Jessica Alpert '03 Winner of Fulbright Grant
New York, NY-- Jessica Alpert '03 has received a prestigious Fulbright grant for a year of research on oral history of the Jewish community in El Salvador. The Fulbright Scholar Program sends 800 U.S. faculty and professionals abroad every year to conduct research in a wide variety of academic and professional fields.
At Barnard, Alpert was awarded a Tow Fellowship to collect oral histories from Jewish communities in El Salvador.
"Latin-American Jewish communities are fascinating because they identify strongly as Jewish, but at the same time they feel very Latin. If you go to a Jewish service in El Salvador, they serve tortillas and frijoles alongside the challah," said Alpert.
Alpert was also the recipient of the Bessie Ehrlich Memorial Prize for an oral history she created of her grandmother, who fled Nazi Germany by immigrating first to Holland and then to El Salvador in 1938. Her work has been published in Marjorie Agosin's anthology Taking Root: Narratives of Latin American Jewish Women (Ohio University Press, 2002).
"Oral history is incredibly in-the-moment," said Alpert. "In many ways, it's an emotional history, rather than a history of events. It is an honor to have the opportunity to continue the work of others, recording the thoughts, experiences, and history of a most vivacious community."
Alpert graduated magna cum laude as a political science major and plans to pursue a career in either academia or law.
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