The Melton Center for Jewish Studies has been fortunate to have received endowed funds from donors over the years, some of which are earmarked for undergraduate and graduate student scholarships. The students below received awards during the 2025–2026 awards cycle.
The Leah Metchnick Godofsky and Martin R. Godofsky Scholarship
Upon consultation with the faculty, the Student Awards Committee of the Melton Center for Jewish Studies at The Ohio State University awards $1200 annually to one undergraduate student who is enrolled in courses of Jewish study and demonstrates excellence in the classroom.
This year's recipient is Ella Rosenblatt, a sophomore majoring in Hebrew and Jewish studies. “I am a sophomore Jewish studies major from New York City. In addition to my studies, I serve on the executive board of the OSU Hillel, and work as a Movement Experiences Intern with BBYO. I look forward to continuing my studies and giving back to the community that has had a profound impact in making me who I am today. I am looking forward to applying my work in both my Jewish studies and Hebrew classes as I look to pursue a career with BBYO or Hillel, organizations that have given so much back to me.”
The Reva and Sanford Lipson Student Support Fund
The Reva and Sanford Lipson Student Support Fund supports students studying or researching the history and culture of the Jewish people.
The Morris and Fannie Skilken Family Foundation Endowment Fund Scholarship for Yiddish and Ashkenazi Studies
The Skilken Fund Scholarship supports undergraduate students who study Hebrew, Yiddish, and Ashkenazi Studies, Jewish Studies, or studies in Jewish oral history.
This year’s recipient for both awards is Zoe Babione, a public affairs and Hebrew and Jewish studies major. She is deeply involved in the Jewish community on campus, serving as Editor-in-Chief of The Buckeye Scroll and Development Chair at OSU Hillel. She is also involved in the larger Columbus Jewish community, teaching religious school and Hebrew at a synagogue in Bexley. Across her roles, she is committed to fostering inclusive Jewish communities for people of all backgrounds.
The Charlotte Susan Roth Memorial Fund Essay Contest
The Roth Essay Contest is open to any currently enrolled graduate and undergraduate student who has written a paper on a topic related to Jewish Studies from autumn semester to spring semester. Essay topics can include any aspect of Jewish studies (Bible, language, literature, history, philosophy, sociology, culture of Israel, rabbinics, arts, etc.).
First Place, Graduate Division: Cody Beasley, for "Features of Qumran Hebrew: A Diachronic Assessment.” Cody is a PhD student in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures. His paper defends the view that the unusual grammatical forms of Qumran Hebrew, the label used to refer to the language of the Dead Sea Scrolls, reflect features of a spoken dialect. "Drawing on comparative linguistic evidence, including typologically similar changes that occur in modern Arabic dialects, I show that natural language change accounts for a selection of eight well-documented features in Qumran Hebrew.”
Second Place, Graduate Division: Matthew Herzog, for “Belial in Select Dead Sea Scrolls: A Physical Abstract or Being?” Matthew is a PhD student in Greek and Latin in the Department of Classics. His paper examines the various depictions of the malevolent entity Belial in three Dead Sea Scrolls: the War Scroll, the Damascus Document, and 1QHodayot. Through careful philological analysis of these Hebrew texts, Matthew shows that Belial's characterization depends on the context in which it appears. This can range from a physical manifestation of wickedness that was created for divine purposes, or an abstraction that the Qumran authors used to categorize impious behavior, and the result of that conduct.
Second Place, Graduate Division: David Catire-Thill, for “Dancing the Jewishness Out of Cuba’s New Man.” David is a PhD student and graduate fellow in the Department of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts. His paper examines the exodus of Cuba’s Jews following the 1959 communist revolution, focusing on the state-sponsored ballet company. By looking at pieces performed by the company alongside work by Jewish choreographers of the time, the paper posits that the erasure of Jewish identity that occurred with the departure of Cuba’s Jews may be viewed in the dance itself.
First Place, Undergraduate Division: Hannah Hansen, for “Judges 11: Jephthah's Reflection of Israel.” Hannah is a junior majoring in architecture. Her paper examines Jephthah's rise and fall as a leader, mirroring the cyclical pattern of faith and apostasy within Israel. By examining Jephthah's tragic vow and its consequences, as well as the often-overlooked righteousness of his daughter, the essay explores themes of flawed judgment, imposed sacrifice, and unsettling divine silence, inviting readers to reflect on human weakness, agency, and divine intervention.
The Norbert and Gretel B. Bloch Endowed Scholarship Fund in Jewish Studies
The Bloch Endowed Scholarship Fund supports a student to coordinate a program that enhances awareness of topics relevant to Jewish life, culture, or history.
This year’s recipient is Brenna Miller, a PhD student in musicology with a graduate minor in folklore. Miller studies Jewish refugees and their musical communities in Shanghai in the interwar, wartime, and postwar periods. Her research seeks to situate itself in the larger field of global music history by developing an understanding of global forces that affect musical and cultural development and expression at a local level, while simultaneously examining Pacific Jewish histories. With this scholarship, Miller organized events on campus with Dr. Kierra Crago-Schneider from the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
Emily and George Severinghaus Beck Education Abroad Scholarship
The Emily and George Severinghaus Beck scholarship is for students who wish to study Yiddish in the United States and abroad.
