ACJS Awards
Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award
Marcia Koven Award for Best Student Paper
The Association for Canadian Jewish Studies recognizes achievement in the field of Canadian Jewish studies through two annual awards announced at the ACJS conference each spring. Nominations for both awards are reviewed by committees composed of ACJS members.
Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award
The Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award was established in 2001 to recognize the significant contribution by an individual, institution, or group to the field of Canadian Jewish Studies over many years. In 2008, the award was named the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award in honour of Louis Rosenberg, a pioneer in the social scientific study of Canada’s Jews.
Louis Rosenberg was a demographer, Jewish communal service worker, and one of the early founders of the field now known as Canadian Jewish studies. Rosenberg was born in Poland in 1893. After arriving in Canada in 1915, he spent more than two decades (1919–1940) as director of settlements of the Jewish Colonization Association. He published Canada’s Jews, a groundbreaking sociodemographic portrait of Canadian Jewish life, in 1940 before serving for the next five years as executive director of the western region of the Canadian Jewish Congress. From 1945 until his retirement in 1972, Rosenberg worked as national research director of the Bureau of Social and Economic Research of the Canadian Jewish Congress. He died in Montreal in 1987.
Louis Rosenberg, circa 1916, conducting investigations on behalf of the Jewish Colonization Association. Source: Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada
Past Award Recipients
2026: Sheldon and Judy Godfrey
2023: Morton Weinfeld
2022: Michael Brown
2021: Frank Bialystok
2019: Norma Baumel Joseph
2018: Richard Menkis
2017: Ruth Panofsky
2016: Janice Rosen
2015: Pierre Anctil
2014: Adam Fuerstenberg
2013: Ira Robinson
2012: Harold Troper
2011: Marcia Koven
2010: Eiran Harris
2009: Seymour Mayne
2008: Seymour Levitan
2007: Cyril E. Leonoff
2006: Irving Abella
2005: Gerald Tulchinsky
2004: Abraham Arnold
2003: Ruth Goldbloom
2002: Rabbi Gunther Plaut
2001: Miriam Waddington
Marcia Koven Award for Best Student Paper
Inaugurated in 2011, the Marcia Koven Award for Best Student Paper recognizes outstanding research, writing, and presentation by a graduate student at the ACJS’s annual conference.
Born in 1926, Marcia Koven was the founder of the Saint John Jewish Historical Society and founder of the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum, both in New Brunswick. Her study of Saint John’s Jewish history, Weaving the Past Into the Present, was published in 1989. Koven received the Louis Rosenberg Canadian Jewish Studies Distinguished Service Award in 2011 for her contributions to the study of Jewish life in Atlantic Canada. The Marcia Koven Award is made possible by the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum.
Marcia Koven, founder of the Saint John Jewish Historical Society and the Saint John Jewish Historical Museum. Source: Saint John Jewish Historical Museum
Past Award Recipients
2026:
Katrina Hermann, University of British Columbia, “A Day to Remember: Developing the Holocaust High School Symposium, 1976–1983”
2025:
Orah Liss, University of Ottawa, “Translating Selfhood: The Significance of Names in Adele Wiseman's The Sacrifice”
Ariel Waller, University of Ottawa, “Assimilation and Canadian Jews”
2024:
Noa Billick, Toronto Metropolitan University, “What Kind of Book are You?: The People of the Book, Communication, and Survival”
2023:
Sigred Thomsen, University of Vienna, “'I’m Growing Where I’m Going to Grow and That’s in Multiple Directions': Fluidities of Genre and Identity in Shiva Baby and Periphery”
Honourable mention: Aaliah Lewis, York University, “Understanding the Complex Identity of Black Jews in Canada and the US”
Honourable mention: Rebecca Mintz, York University, “Eating Disorders and Orthodox Jewish Life: Navigating the Conflict between Jewish Identity and Mental Health”
2022:
Tyler Wentzell, University of Toronto, “‘The Vanguard of the Vanguard of the Vanguard’: Revolutionary Jewish Youth in Interwar Toronto, Montreal, and New York.”
