Roy Ginsberg '24 Wins 2024 Harry and Cecile Starr Prize in Jewish Studies

We are very pleased to announce that Roy Ginsberg (Ph.D. '24) has been awarded the 2024 Harry and Cecile Starr Prize in Jewish Studies by the Center for Jewish Studies at Harvard for his doctoral dissertation entitled “Building the Ratn-Farband: Monumentalizing the Soviet Utopian Project through Yiddish Art and Literature.”

This dissertation considers literary monuments, such as Peretz Markish's Di kupe (The Mound, 1921), and places them in conversation with sculptor Iosif Chaikov's literal Soviet monumentalization projects of the 1920s and 30s. Roy analyzes poetry alongside architecture to demonstrate how writers modified versification and manipulated the aural and visual elements of texts to create literary works that resemble the monumental structures of human history, from the Tower of Babel to the metallurgical plants of the Urals.

The Starr prizes are awarded for the best undergraduate theses and graduate dissertations in the field of Jewish and Hebrew studies, and were established by Harry Starr '21, LL.B. 1924.

Congratulations, Roy!