First Place, Undergraduate Division
Daisy Roberts for “Poetry in Excavating the Interior Landscape: Avrom Sutzkever’s ‘A Day in the Hands of the Stormtroopers’ as a Doorway to Jewish Mentality during the Holocaust." Daisy graduated in the spring of 2025 with a major in English with a creative writing specialization and a minor in Spanish.
Her essay investigates the complexity and nuance of the Jewish Holocaust experience through the lens of a powerful poem by Avrom Sutzkever. In addition to examining Sutzkever, this essay positions poetry as an essential communicative vessel for expressing the mysteries of the internal landscape, ultimately arguing the importance of poetry for archival memory and testimony.
Second Place, Undergraduate Division
Annalise Wabler for “Qui est responsable?: A Comparative Analysis of Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps, The Last Days, and Night and Fog.” Annalise is a junior majoring in environmental policy and decision making with minors in French and economics. Her essay compares three influential documentary films about the Holocaust based on their context, use of formal devices, and framing of the Holocaust’s implications.
The films were made in different time periods and for different purposes: one by the United States government as evidence in Nazi trials, one as an inspiring depiction of Jewish life after the Holocaust, and one as a warning that an event like the Holocaust could happen again.
Honorable Mention, Undergraduate Division
Grace Higgins for "Coexistence or Conflict? How Culture Shapes Understanding." Grace is a sophomore majoring in political science with minors in history and economics. Her paper examines the difference between the Ashkenazi and Sephardic communities regarding Arab-Jewish relations in early 20th-century Palestine.
By drawing on work from Hillel Cohen, Abigail Jacobson, Michelle Campos, and Yuval Evri, the paper argues that Sephardi Jews were more integrated into Arab and Ottoman culture while Ashkenazi immigrants had more experience with European antisemitism. Therefore, the Sephardic community emphasized coexistence with their neighbors while the Ashkenazi community tended to favor more nationalist policies. T
hese contrasting outlooks contributed to competing narratives of the history of Arab-Jewish relations in the region. This paper explores how different understandings of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are born from cultural differences.
Honorable Mention, Undergraduate Division
Caroline Redder for “Attitudes of Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews Towards Zionism of the Early 20th Century.” Caroline is a junior majoring in journalism and history with a minor in classics.
Her essay surrounds the conflicting attitudes of Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews towards the emergence of Zionism in early 20th-century Palestine. Their loyalty to the Ottoman Empire, Jewish cause and Arab community put them in a one-of-a-kind position, as reflected by Sephardi newspapers and intellectuals. Redder examines how the Sephardic and Mizrahi community reacted to Zionism and the insight they offered within a highly polarizing political climate.
Diane Cummins Hebrew Prize
The Cummins Prize in Hebrew is a scholarship awarded by the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures to benefit those studying Hebrew and/or Yiddish.
This year’s winners are Ben Monroe and Lexi Simon. Both minored in Hebrew and graduated in May 2025.
The Samuel M. Melton Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies
The Samuel M. Melton and the George M. and Renée K. Levine Graduate Fellowships in Jewish Studies provide a year of support to a graduate student conducting research in a core area of Jewish studies.
Armand Rogers has been awarded the 2025–2026 Samuel M. Melton Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies. Armand completed his undergraduate degree in Jewish studies at Moody Bible College in Chicago and is now a second-year MA student in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at Ohio State.
Armand’s coursework has focused on the Hebrew Bible and other Jewish religious literature, like the Mishnah and Mishnah Torah. Armand reports that “all of these courses have been incredibly helpful in advancing my skills in Hebrew, not to mention instrumental for my research interests.”
Armand recently presented some of his work at the New Generations Conference at the University of Texas. His interests focus on Jewish literature in the medieval Islamic world, particularly the transmission and translation of the Hebrew Bible and its commentaries in Judeo-Arabic. Armand is especially interested in how these translations and commentaries functioned within the interreligious polemical disputes, particularly between the Karaites and Rabbinites of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
For the upcoming 2025–2026 academic year, Armand will continue coursework in Hebrew Bible, including a course on the Dead Sea Scrolls, and advance his training in Arabic and Syriac. Armand states that “these languages are essential for working with medieval texts, and what is more, understanding the broader religious and intellectual world in which they circulated.”
His main project for his fellowship tenure will be his MA thesis. Armand will develop a previously unpublished critical edition of a Judeo-Arabic commentary on a portion of the Psalms by the Karaite Yefet ben Eli. This involves locating cataloged manuscripts, transcribing, translating and analyzing their language and content. He will also provide a comparison with Rabbinite and other Karaite opinions for a thorough examination and presentation of the material.
Armand wrote, “I am truly honored to be receiving the graduate fellowship and hope my work will help contribute to the Melton Center’s mission.”
Graduate Student Research Travel Grant
Each year the Melton Center allocates support for students to apply for travel to an academic conference or to use for travel or research that supports a major project in Jewish studies and forms part of the student's academic program.
This year the Melton Center awarded a travel grant to Brenna Miller, a PhD student in musicology with a graduate minor in folklore, to travel to New York to conduct research at the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee Archives and the Leo Baeck Institute at the Center for Jewish History for her dissertation, “Sounding and Performing Jewish Cultural Community in Shanghai.”
This work explores how the newly arrived European Jews developed and created cultural institutions that built community and created a sense of place for themselves in Shanghai. The project is situated in the field of global music history; with this project, Miller is developing an understanding of global forces that affected musical and cultural development and expression at a local level.
