Jakubczak’s project examines the successful and unsuccessful attempts to reestablish familial contact between Jewish immigrants in the United States and their relatives in Eastern Europe between the outbreak of World War One and 1944. Its goal is to provide a more comprehensive understanding of how Jewish immigrants related to their families in Eastern Europe who faced unprecedented difficulties: wars, displacement, and massive unemployment in the interwar period, and how Jews in Eastern Europe utilized transnational connections to improve their situation in a world of shrinking economic and emigration opportunities, growing antisemitism, and, ultimately, the Holocaust. 

Lu’s research investigates diverse interactions between American Jews and Chinese purveyors of food in the twentieth century. Her current project, “We Offer Chicken Chop Suey on Sundays: The Encounter Between Jews and Chinese Restaurateurs in Chicago, 1910s-1930s,” explores how Chinese restaurateurs in Chicago visioned and established a Jewish clientele through long-term advertising campaigns in the Chicago Jewish press from 1910s to 1930s. This project aims to reveal the active role played by Chinese restaurateurs in forming the deep-rooted attachment of American Jews to Chinese food, and the interconnectedness between the two communities that evolved from food.

Between the fall of slavery in the 1860s and the rise of the modern liberal state in the 1930s, the notion of what it meant to be a “good citizen” radically transformed for Jews in the United States. Morrow-Spitzer’s dissertation, “Jewish Citizenship Politics in the Age of American State Transformation, 1850-1933,” argues that a group of “American Jewish citizenship reformers” emerged during this era, all of whom placed the future of Jewish citizenship at the heart of their intellectual and political projects. As both the power of the regulatory state and the size of America’s Jewish population grew in previously unimaginable ways, these Jewish leaders consistently debated, theorized, and lobbied on behalf of what constituted an unthreatening and upwardly mobile modern Jewish citizen.

2023

• Jake Beckert, University of Washington Seattle, “Profit in the Holy Land: American Capital and Development in Mandatory Palestine”
• Mimi Wooten, University of Michigan, “Rubin Morris Hanan’s ‘Freedom Tree’: Narrating Immigration After 1924”
• Alexandra Zborovsky, University of Pennsylvania, “Should I Stay or Should I Go: Late Twentieth Century Jewish Immigration from the USSR to the United States”

2022

• Natalia Dubno Shevin, New York University, Labor to Labor’: How American Labor Unions Supported Israel, 1948-1977
• Uri Schreter , Harvard University, A New Thing for Israel’: Jewish Music and Politics in Postwar New York City 

2021

• Hadas Binyamini, New York University, Jewish American grassroots conservatism from the 1960s to the late 1980s
• Morgan Carlton, University of Michigan, Warring of the Classes: Jewish-American & African-American Mothers between World Wars
• Samantha M. Cooper, New York University, Cultivating High Society: American Jews engaging European Opera in New York, 1880-1940
• Amy Fedeski, University of Virginia (Honorable Mention), What We Want To Do As Americans”: Jewish Political Activism and United States Refugee Policy, 1965-1989
• Lucas Wilson, Florida State University (Honorable Mention), Postmemorial Structures: Portraits of Survivor-Family Homes in Second-Generation Holocaust Literature and Oral History

2020

• Ariel Cohen, University of Virginia, Displaying Art and Exhibiting Philanthropy: Jews, Gender, and Museums in the United States, 1915 – 1958
• Andrew Fogel, Purdue University, Racial architecture, sociocultural impact, and reception of the superhero fantasy
• Hannah Greene, New York University’s Skirball Department of Hebrew and Judaic Studies, Able to Be American: American Jews and the Public Charge Provision in United States Immigration Policy, 1891-1934

2019

• Jeremiah Lockwood, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Stanford University, LA Archivera
• April Rosenblum, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, York University, Crossing Columbia Avenue: Microhistory, Black-Jewish Relations and the Murder of William Seidler
• Alissa Schapiro, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Northwestern University, Lest We Forget: American Art, Visual Culture, and Antisemitism during World War II

2018

• Gregg Drinkwater, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, University of Colorado Boulder, Building Queer Judaism Gay Synagogues and the Transformation of an American Religious Community, 1965-1990
• Peter Labuza, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, University of Southern California, When A Handshake Meant Something: The Emergence of Entertainment Law and The Constitution of Hollywood Art, 1944-1967
• Anastasiia Strakhova, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Emory University, Imagining Emigration: Crossing the Borders of Russian Jewry during the Era of Mass Migration, 1881- 1917

