Jewish Book Council Honors Talya Fishman with the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award

Talya Fishman, Associate Professor of Religious Studies, has been awarded the Nahum M. Sarna Memorial Award by the Jewish Book Council for her work Becoming the People of the Talmud: Oral Torah as Written Tradition in Medieval Jewish Cultures.The book, which Fishman spent 11 years researching and writing, examines the circumstances that have shaped the cultural meaning of Jewish traditions.

Fishman, a member of the Middle East Center, is the recipient of numerous other honors including a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, a Center for Advanced Jewish Studies Fellowship and an American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Fellowship for Independent Scholars. She joined Penn’s faculty in 2001 and concentrates her research on the formation and reformation of medieval Jewish subcultures and gender and religion.

Fishman serves on the doctoral fellowship review panels for the Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture and the Foundation for Jewish Culture. In addition, she sits on the faculty advisory committee for the Center for Advanced Jewish Studies and is a member of the Book Review Editorial Board for the Association for Jewish Studies Review.