Honourable mention: Sean Remz, Concordia University, “The Hungarian Martyrs Synagogue and its Sisterhood: A Locus Holocaust Commemoration Avant la Lettre”
Honourable mention: Emily Belmonte, York University, “Gender and the Canadian Jewish Fur Trader Experience: Expansion and Colonialism in British North America, 1759-1812”
2021:
Nathan Lucky, University of British Columbia, “A Voice Behind the Headlines: The Public Relations of the Canadian Jewish Congress during World War II”
Honourable mention: Kenneth Grad, Osgoode Hall Law School at York University, "A Gesture of Criminal Law: Jews and the Criminalization of Hate Speech in Canada”
Honourable mention: Elizabeth Moorhouse-Stein, Queen's University, "Attachment and Attitudes toward Israel among Canadian Jews, and What Impacts these Most”
2019:
Heather Munro, Durham University, “Newly Religious North American Women in Jerusalem”
Honourable mention: Rotem Fellus, University of Ottawa, “Online Antisemitism”
2018:
Magdalene Klassen, McGill University, “Going Out into the World: Humanitarianism, Assimilation, and Gender among Jewish Members of the Imperial Order of the Daughters of Empire, 1900–1939”
Honourable mention: Vardit Lightstone, University of Toronto/Hebrew University of Jerusalem, “Traditional Innovation: An Analysis of the Folk Literature of Yiddish-Speaking Immigrants”
Honourable mention: Christopher Chanco, York University, “Through the Eye of a Needle: Post-War DPs and the Jewish Labour Committee of Canada”
2017:
Gesa Trojan, Technische Universität Berlin, “‘Add Matzo Meal and Stir Well’: Food as a Practice and a Representation of Urban Jewishness in Interwar Toronto”
Honourable mention: Simon-Pierre Lacasse, University of Ottawa, “À la croisée de la Révolution tranquille et du judaïsme orthodoxe: l’implantation de la communauté hassidique des Tasher au coeur du Québec francophone et catholique (1962–1967)”
2016: Lindsay Jackson, Concordia University, “Bloodless Bris: Intactivism and Brit Shalom in the Montreal Jewish Community” Honourable mention: Daniel Simeone, McGill University, “In Prison for Debt: Jewish Debtors in the Montreal District Prison between 1865 and 1900” Honourable mention: Yosef Robinson, Concordia University, “‘Rewritten Bibles’ in Modern Canadian Literature”
2015: Antoine Burgard, UQÀM / Université Lumière Lyon 2, “Entre exigences administratives et attentes de la communauté, le Congrès Juif Canadien et l’immigration d’orphelins de la Shoah depuis l’Europe de l’immédiat après-guerre” Rebecca Margolis and Meghan Cavanagh, University of Ottawa, “Canadian Yiddish in the Internet Age” Honourable mention: Yosef Robinson, Concordia University, “Montreal’s Keneder Odler in the 1920s and 1930s”
2014: SJ Kerr-Lapsley, McGill University, “Roots, Routes and Bridges: An Introduction to the Involvement of Holocaust Survivors in Holocaust Education in Vancouver” Honourable mention: Allie Cuperfain, Ryerson University, “The Identities of Toronto: An Analysis of UJA’s Annual Campaign 2012”
2013: Amy Coté, University of Victoria, “Analyzing Stories: (Re-)Reading Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces after the I-Witness Field School” Honourable mention: Maxa Sawyer, York University, “The Voices of Birthright Israel: Going Beyond the Jewish Homeland Narrative to Create a Realistic Relationship between the Jewish Canadian Diaspora and Israel”
2012: Kata Bohus, Central European University, “Standing Together or Staying Apart? Contradictions of Integration among 1956-er Hungarian Jewish Refugees in Toronto” Honourable mention: Faith Jones, University of British Columbia, “Grade’s Quarrel in Montreal”
2011: Adara Goldberg, Clark University, “Left in the West: Orphaned Holocaust Survivors in Western Canada” Gary Smolyansky, York University, "Class, Identity, and Ethnicity in Russian-Speaking Jewish Communities in post-WWII Canada”
2010: Faith Jones, University of British Columbia, “‘Di ershte un greste Yidishe bukh stor': Miller’s Books Advertising, 1910-1920″
2009: Tanhum Yoreh, York University, “Religious Geographies: A Case Study of Haredi Consumption Patterns in Canada and Israel”