From the Liveblog of
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
Jewish history scholar named a MacArthur ‘genius’
Add ToI as a Preferred Source on GoogleA Princeton professor of Jewish history is one of 24 people from the arts and sciences who have won this year’s “genius grant” awards from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The prize comes with $625,000 over the next five years that can be used any way the recipient likes.
Marina Rustow, 46, is a professor at Princeton’s Department of Near Eastern Studies and Department of History.
According to the MacArthur Foundation, “Marina Rustow is a historian using the Cairo Geniza texts to shed new light on Jewish life and on the broader society of the medieval Middle East. The Cairo Geniza (or Genizah) comprises hundreds of thousands of legal documents, letters, and literary materials—many of them fragmentary—deposited in Cairo’s Ben Ezra Synagogue over more than a millennium. Rustow’s approach to this archive goes beyond decoding documents, in itself a formidable task, to questioning the relationship between subjects and medieval states and asking what that relationship tells us about power and the negotiation of religious boundaries.”
— AP and Times of Israel staff
The Times of Israel Community.