bailey Mezan – Hadassah-Brandeis Institute Undergraduate Internship
2011 – 2012
Savyonne Steindler, “Being Baal Teshuvah”
Sarah Edelstein, “Spielberg’s Holocaust: A Critical Analysis of Schindler’s List”
Pamela Ong, “The Land of Exile and Humanity”
Alicia Barnett, “Keep It In the Family: Secrets and Shame Summon Jewish Jinns”
Other Awards Received
2010 – 2011
Zachary Ragent, “Providence and Personality: How and Why the Lubavitchers of the Chabad Student Center Experience Santa Cruz”
Nathan Brown, “By the Rivers of Babylon: The Near Eastern Background and Its Influence on the Power Structures of Ancient Egypt and Judah”
Savyonne Steindler, “The Message of Unity in Saving the Lost Tribe and its Relationship to the Trauma of Absorption for Ethiopian Jews”
Joshua Hungerford, “Functions of Languages in Henry Roth’s Call It Sleep
Tal Harari, “Homogenization Involved in Transgenerational Trauma”
Leah Pickar, “A Natural Connection: Discovering My Identity Through My Matriarchal Lineage”
Summer Fellowship with Digital Heritage Mapping
Now accepting applications for Summer 2025! Apply by Monday, May 5, 2025 at 11:59pm.
Digital Heritage Mapping (DHM) is a multi-disciplinary 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that melds age-old scholarship with 21st century technology to assert the importance of physical location to the understanding of history. Launched in 2008, DHM’s flagship initiative, Diarna (“Our Homes” in Judeo-Arabic): the Geo-Museum of North African and Middle Eastern Jewish Life, pioneers the synthesis of digital mapping technology, traditional scholarship, and field research, as well as a trove of multimedia documentation to create virtual entry points to once vibrant, yet now largely vanished, communities.
In 2018, DHM launched Beitenu – The Atlas of Jewish Life to encompass and expand upon Diarna. To date, Beitenu has grown beyond the Middle East and North Africa to include Jewish sites, memories, and communities in 66 countries, including Poland, Mexico, Azerbaijan, and Mexico.
Working on Diarna provides unrivaled opportunities to explore the past, gain insights into people and places and the present, as well as uncover hidden history. Diarna was profiled in Smithsonian Magazine (June 2020), featured on the cover of Newsweek (2017), and listed as a resource for scholars in the Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World (2010). Exhibitions of Diarna photographs and/or interactive installations have occurred around the world, including at Paris City Hall, New York City’s Center for Jewish History, and Dubai’s Crossroads of Civilizations Museum. Diarna has been presented at conferences of Wellesley College, Association for Jewish Studies, American Sephardi Federation, Association of Jewish Librarians, and the Kingdom of Morocco’s Rabita Mohammadia des Oulémas and US Department of State for the “First Regional Conference on Cultural Heritage Protection for Religious Communities.”
What you will learn: Diarna interns will be part of an international, interfaith team dedicated to identifying, documenting, and preserving Jewish sites and memories. The work covers a range of areas, to be assigned depending upon skill level and interest, as well as current priorities. Possible assignments may include:
- Research determining exact locations of Jewish sites in cities and towns across the region
- Sourcing photographs and video (archival and contemporary) of these sites
- Writing brief site entries for mapped locations by analyzing and synthesizing fragments of information culled from diverse sources
- (Note: the above three items may require conducting interviews as well as interfacing with partnered research institutions)
- Translating research documents or project materials for publication
- Helping prepare basic educational materials (e.g., curricular supplements, video presentations, lectures, virtual guided tours)
- Assist with basic maintenance of the site, carrying out occasional tasks of proofreading, basic editing of materials for/on the site. Testing website links and reporting errors and inconsistencies.
Past interns have successfully presented at conferences, developed a lesson plan, and helped create exhibitions.
Interns are expected to complete assignments in a timely and efficient manner, work for at least two months during the summer, post findings regularly to shared online documents or the project’s research database, meet all assignment-specific deadlines, and contribute in other ways as required.
Fellows will work remotely – all work will be conducted online. Fellows are responsible for their own housing arrangements.
Who are you? All majors welcome. Knowledge of one or more relevant languages in addition to English would be helpful. Fellows should be comfortable working independently without daily supervision. Ideal candidates are:
- Curious and conscientious
- Determined to get results
- Appreciative of the importance and urgency of the work
Compensation: Each fellow will receive 5,500 USD in the form of a fellowship administered by The Humanities Institute. Dates for the fellowship are June 16-August 22, 2025.
To Apply: Submit transcript, CV, and cover letter to Associate Professor Alma Heckman (aheckman@ucsc.edu) by Monday, May 5, 2025 at 11:59pm.
Past Digital Heritage Mapping Fellows
Summer 2022
Jack McSweeney (class of 2023)
Sabrina Nguyen (class of 2025)
Shayna Brog (class of 2023)
Summer 2021
Sage Michaels (class of 2022)
Ramsey Perez (class of 2022)
Leighton Souza (class of 2021)
Chloe Seifert (class of 2022)
Summer 2020
Maya Gonzalez (class of 2021)
Claire Williams (class of 2021)
Samantha Stringer (class of 2020)
Adriano Odello (class of 2020)
Summer 2019
Sophie Tamayo (class of 2021)
Maddy Turner (class of 2019)
Emet Levy (class of 2021)
Emily Wang (class of 2021)
Summer 2018
Maddy Turner (class of 2019)
Maddy Carpou (class of 2019)
Jessica Ramon (class of 2018)
Michelle Abraamanian (class of 2018)
Summer 2022
Jack McSweeney (class of 2023)
Sabrina Nguyen (class of 2025)
Shayna Brog (class of 2023)
Summer 2017
Samantha Stringer (class of 2020)
Isaiah Charles (class of 2020)
Summer 2016
Theodora Alexander (class of 2016)
Esther Lu (class of 2017)