Emma DeRose wins the Jill Stacey Harris undergraduate essay prize
June 6, 2024
The Crown Family Center for Jewish and Israel Studies is pleased to award this year’s Jill Stacey Harris Prize in Jewish Studies to Emma DeRose. DeRose submitted her paper “Red Sacrifice: An Examination of the 'Soviet-Jewish Imagination' in Isaac Babel’s 'My First Goose'" to Prof. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern’s course “Jews in Poland, Ukraine, and Russia”. The committee is unanimous in finding DeRose’s paper to be not only remarkably well-written and exhaustively researched, but also insightful, original, and historically nuanced. It is further exceptional for integrating and threading several different fields: Russian and Slavic studies, Jewish religious traditions, East European history, memory studies, and gender studies. Her argument is well streamlined, importantly and ingeniously also pointing to the significance of studying the suppression of memory about Judaism among socialist-minded Jews.
The Jill Stacey Harris Prize in Jewish Studies has been awarded annually since 1991 for the best undergraduate essay in the field of Jewish Studies. Student papers are nominated by the faculty in Jewish Studies and an independent committee evaluates and judges the nominated submissions.