Edna Aizenberg Research Award

Award Recipients

2026 – Debora Kantor (Escuela de Arte y Patrimonio, Universidad Nacional de San Martín), “Jewish Refugee Artists in the Argentine Film Industry During World War II: Individual Trajectories, Solidarity Networks and Political Affinities.” Her project explores the experiences of Jewish refugee artists in Argentina’s film industry during World War II, examining their individual trajectories, solidarity networks, and political affinities. By bringing together migration studies, film studies, and Latin American Jewish history, the research sheds light on the creative contributions of displaced artists and the support networks that enabled their integration and professional success. The project demonstrates a strong engagement with emerging interdisciplinary scholarship and presents a clear, well-structured, and feasible research plan that promises to deepen our understanding of exile, cultural production, and transnational Jewish experiences in wartime Argentina.

2025 – Tamara Gleason Freidberg (University College of London, United Kingdom), “Memorial Builders: Early Commemoration of the Khurbn/Holocaust in Mexico, 1941-1948.” Her project offers the opportunity to analyze the early memorialization efforts of this community and to understand the political factors behind the emergence of a narrative that suggested there was only silence. The focus of this research project is the Yiddish press and the archive of Mexico’s main Jewish school, since many of the early memorialization events only left traces in these spaces. Thus, attention to these sources will bring to light previously unheard voices. This project demonstrates the applicant’s excellent familiarity with current, developing research areas, both within and beyond Jewish Studies and Mexican and Latin American Studies, and shows an organized, realistic, and efficient approach to the research questions posed.

2024 – Adriana Abuhab Bialski (University of São Paolo, Brazil), “Experiências museológicas para a salvaguarda da memória sefaradi e mizrahi na América Latina.” Her project explores museum practices for preserving the memory of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jewish immigrants in Latin America, particularly focusing on Lebanese Jewish immigrants. This project stands out for its innovative approach, using New Museology methods to highlight the history and identity of Jewish communities from the Middle East and North Africa.

2023 – Rachel Kaufman (University of California, Los Angeles), “Quería Enseñar: Conversa Transmission, Memory, and Adaptation in Mexico and New Mexico.”

2022 – Melina di Miro (Universidad de Buenos Aires) Project “Reapropiaciones de Shylock en la literatura argentina: Debates y concepciones sobre las relaciones interculturales de judíos y no judíos.” The selection committee praised the proposal as compelling in its solid methodology and innovative perspective of inquiry, in exploring untrodden paths concerning notions of Jewishness and the resignifications of the Shakespearean Jewish merchant figure within an Argentine context. Moreover, the committee was drawn to the potential of how this research will inform scholars in areas beyond the usual scope of Latin American studies.

2021 — Elaine Fitz Gibbon (Harvard University) “Musiktheater in Transit: Circum-Atlantic Perspectives on Avant-garde Music Theater (1945–Present).”

2020 — C. Tova Markenson The selection committee unanimously agreed to confer the 2020 Edna Aizenberg Research Award to C. Tova Markenson (Northwestern University) to complete her project “Performing Jewish Migration: Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment in Latin America’s River Plate Basin (1900-1939). The committee positively valued the goal of the candidate to achieve a refreshing approach to the subject. In her description, Ms. Markenson writes: “To offer a new way of understanding the migration experiences of Latin American Jewish women such as prostitutes, moral reformers, and actresses: I argue that they strategically represented their experiences before Jewish and Gentile authorities in order to persuade Latin American authorities that they were ‘morally upstanding.’ In other words, they needed to perform.”

2019 — Rachelle Grossman (PhD candidate, Harvard University). Dissertation: “Cultural Capital: Networks of Yiddish Publishing and the Postwar Rise of Buenos Aires.”