Congratulations to Michail Kitsos, who has received the Frankel Center's Michael Bernstein Dissertation Prize in Judaic Studies for his dissertation "Speaking as the Other: Late Ancient Jewish and Christian Multivocal Texts and the Creation of Religious Legitimacy," conducted in Middle East Studies under the joint supervision of Ellen Muehlberger and Rafe Neis.
The committee was impressed with the ways in which the dissertation brings together Christian anti-Jewish sources with Talmudic dialogues in order to better understand the ways the two traditions portray each other to outside audiences. Perusing a broad variety of sources in relevant ancient languages from Latin and Greek to Aramaic, Syriac and Hebrew, Kitsos treats these sensitive topics with sophistication and nuance.
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.
