Goldziher Prize Announcement now on YouTube!

The Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations announced on Tuesday May 11th the first awardee of the Goldziher Prize for Jewish-Muslim Relations, Professor Mark Cohen of Princeton University.  The announcement was made at an event at the Muslim American Society of Boston’s Islamic Cultural Center attended by members of Boston’s interfaith community. 

The prize is named for the 19th century Islamicist, Ignác Goldziher, a Hungarian Jew who revered Islam and Muslim people and validated Islamic studies in the 19th century European university context.

Made possible by a grant from the William and Mary Greve Foundation, the prize is being administered by Merrimack College’s Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations.  The Center promotes reverence, understanding and collaboration in works of justice and peace among Jews, Christians and Muslims.

Click HERE to watch a video of the May 11th announcement.

Click HERE to download a copy of the press announcement.

Mark R. Cohen is The Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East and Professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Educated at Brandeis University (B.A.), Columbia University (M.A.), and the Jewish Theological Seminary (M.H.L., Rabbi, Ph.D.), he is a well known historian of the Jews in Arab lands in the Middle Ages. His publications include over 100 articles and reviews, and several books including Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages, 1994, new edition 2008, which has been translated into Hebrew, Turkish, German, Arabic, and French (Spanish and Romanian forthcoming).

Since 1986 he has been the director of the Princeton Geniza Project, an online database of transcriptions of documents from the Cairo Geniza.

Cohen has been a visiting professor at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, a guest lecturer at Ain Shams University in Cairo, and has taught at the Free University in Berlin and the Central European University in Budapest. He has held a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fellowship at the Wissenschaftskolleg in Berlin, a Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities, has been a Visiting Scholar at the National Humanities Center, and directed a DuPont Seminar for College Teachers on “Islam” at the National Humanities Center. He is a member of the American Academy for Jewish Research.

Cohen has lectured widely in the U.S., Europe, Russia, Japan, Qatar, Egypt, and Israel, before both scholarly and general audiences.

The Goldziher Prize will be awarded to Prof. Cohen on October 6, 2010 at a private dinner at Brandeis University.  Also being honored that evening are Goldziher Finalists Reuven Firestone, Professor of Medieval Jewish and Islamic Studies, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in Los Angeles, California; and Mohamed Hawary, Professor of Hebrew Studies and Jewish Thought at Ain Shams University in Cairo, Egypt.