2024 Recipients

Pierre Forfert- Ph.D. student, Department of French 

My project investigates the entanglement of antisemitism and spa culture in 19th-century France. Examining the ways in which anti-Jewish discourses took roots and proliferated during the heyday of spa towns, I turn to literary productions written in and about spas to map out the rise of a specific trend of French “resort antisemitism.” The generous support of the Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Student Research Grant will allow me to conduct archival research trips to Vichy, Clermont-Ferrand, and Paris in order to consult a wide array of undigitized material pertaining to spa towns. Through a critical survey of local newspapers, guidebooks, and novels, I intend to study the extent to which accounts of lived experiences in these towns were imbued with nationalistic discourses that equated the presence of Jews with anxieties about territorial loss, land speculation, and rampant industrial capitalism. Simultaneously, this project studies how the rise of resort antisemitism might have emerged as a reaction to French spas’ gradual—and oftentimes forgotten—transformation into important sites of worship and sociability for the Jewish community. Examining how this sense of place translates into the burgeoning works of novelists, painters or composers, this project seeks to explore personal letters and manuscripts to shed light on Jewish artists’ significant contributions to 19th-century French spa culture. 

Daniel Blokh- Yale College 

Growing up as the child of Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union, I was frequently told about the persecution my parents faced for being Jewish in Russia and Ukraine. Their ethnicity forced them to confront both structural and cultural oppression, determining where they could go to school, what jobs they could work, and how people treated them. The stories I heard from other Jewish family members and acquaintances from the former Eastern Bloc solidified my impression of the deep antisemitism permeating Soviet society. When I began to study Soviet history as a Slavic Studies major at Yale, however, I was shocked to discover that accounts from the early Soviet period portrayed Jewish and Soviet identity as symbiotic, even synonymous. Jews were proportionally more highly represented in the Bolshevik party than any other ethnicity, and many of the most radically pro-Soviet politicians, artists, and writers of the 1920s and 30s were Jewish. Due to the Russian chauvinism and immense antisemitism of the tsarist regime, many Jews identified with the revolutionary ideal of communist internationalism, which promised to abolish antisemitic repression and absorb them into a greater program of Soviet solidarity. What happened between these early years of Jewish-Soviet symbiosis and the later years of Soviet antisemitism? This riddle has fascinated me throughout my academic career, and my Baron Grant project, Soviet Jewry: The Evolution of Identity and Internationalism, will allow me to produce a research paper delving further into this question. By researching documents written by Soviet Jews, specifically the pivotal years when official policy towards Jews suddenly changed, Soviet Jewry: The Evolution of Identity and Internationalism strives to narrow down the cause of the alteration and how it was experienced by Soviet Jews. I am optimistic that my work can generate new insights about the history and causes of Soviet antisemitism, and I see the potential for a future doctoral dissertation to develop from this project. 

Faculty- Matthew Morrison