The UCLA Maurice Amado Program in Sephardic Studies invites UCLA graduate students to apply for Maurice Amado research and travel grants. The Maurice Amado grants are intended to defray costs associated with short-term research or study in the field of Sephardic studies. Awards will be made up to $1,500.

2019-2020 Recipients

Max Modiano Daniel

Max Modiano Daniel [History] traveled to San Diego to present paper entitled, “Particularly Exotic and a Taste of Home: Foodways, Cookbooks, and the Shaping of a Sephardic American Community” at the annual Association for Jewish Studies conference.

KalebAdney

Kaleb Herman Adney [History] traveled to Israel to visit the Ben Zvi Institute in Jerusalem to access collection of business records of tobacco merchant Juda Perahia. His collection, which includes documents in Greek, Ladino, Turkish, and French, offers rare insight into Jewish commercial and social practices in the Ottoman context.

Max Modiano Daniel

Max Modiano Daniel [History] continued his examination of the Los Angeles Sephardic community’s engagements with their interwoven Spanish, Ottoman/Turkish, and American histories as part of his doctoral dissertation, “A Sephardic Century: The Transnational Entanglements of a Los Angeles Community, 1893- ”.1992

Rachel Kaufman

Rachel Kaufman [History] participated in an online language-learning program in Ladino.

Salmon

Simone Salmon [Ethnomusicology] participated in a summer online language-learning program in Ladino offered by the University of Washington.

2018-2019 Recipients

Salmon

Simone Salmon [Ethnomusicology] traveled to Albuquerque, NM to present a paper on Jewish diaspora at the annual Society for Ethnomusicology conference.

Max Greenberg

Maxwell Greenberg [Chicana/o Studies] traveled to Tijuana, Mexico to conduct dissertation research at the National Government Archives where he digitized and transcribed oral histories with Sephardic entrepreneurs central to the development of Tijuana’s economic and urban development in the 20th century.

Max Greenberg

Maxwell Greenberg [Chicana/o Studies] traveled to Boston to present a paper at the 2019 Latin American Studies Association Conference on “The Borderlands of Jewishness in 20th Century Tijuana, Mexico.”

Molly Oringer

Molly Oringer [Anthropology] conducted ethnographic research in Beirut on “Spatial Relations: Post-War Rehabilitation and the Afterlives of Jewish Terrains in Lebanon.”

Salmon

Simone Salmon [Ethnomusicology] traveled to Istanbul Technical University to present a paper on “Multivalent Ladino Song in Los Angeles.”

Fulbright-Stoolman-1

Jessie Stoolman [Anthropology] traveled to Morocco to research at the national archives in Rabat and the library in Tetouan to study the racialization of minority communities under Spanish colonialism, namely, Jewish and black communities.

Harrison Woods

Harrison Woods [History] visited Beirut, Lebanon to study Jewish political culture at American University of Beirut’s archive as well as the National Archives.

2017-2018 Recipients

KalebAdney

Kaleb Adney [History] traveled to Thessaloniki to do research in the Historical Archive of Macedonia and look at records from the Ottoman Empire.

Botnick

Julie Botnick [Info. Studies] created a participatory digital community archive in partnership with the Los Angeles Sephardic community to present at the Association of Jewish Libraries conference.

Orringer

Molly Oringer [Anthropology] traveled to Beirut to explore how sites of a former Jewish community that has all but disappeared embody the ostensibly multifaceted, multi-sectarian nature of Lebanon—once considered the impetus for the so-called Balkanization of the region.

Salmon

Simone Salmon [Ethnomusicology] presented a paper at the International Council for Traditional Music Mediterranean Symposium in Essaouira, Morocco.