2017

• Ronnie Grinberg, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, The Schusterman Center for Judaic & Israel Studies at the University of Oklahoma, My Pen is My Weapon: The New York Intellectuals and Masculinity, 1930-1980
• Sara Halpern, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, The Ohio State University, The World of 1939 Stood Still For Us: European Jewish Emigration from Shanghai, 1946-1951
• Geoffrey Levin, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, New York University, Another Nation: Israel, American Jews, and Palestinian Rights, 1949-1977
• Mathias Fuelling, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Temple University, Stollpersteine 

2016

• Aaron Welt, The Kevy Kaiserman Memorial Fellowship, New York University, The Shtarkers of Progressive Era New York; Crime, Labor, and Capitalism in an Age of Mass Migration, 1900 -1930
• Stefanie Halpern, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Jewish Theological Seminary, Crossing Over From the Yiddish Rialto to the American Stage
• Holly Genovese, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Temple University, A Pennsylvania State Historical Marker for the Hebrew Literature Society

2015

• Avigail Oren, The Kevy Kaiserman Memorial Fellowship, Carnegie Mellon University, Adjusting to Change: The Jewish Community Center Movement in Postwar Urban America, 1945-1980
• Julia Alford, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Temple University, Reaching a Complete Understanding of Klezmer Music
• Max D. Baumgarten, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, University of California, Los Angeles, From Watts to Rodney King: Peoplehood, Politics, and Citizenship in Jewish Los Angeles, 1965-1992

2014

• Shari Rabin, The Kevy Kaiserman Memorial Fellowship, Yale University, Manifest Jews: Mobility and the Making of American Judaism, 1820-1877
• Rachel Gross, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Princeton University, Objects of Affection: The Material Religion of American Jewish Nostalgia
• Geraldine Gudefin, Feinstein Center Summer Fellowship, Brandeis University, Navigating the Civil and Religious Worlds: Jewish Marriage and Divorce in France and the United States (1880s-1920s)

2013

• Zalman Newfield, The Kevy Kaiserman Memorial Fellowship, New York University Between the Sacred and the Secular: Communal Continuity and Change in Contemporary Lubavitch Society
• Zev Eleff, Brandeis University Declarations of Independence: The Formation of Religious discourse and movements within American Judaism
• Joshua Furman, University of Maryland“ Jew and American in the Making”: Approaches to Education and Childrearing in the American Jewish Community, 1945-1967
• Britt P. Tevis, University of Wisconsin – Madison May It Displease the Court: Jewish Lawyers and the Democratization of American Law

2012

• Amy Weiss, The Kevy Kaiserman Memorial Fellowship, New York University, Between Cooperation and Competition: American Jewish and Protestant Zionists, 1939-1977
• Joseph Gindi, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Claiming Tradition: Contesting the Shift toward Ashkenazi Orthodoxy among Syrian Jews 
• Rachel Rothstein, University of Florida at Gainsville “A Relationship of Equals”: Polish and American Jews and the Creation of a New Polish Jewishness since 1968
• Katie Rosenblatt, University of Michigan “To Protect the Aims of Collective Bargaining with Collective Buying”: Cooperative Housing, Ecumenical Activism, and the Labor Movement in the Early Cold War 

2011

• Ronit Yael Stahl, The Kevy Kaiserman Memorial Fellowship, University of Michigan God, War, and Politics: The American Military Chaplaincy and the Making of Modern American Religion
• Garrett Eisler, Graduate Center, CUNY “This Theater is a Battlefield”: Political Performance and Jewish-American Identity, 1933-1948
• Rachel Feinmark, University of Chicago Look for the Union Label: The American Federation of Labor and the Jewish Labor Committee’s Partnership for Economic Justice and International Human Rights, 1933-1955
• Pearl Gluck, City College of New York Where is Joel Baum: The Gender Dynamics and Community Politics of Post Holocaust Williamsburg

2010

• Leandra Zarnow, University of California, Santa Barbara Bella Abzug and the Promise of Progressive Change in Cold War United States
• Caroline Luce (Honorable Mention), University of California, Los Angeles Baking and the Jewish Labor Movement in Los Angeles 1920-1950
• Amaryah Orenstein (Honorable Mention), Brandeis University “Let My People Go” The Student Struggle for Soviet Jewry and the Rise of American Jewish Identity Politics

