PROFESSOR ELI YASSIF WINS PRESTIGIOUS ISRAELI LITERARY AWARD
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Professor Eli Yassif, the Sarah and Zvi Berger Professor of Jewish Folk-Culture at Tel-Aviv University and the academic advisor and representative of the Posen Foundation in Israel, has received the 2009 Bahat Prize for outstanding academic manuscripts from the University of Haifa press. The prize is Israel’s highest award for an academic publication (100,000 NIS for a senior academic faculty member and 40,000 NIS for a young scholar).
Professor Yassif receives this prize as a senior academic for his work examining the culture of Safed in northern Galilee, as expressed in legends of Safed from the sixteenth century. The work, “Safed as Myth: Life and Fantasy in the City of Kabbalists,” offers ethnographic analyses and a survey of folklore based on a rich line-up of texts: legends and fables, dreams and fantasies, hearsay and casual testimony, ethical instruction and mystic imagination – all of which were created some 400 years ago, and all of which reflect one of the richest and most dynamic phenomena in the history of Jewish culture.
The prize, named after the late Professor Yaakov Bahat, one of the founding faculty members of the Department of Comparative Hebrew Literature at the University of Haifa, has been awarded annually since 1998 for quality, original, non-fiction manuscripts in Hebrew that have not previously been published. ). The winning manuscripts will be published by the University of Haifa press in conjunction with Yedioth Acharonot Books.
This is the first year that the prize carries this amount made possible due to a grant from the Bahat and Yuval families, and former students of Professor Bahat who wished to honor his memory.
Dr Dana Olmert and Dr Yehuda Goodman share the prize of 40,000 NIS each in the category of young scholar/general public. Dr. Olmert has been recognized for her manuscript “First Hebrew Women Poets,” a discussion of the poetry of the first modernist Hebrew women poets that shows a new focus on their psycho-poetic self-image as reflected in their works.
Dr. Goodman receives the prize for his work, “Exile of Broken Vessels,” an ethnographic journey into the Haredi world in Israel.
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