AFHU News Spring 2023

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AMERICAN FRIENDS OF THE HEBREW UNIVERSITY
AFHU NEWS VOL. 30 PAGE 21
Awards and Prizes
Prof. Nir Friedman
Congratulations to Professor Nir Friedman of the Lautenberg
Center for Immunology and Cancer Research for receiving
the prestigious Landau Prize from the Mifal HaPais Council
for Culture and the Arts.
This award recognizes Professor Friedman’s exceptional contributions
to the field of computational biology, particularly in the development
of machine-learning techniques for analyzing human genomes in
the medical field. His pioneering work, which has allowed for highly
sensitive measurements of DNA fragments in blood samples and has
been widely cited in scientific research, has helped pave the way in
the emerging field of personalized medicine.
Congratulations to Dr. Yotam Drier of the Lautenberg Center for Immunology and Cancer
Research on receiving the prestigious Krill Prize for his outstanding contributions to
scientific research.
The Krill Prize is awarded to outstanding academic faculty members and promising researchers from
research universities in Israel who have demonstrated significant research breakthroughs and who
are expected to lead research and academia in Israel in the future in the fields of exact sciences, life
sciences, and medicine, engineering, and agriculture.
Meet the Professor:
Dr. Avigail Manekin-Bamberger
Dr. Avigail Manekin-
Bamberger is a historian
of Jews in antiquity,
focusing on social
and cultural history
and on the study of
ancient Jewish magic.
By integrating rabbinic
sources, non-Jewish
sources and material
Dr. Avigail Manekin-Bamberger evidence, she attempts
to reconstruct the everyday lives of Jews beyond
the rabbinic class.
An important source for her study is
archaeological findings of Jewish magical texts
and artifacts from antiquity. Early scholarship on
the subject often disregarded Jewish magical
sources, preferring to paint ancient Judaism as
rational and non-superstitious, and magical acts
as a marginal practice limited to the uneducated.
However, in the last few decades, as more texts
and artifacts have been discovered, scholars
have rejected these apologetic tendencies and
recognized the central role that magic played
in the ancient Jewish world. For example, a
discovery of hundreds of magical texts from
the time of the Babylonian Talmud inscribed on
ceramic bowls demonstrates how Jews protected
their households from demons, curses, and
malice. A Jewish scribe wrote incantations, divine
names, curses and spells in ink, on the surface of
an earthenware bowl, usually in a spiral fashion,
and later the bowl was buried. In her research,
Manekin-Bamberger demonstrates how careful
study of these “bowl texts”, alongside rabbinic
literature and other non-Jewish sources, can
reshape our understanding of ancient Jewish
society, such as the daily lives of Jewish men
and women, their rituals and institutions, the
boundaries between Jewish communities and
non-Jews and much more.
Click here for her recent blog post on the
subject.
Prof. Yotam Drier