2009

• Adam Mendelsohn, College of Charleston Center City: Philadelphia and the English-speaking Jewish World in the Mid-Nineteenth Century
• Maya Balakirsky Katz (Honorable Mention), Touro College The Art of Hasidism: Chabad Dynasty and Visual Culture
• Rebecca Kobrin (Honorable Mention), Columbia University Creative Destruction: East European Jewish Immigrant Bankers, Financial Failure and the Reshaping of American Capitalism
• David S. Koffman (Honorable Mention), New York University The Jews’ Indian: Native Americans in the Jewish Imagination and Experience, 1824-1945

2008

• Rachel Kranson, New York University Grappling with the Good Life: Anxieties of Jewish Affluence in Postwar America
• Joshua Nathaniel Aaron Lambert (Honorable Mention), University of Michigan Unclean Lips: Obscenity and the Jews in North American Literature
• David S. Koffman (Honorable Mention), New York University The Jews’ Indian: Â Native Americans in the Jewish Experience and Imagination, 1824-1945
• Erik M. Greenberg (Honorable Mention), University of California, Los Angeles “Not for This Did the Prophets Sing and the Martyrs Die:” American Jewish Resistance to the Melting Pot, Circa 1900-1920 

2007-2006

2007

• Marni Davis, Emory University On the Side of Liquor: American Jews and the Politics of Alcohol, 1870-1936

2006

• Lauren Strauss, Jewish Theological Seminary of America Painting the Town Red: Jewish Visual Artists, Yiddish Culture, and Progressive Politics in New York, 1917-1939

2005

• Valerie Thaler, Yale University The Reshaping of American Jewish Identity, 1945 to 1960
• Leah Levitz Fishbane (Honorable Mention), Brandeis University An ‘American Hebrew’ Renaissance: Young American Jews and the Challenge of Leadership in Late-19th Century American Judaism

2004

• Mia Sara Bruch, Stanford University The Fatherhood of God and the Brotherhood of Man: American Jews and American Religious Pluralism, 1941-1960
• Joshua A. Perelman (Honorable Mention), New York University Choreographing Identity: Modern Dance and American Jewish Life, 1924-1964
• Ari Y. Kelman (Honorable Mention), University of Pennsylvania Station Identification: A Cultural History of New York’s Yiddish Radi 

2003

• Rona Sheramy, Brandeis University Defining Lessons: Creating Jewish Memory of the Holocaust across the Generations
• Lila Corwin Berman (Honorable Mention), Yale University Presenting Jews: Jewishness and America, 1920-1960 

2002

• Shana Bernstein, Stanford University Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict: Interracial Cooperation and the Fight for the Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933-1954
• Lisa Silberman Brenner (Honorable Mention), Columbia University The Jazz Singer’s Legacy: The Racial Role-Play of African-American and Jews in Twentieth Century American Performance​
• Susan Gittleman (Honorable Mention), Temple University The German Jewish Experience in America, for a biography of Edna Ferber

2001

• Beth Cohen, Clark University Case Closed: Holocaust Survivors in America, 1946-1954
• Susan Breitzer (Honorable Mention), University of Iowa Class, Ethnicity, and Community: The Jewish Working Class of Chicago, 1886-1928
• Shana Bernstein (Honorable Mention), Stanford University Building Bridges at Home in a Time of Global Conflict: Interracial Cooperation and the Fight for Civil Rights in Los Angeles, 1933-1954
• Alexander Molot (Honorable Mention), New York University Between Reform Judaism and Jewish Nationalism: David Neumark and the Problematics of Modern Jewish Identity
• Arlene Lazarowitz (Honorable Mention), University of California Senator Jacob K. Javits and Soviet Jewish Emigration 

2000

• Marc Frey, Temple University The American Soviet Jewry Movement, 1958-1972
• Libby Garland (Honorable Mention), University of Michigan Migrants, Aliens, Citizens: United States Immigration Policies and the Making of Jewish Americans, 1919-1939
• Adam Howard (Honorable Mention), University of Florida Return to Zion: Organized American Labor and the Establishment of the State of Israel, 1942- 1948 

1999

• Lisa Levenstein, University of Wisconsin Poor Jewish Women in Philadelphia, 1920-1960
• Shuly Rubin Schwartz (Honorable Mention), Jewish Theological Seminary of America Serving the Jewish People: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life
• Joellyn Wallen Zollman (Honorable Mention), Brandeis University Shopping for a Future: A History of the American Synagogue Gift Shop
• Lawrence Charap (Honorable Mention), Johns Hopkins University Jewish-Prostestant Interfaith Dialogue in the American Religious Press, 1883-1914

