The National Endowment for the Humanities, a U.S. federal agency, announced $37.5 million in grants for 240 humanities projects on Tuesday. Eight of the projects, which received $1,186,847 in funding, relate to Judaism and Israel.
The largest amount—$298,782—is to go to a translation of two 16th-century accounts of the New World by Sephardic Jews, Joseph Ha-Kohen and Luis de Carvajal. (The NEH spelled it “Joseph Ha-Kohem.”) The Washington University in St. Louis project is titled “Translating the Americas: Early Modern Jewish Writings on the New World.”
The NEH is also awarding $196,039 for an English translation of 20 stories by Rokhl Brokhes (c. 1899-1945), “a modern Yiddish woman writer who was murdered by the Nazis,” to be produced at Vanderbilt University.”
A Harvard Library of Ukrainian Literature five-volume English translation ($197,030), which includes Ukrainian-Jewish poetry; a two-week “residential institute” for 25 faculty members ($175,000) to explore “the history of Jewish print culture in New York City and Rochester, N.Y.”; and a University of Pennsylvania project ($149,996) that involves “development of training data and workflows for the computational analysis of Yiddish language and literature, as a case study for other low resource languages,” are also among the funded projects.
The federal agency allocated smaller amounts of funding for an Arizona State University book project ($60,000) titled “The Great Jewish Lunacy Trial,” about “Warder Cresson (1798-1860), a Pennsylvania-born Quaker and first American diplomat to Jerusalem, who was tried for insanity after his conversion to Judaism in the 1840s” and to University College London ($60,000) for a book titled “Afterlives of Israel’s 1982 Lebanon Invasion: Writing History in a Time of War.”
The latter book, per the NEH, will address the 1982 event’s “wide-ranging impacts throughout the Middle East, changed the relationship between the West and the Arab worlds, and influenced movements for Palestinian self-determination.”
A University of Notre Dame project titled “The Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls at the Crossroads of Empire: Negotiating Jewish Life Under Foreign Rule” will also receive $50,000. That involves two workshops “on the Aramaic Dead Sea Scrolls as a window into Jewish history and the imperial cultures of the ancient Near East,” per the NEH.
