Congratulations to Dory Fox who was awarded the Michael S. Bernstein Dissertation Award for her original dissertation, “The Biological Imagination in Twentieth-Century Jewish American Culture." This compelling project explores the shifting biological theories of inheritance that have informed Jewish cultural production throughout the twentieth century. Fox draws on American fiction, photography by Jewish artists, Yiddish poetry, and scientific discourse to reveal how the "biological imagination" has shaped interpretations of Jewishness, locating them in the body rather than in religious or scholarly sources.
The committee was deeply impressed with Fox's interdisciplinary study of writers and artists who engaged with biological theories of inheritance, even in the post-Holocaust period. Her sophisticated approach to twentieth-century Jewish American culture underscores how Jewish bodies have histories of their own, worthy of in-depth examination.
The Bernstein award, which comes with a $4,000 cash prize, was established to honor the memory of Michael Bernstein, a distinguished graduate of the University of Michigan. Mr. Bernstein studied History and received top honors in 1973; he subsequently earned a J.D. from the University of Chicago. He joined the Office of Special Investigations (OSI)—the Nazi hunting unit of the US Department of Justice—in 1985 as a trial attorney, and was appointed Assistant Deputy Director of OSI in 1988. Mr. Bernstein died in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He was returning from Vienna, where he had persuaded the reluctant Austrians to take back Nazis deported from the U.S.
Mazel Tov, Dory!