1998

• Michael Alexander, Yale University Jazz Age Jews
• Kirsten Fermaglich (Honorable Mention), New York University Perpetrators, Bystanders, and Victims: Â Secular Jews, the Holocaust, and American Intellectual Culture, 1959-1978
• Andrea Most (Honorable Mention), Brandeis University Cantors and Jazz Singers: Theatre as a Medium of Modernization and Acculturation

1997

• Tova Perlmutter, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor The Federal Voting Rights Act and Jews in New York City
• Arthur Kiron (Honorable Mention), Columbia University Sabato Marais: Italian Rabbinic Humanist in Victorian Philadelphia
• Rakhmiel Peltz (Honorable Mention), Columbia University, University of Pennsylvania Forging the Mainstream of American Jewish History: Children of Immigrants Interpret Their Legacy
• Mark Frey (Honorable Mention), Temple University A Chorus of Protest from the Free World: The American Struggle for Soviet Jewish Emigration, 1957-1963

1996-1995

1996

• Marc Dollinger, Pasadena City College, California State University at Northridge Turning Inward, The Transformation of American Liberal Politics from 1946-1980

1995

• Aviva Ben-Ur, Brandeis University Americanization in a Sephardic Immigrant Community: Two Advice Columns from the New York Ladino Press
• Alice A. Butler-Smith Eisenhower, the Middle East and the Jews: Imitations of Influence

1994

• Lisa Levenstein, University of Wisconsin Poor Jewish Women in Philadelphia, 1920-1960
• Shuly Rubin Schwartz (Honorable Mention), Jewish Theological Seminary of America Serving the Jewish People: The Rebbetzin in American Jewish Life
• Joellyn Wallen Zollman (Honorable Mention), Brandeis University Shopping for a Future: A History of the American Synagogue Gift Shop
• Lawrence Charap (Honorable Mention), Johns Hopkins University Jewish-Prostestant Interfaith Dialogue in the American Religious Press, 1883-1914

2001

• Eric Goldstein (Dissertation Fellowship), Emory University, Race and the Dilemmas of Jewish Identity, 1875-1945

2000

• Edward Shapiro (Research Grant), Seton Hall University, Right Turn: Jews and the American Conservative Movement
• Eugene Sheppard (Research Grant), Brandeis University, Analysis of Leo Strauss’ philosophy and work post-World War II at the University of Chicago
• Nathan Abrams (Research Grant), University of London, The special role played by Commentary magazine in Jewish affairs, especially on the growth of American Jewish political conservatism

1998

• Marc Dollinger (Doctoral Prize), Pasadena City College, Turning Inward: Cultural Nationalism and American Jewish Life, 1964-1980
• Karla Goldman (Doctoral Prize), Hebrew Union College, Jewish Institute for Religion, Beyond the Gallery: The Place of Women in the Development of American Judaism
• Mary McCune (Special Grant in Women’s Studies), Ohio State University, “Charity Work” as Nation-Building: American Jewish Women’s Activism and the Crises in Europe and Palestine, 1914-1929
• Felicia Herman (Special Grant in Women’s Studies), Brandeis University, The ways gender has shaped the religious lives of American Jewish women and men from the 1890’s to World War II.
• Jane Rothstein (Special Grant in Women’s Studies), New York University, Social and cultural history of the mikveh in the United States from the late nineteenth century through the 1940’s.
• Jeremy Stolow (Special Grant in Women’s Studies), York University, Toronto, Canada, Nation of Torah: Inspiring Stories and the Politics of Historiography in a Religious Social Movement
• Aviva Ben-Ur (Special Grant in Women’s Studies), Brandeis University, Queens University, Where Diasporas Met: Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews in the City of New York - A Study in Intra- Ethnic Relations, 1880-1950
• Melissa Klapper (Special Grant in Women’s Studies), Rutgers University, A Fair Portion of the World’s Knowledge: Young American Jewish Women and the Problem of Education, 1870-1920

1997

• Nancy Mykoff, A Jewish Season: Ethnic-American Culture at Children’s Summer Camp (1918-1941)
• Jay Eidelman (Research Grant), Yale University, Jews in North America, 1790-1830
• Regina Stein, Jewish Theological Seminary of America

1995

• Reena Sigman Friedman (Research Grant), Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, History of the Reconstructionist Movement
• Eli Faber (Research Grant), John Jay Criminal College, Jews and Slavery in the English Speaking World
• Alice Saldan (Research Grant), University of Kansas, Eisenhower, American Middle East Policy, and Domestic Imperatives: American Zionism Confronts “Sympathetic Impartiality”

1993

• Beth Wenger (Doctoral Prize), University of Pennsylvania, New York Jews and The Great Depression