This year’s recipient is Casey Carsel, a PhD student in the Department of History of Art. Their dissertation topic revolves around the exploration of Jewish amulets in early modern Eastern Europe through a material culture lens. Casey will develop their knowledge of Yiddish through Warsaw’s 24th International Summer Seminar in Yiddish Language and Culture to recover relevant objects and practices whose material traces now remain only in texts that describe them. Knowledge of languages such as Yiddish will also help Casey better understand the contexts in which these objects are situated and the meanings that can be found therein.
The Samuel M. Melton and the George M. and Renée K. Levine Graduate Fellowships in Jewish Studies
The Samuel M. Melton and the George M. and Renée K. Levine Graduate Fellowships in Jewish Studies provide a year of support to a graduate student conducting research in a core area of Jewish studies.
George M. and Renée K. Levine Fellowship in Jewish Studies
Brenna Miller is a fourth-year PhD student in musicology at The Ohio State University. Her dissertation project, “Sounding and Performing Jewish Cultural Community in Wartime Shanghai,” seeks to explore how newly arrived European refugees developed and maintained cultural and artistic institutions that built community among the Central European Jews in Shanghai and how this community interacted with itself and other diasporic groups in the city.
Brenna has held fellowships from The Ohio State University (2023–2024 Graduate Enrichment), the US Holocaust Memorial Museum (2024 Summer Graduate Fellowship), and the Joint Distribution Committee (2025 Fred and Ellen Lewis/JDC Archives Fellowship). Her work has been generously supported by Ohio State’s Melton Center for Jewish Studies, East Asian Studies Center, Musicology and Ethnomusicology Area, and the Center for the Study of Religion.
During her fellowship year, Brenna will complete her candidacy exams and conduct archival research in Germany, Austria, and the U.K. for her dissertation. This fellowship year will also allow Brenna to study both Chinese and German more deeply, better preparing her to read archival materials and articles in both languages.
The Samuel M. Melton Graduate Fellowship in Jewish Studies
Salma Albezreh is a master’s student in the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures at The Ohio State University, where she previously earned her BA in history and Islamic studies as a Stamps Eminence Fellow. Her research interests include the religious communities and traditions of Late Antique Arabia, pre-Islamic and early Islamic epigraphy, ancestral Arabian religion, and the Qur’anic text.
Salma’s research explores the diverse religious landscape and rich “scriptural galaxy” of Late Antique Arabia—an environment long characterized as isolated, but now increasingly understood as deeply interconnected with the broader Near East and home to vibrant Jewish and Christian communities. Her work seeks to illuminate this complexity through two complementary approaches. First, she examines epigraphic and archaeological evidence from pre-Islamic Arabia to better understand patterns of religious diversity and the nature of Jewish communities in the region. Second, she conducts literary analysis to explore how these neighboring religious communities interacted, influenced one another, and contributed to shared symbolic and theological vocabularies that the Quran inherits and recasts. At the heart of this work is a conviction that Jewish scriptures, customs, and traditions offer a rich repository of materials that function as a kind of palimpsest underlying the Quranic text.
During her fellowship year, she will pursue her project Houses of Light: Law, Purity, and Divine Presence in Jewish Tradition and the Quranic Verse of Light, which examines how Jewish biblical and post-biblical traditions conceptualize divine law as a form of illumination that structures both ethical life and communal identity. The fellowship year will also allow her to deepen the linguistic foundation essential to this work, including Hebrew. She hopes this project strengthens scholarly bridges between Jewish Studies and Quranic Studies and contributes to the growing field of Judeo-Islamic studies, which investigates the deep and sustained interplay between Jewish and Islamic texts and cultures.
Graduate Student Research Travel Grant
Each year the Melton Center allocates support for students to apply for travel to an academic conference or to use for travel or research that supports a major project in Jewish studies and forms part of the student's academic program.
This year the Melton Center awarded a travel grant to Brenna Miller, a PhD student in musicology with a graduate minor in folklore, to travel to Washington, DC to conduct archival research at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. Over the course of two weeks, she will examine collections that have been accessioned since her 2024 residency, including personal collections, newspapers, and photographic albums held and created primarily by Central European Jewish refugees who fled to Shanghai to escape Nazi Germany in the 1930s and 1940s. This research will contribute to her dissertation, deepening understanding of the lived experiences and cultural histories of Jewish refugees in transit during the Holocaust era.
Diane Cummins Hebrew Prize
The Cummins Prize in Hebrew is a scholarship awarded by the Department of Near Eastern and South Asian Languages and Cultures to benefit those studying Hebrew and/or Yiddish.
This year’s winner is Nina Goulet. Nina majored in Hebrew and Jewish studies with a minor in linguistics and graduated in May 2026.