Please join the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies in congratulating our Graduate Student Award winners!
This year’s Marshall Weinberg prize, given annually to an outstanding graduate student who is engaged in writing a dissertation, was awarded to Martin Amesquita. Amesquita's dissertation project explores the contested understandings of Jewishness in response to the politics of assimilation and secularism in early 20th-century Germany. The selection committee was impressed with his comparative work on a spectrum of Central European Jewish intellectual production, ranging from Siegfried Kracauer and Bertha Pappenheim to the religious thought of Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig.
In his nomination, Professor Scott Spector highlighted Amesquita's "adventuresome" and "precocious" approach, specifically noting his ability to reveal a complex history of German-Jewishness in its encounter with modernity.
Congratulations to our two recipients of the Michael S. Bernstein Dissertation Award: Morgan Carlton and Marina Mayorski. This year, we have made the exception of awarding two prizes because of the exceptional quality of both dissertations. The executive committee was thoroughly impressed with the level of research, writing, and argumentation, and viewed both projects as worthy of this honor.
Denisa Glacova has been awarded the Marshall Weinberg Dissertation Writing Semester Fellowship for the Fall 2026 semester. This Fellowship includes tuition, stipend, and grad care for one semester.
