Honors
Bloomberg journalist and J. board member Peter Waldman received the 2024 Prince Albert II of Monaco United Nations Gold Prize for Climate Change Reporting for Bloomberg Green’s Water Grab series. The series investigates how investors are moving to control profit from water sources as climate-fueled droughts become common around the world. Waldman and the Bloomberg team donated the significant cash prize to the Committee to Protect Journalists to help secure the rights and safety of journalists to cover natural resource extractions by unscrupulous actors everywhere.
Daniel Solomon, a history Ph.D. student at UC Berkeley, won the 2024 Nathan L. and Suzanne K. Wolfson Merit Award from the Jewish Braille Institute. Solomon is one of five students recognized for their academic achievements and contributions to the Jewish community who are also legally blind and enrolled full time in an accredited college or university. A total of $75,000 in scholarships was awarded to the five winners, with individual awards ranging between $2,500 and $15,000 per year.
“Being Jewish and visually impaired are both constitutive elements of my identity,” said Solomon in a press release. “I strive to serve both of these communities as an academic and a writer in the public sphere.”
Solomon wrote an opinion piece for J. in February titled “Mob violence at UC Berkeley shows free speech doesn’t exist for Zionists,” days after protesters broke into Zellerbach Playhouse where an Israeli attorney and reserve IDF officer had been invited to speak.
Applications for next year’s scholarship are currently open to any college or graduate student who is legally blind, has a strong academic record and has demonstrated engagement with the Jewish community. Apply at wolfsonfund.org
Stanford Taube Center for Jewish Studies announced the achievements of fourth-year graduate student Ariel Horowitz and postdoctoral scholar in Jewish studies Rebecca Glasberg. Horowitz won the Levi Eshkol Literary Award for excellence in Hebrew literary writing. His novel “The Ghost Editor,” a bestseller in Israel, is about a renowned and charismatic academic who has a secret: He trampled over friends and colleagues while climbing his way to the top. Glasberg won the Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Award for her literary translation work. The recognition came from the Modern Language Association for translations included in “A Jewish Childhood in the Muslim Mediterranean,” which she edited and annotated, bringing together stories of Jewish writers and intellectuals in the Muslim world.
“Miri’s Moving Day,” co-authored by Stephanie Wildman of San Francisco and Adam R. Chang of Daly City, has been included in Tablet magazine’s list of best Jewish children’s books of 2024 and the S.F. Chronicle’s holiday gift list of Bay Area-focused kids books. Wildman and Chang decided to write the book after one of Wildman’s grandchildren asked at dinner one night, “Can I be Chinese and Jewish?”
Danielle Feldman of Santa Rosa, Tory Roman of Piedmont and Tess Wong of Mare Island have been selected for Hadassah’s 2024 class of Evolve Leadership Fellows. The leadership development program launched in 2022 to inspire and nurture the next generation of Hadassah leaders.
Feldman is a substitute teacher in Sonoma County. She volunteers with A Wider Bridge, the national nonprofit that advances LGBTQ inclusion in Israel; Congregation Shomrei Torah, her Santa Rosa synagogue; and the JCRC Bay Area. She holds a master’s degree in public health from Johns Hopkins University and her bachelor’s in integrative biology from UC Berkeley.
Roman, who has helped produce a number of NYC theater projects, originated the role of “Pat” in the Broadway hit “Kinky Boots.” She is a member of two unions, SAG-AFTRA and the Actors’ Equity Association, and earned a degree in musical theater from the University of Cincinnati College–Conservatory of Music.
Wong is a nurse team manager at Kaiser Permanente and a staff nurse at Washington Hospital in Fremont. She is active in the American Association of Critical-Care Nurses and holds a BS in nursing.
Aliza Craimer Elias of Berkeley, interim CEO of the Institute for Curriculum Services, has been chosen for the Wexner Field Fellowship, a program for young Jewish community professionals who receive guidance on development, education, leadership and Jewish learning. Elias is one of 15 professionals selected from a competitive pool of applicants for the intensive three-year program.She has a master’s degree in modern Jewish studies from Oxford and her bachelor’s degree in psychology from the University of Calgary.
Happenings
Members of the organization Sharaka (“partnership” in Arabic) visited the Bay Area in November with the theme “Arabs Learn About the Holocaust: Rising Antisemitism and Peacemaking in the Middle East.” An interfaith event with the Bay Area Jewish Coalition and South Peninsula Hebrew Day School was held on Nov. 20 and attended by 200 people, including Sunnyvale Mayor Larry Klein. The visitors also met with state elected officials and community leaders and with Chabad SF’s Young Jewish Professionals at a Nov. 22 Shabbat dinner. The Sharaka team is made up of young leaders from Bahrain, Lebanon and Morocco who have become advocates for peace and coexistence in the Arab world.
Longtime Peninsula Sinai Congregation cantor Doron Shapira was ordained as a rabbi by the Pluralistic Rabbinical Seminary, in Tarrytown NY. Shapira served the congregation for 31 years as cantor and as ritual director from 2010-2011.