Past Drucker Memorial Prize Recipients

Past winning thesis titles range from "Reacting to the Rabbi: How the Israeli Right Responded to Meir Kahana" in the Department of Politics, and "Jewish-Black Relations in Post-Apartheid South Africa" in the Woodrow Wilson School, to "Allegory and the Text in Rashi's Commentary on Song of Songs" in the Department of Religion, and "Bound by Enigma: the Akedah Motif from the Bible to 20th-Century Jewish Literature" in the Department of English.

Year Past Prize Recipients
2019 The 2019 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Nathaniel Moses, Department of History, for “Exegetical Encounters: Edward Pococke’s Bible and Seventeenth-Century Orientalism.” Second Prize was awarded to Maya Aronoff, Woodrow Wilson School, for “We Were All Once Refugees: The Battle Over Israeli Policies Towards African Asylum-Seekers.”
2017 The 2017 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Maya Rosen, Independent Concentrator in Philology for “The Bible Unbound: the Wakefield Brothers and Christian Hebraism.” Second Prize was awarded to  Ayelet Wenger, Department of Classics for “Greek in the Arukh of Nathan ben Jehiel.”
2016 The 2016 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Eu Na Noh, Department of English for “Imagination in a Catastrophic Time: Crisis and the Ethics of Representing Trauma.” Second Prize was awarded to Ariel Futter, Department of Politics for “Does Israel Fit the New Commonwealth Model? Analyzing Israeli Political Development (1948-2016) through the Lens of the Constitutional Revolution.”
2015 The 2015 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Anna Rubin, Department of Religion for "Defining My Jewish Community: Intersections of Individuality and Community in America’s Post-College Jewish Meaning-Making."
2014 The 2014 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Anna Nilles, Art and Archaeology, for "Finis Ghetto? Architecture and the Afterlife of the Jewish Quarter in Prague."  Second Prize was awarded to Abigail Klionsky, History, for "In the Tiger’s Lair: The Development of Jewish Student Life at Princeton University, 1915-1972."
2013
The 2013 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Nava Friedman, Department of Religion, for “Choosing to be Chosen: Religious Identity Among the New Jews of Uganda.” Second Prize was awarded to Brandon Davis, Department of Anthropology, for “Desiring Israel: Gays, Jews, and Homonationalism.” Third Prize went to Samson Schatz, Woodrow Wilson School, for “The Balancing Act: Saudi Arabia and the Arab-Israeli Peace Process, 1981-2013.”
2012 The 2012 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Tal D. Eisenzweig for "The Jerusalem Light Rail Train: A Bumpy ride in an Ethnically Polarized City” in the Woodrow Wilson School. The second prize winner was Lydia Dallett, “Combat is Best, Sister: the Integration of Women into Israeli Combat Units” in the Department of Politics.
2010 The 2010 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Jane Beatrice Dobkin for “The City of Jerusalem and the Architecture of Division”  in the Department of Architecture.  The Second Prize winners were Esther Meira Breger for “A Maidservant in This Household: Hagar, Identity, and Exclusion in Midrashic Literature” in the Department of Religion and Miriam Rebecca Marek for “Many Ways Forward: Jewish Identity in the Work of Grace Paley, Cynthia Ozick, and Allegra Goodman” in the Department of English.  The third prize went to Talia Tova Nussbaum for “Draft and Release: Navigating the Israeli Army and Life Beyond” in the Department of Art and Archeology.
2009 The 2009 Drucker First Prize was awarded to  Jae Hee Han for “‘And his name is Ephraim, My true Messiah’:  Christian Elements in the Pesikta Rabbati Piska 36 “ in the Department of Religion.  The Second Prize winner was Melissa Lerner for “A ‘Catalyst for Peace’:  Deciphering Strategies for Effective Presidential Leadership of the Arab-Israeli Peace Process” in the Woodrow Wilson School, and the third prize went to Rebecca Nyquist for “Beyond Blood and Creed:  A New Perspective on Children of Interfaith Marriage” in the Department of Religion.
2008 The 2008 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Shira Nomi Billet for "Rupture and Recreation:  The Shared Journey of Jewish Thought and Anglo-American Legal Theory in the Twentieth Century" in the Department of Religion.  The Second Prize winner was Jonathan Michael Fluger  for "Legislators of the Word: Anti-Anthropomorphism as Political Theology in al-Jāḥiẓ and Saadia Gaon" in the Department of Religion and the third prize went to Jordan Raphael Reimer for "We the…Who?  The Dilemmas of Israeli Constitutionalism" in the Department of Politics.
2007 The 2007 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Jonathan A. Pomeranz for "Do You Wish to Know the One Who Spoke and the World Came into Being?  Looking for the Author in Philonic and Rabbinic Exegesis" in the Department of Classics.  The Second Prize winner was Oded Zinger for " 'When the One Who is With Me' Is Not With Me:  Long-distance Marriages in the Medieval Egyptian Jewish Community" in the Department of History and the third prize went to Ben Pollack for "Project Golem:  Imagining the Past in Contemporary Jewish American Literature" in the Department of Comparative Literature.
2006 The 2006 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Sarit Jolanda Kattan Gribetz for " 'And God Spoke to Moses and Aaron:' Rabbinic Authority and Identity in the Mekhilta de Rabbi Ishmael" in the Department of Religion. The Second Prize co-winners were Rachel Lieff Axelbank for "Everywhere the Same: A Collection of Short Stories on the Orthodox Jews of Dublin" in the Department of Anthropology and Nathaniel Fintz for "Milton's Hebraic Dynamism: Paradise Lost and John Selden's Talmudic Scholarship" in the Department of English.
2005 The 2005 Drucker First Prize was awarded to Rena N. Lauer for "The Second Controversy of Paris: Text, Context, and Intertextuality" in the Department of History. The Second Prize co-winners were Netti Minsker Herman for "Of Wives and Other Demons: A Comparative Analysis of The Tale of the Jerusalemite and The Tale of the White Snake" in the Department of Comparative Literature and Joseph Aaron Skloot for "Moses of Hamilton Terrace: The Hertz Torah Commentary in Context and Interpretation" in the Department of History.
2004 The 2004 Drucker Prize co-winners were Elizabeth Rose Bailey for "The Quest of the Commentary Intellectuals: Anti-Semitism, Racism and the Search for Identity in Postwar America 1945-1955" and Orly Lieberman for "Wrestling with Ambiguity: Jewish and Christian Exegetes by the River Jabbok," both in the Department of Religion.
2003 The 2003 Drucker First Prize winner was Amos Bitzan for "The Sorrows of Young Graetz: A Jewish Historian in the Making, from Aufklärung to Wissenschaft" in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literature. A Second Prize was awarded to David Jeremy Segal for "A Platonic Relationship, Philo's Reading of Plato's Phaedrus and Republic" in the Department of Classics. And the Third Prize winner was Jessica Rose Munitz for "Ohev Shalom V’Rodef Shalom: A New Perspective on Peacemaking in Ancient Judaism" in the Department of Religion.
2002 The 2002 Drucker Prize winner was Adina Miriam Yoffie for "Rhetoric, Rash, and Reason: The Exegesis of Johannes Cocceius (1603-1669)" in the Department of History.
2001 The 2001 Drucker First Prize winner was Vance Serchuk for "Continuity and Crisis: The Development of the Moscow Choral Synagogue, 1869-1906" in the Department of History. A Second Prize was awarded to Eric Reimer for "Ashkenazi Jewish Women and the BRCA Assay: An Exploration of the Factors Influencing Awareness, Knowledge, and the Intention to Test" in the Department of Sociology.
2000 The Drucker Prize winners for 2000 were Alexandra Ariel Garber Rothstein for "Let Us Make a Man in Our Image: The Rabbinic Portrayal of Wicked Biblical Kings as Torah Scholars" in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and Benjamin Daniel Sommers for "Blacks and Jews in Each Other's Eyes: Exploring Minority Identity in 20th-Century American Fiction" in the Department of English, who shared First Prize; and Geoffrey Aron Mitelman for "The Demise of the Temple and the Rise of the Torah: Rabbinic Views of the Temple in Lamentations Rabbah" in the Department of Religion, who won Second Prize.
1999 In 1999 the Program in Jewish Studies awarded two First Place Drucker Prizes. The winners were Owen Simon Alterman for "Mauritius Exiles? The Detentions of Jewish Refugees on the Island of Mauritius, 1940-45" in the Department of Near Eastern Studies, and Margot Louise Albeck for "AntiSemitism and its Aftermath: The 'Jewish Problem' and the 'Vichy Solution'" in the Department of History.