Laura Levitt received the inaugural Fine Fellowship

Laura Levitt, a professor of religion, Jewish studies and gender at Temple University, earned the inaugural Fine Fellowship.

Created by the University of Pittsburgh Jewish Studies Program in collaboration with the Rauh Jewish Archives at the Heinz History Center, the fellowship will fund Levitt’s travel to Pittsburgh and study of materials related to the Oct. 27, 2018, attack on the Tree of Life – Or L’Simcha Congregation synagogue. The bulk of these materials — including ephemera, correspondence, oral histories and institutional records — are held in the Rauh Jewish Archives’ October 27 collections. Levitt will also study archives from the University and the city of Pittsburgh.

Levitt’s project, “Offerings of Grief, Offerings of Rage: Revisiting Tree of Life Synagogue and George Floyd Square,” will center on gifts visitors have brought to the site of the Pittsburgh synagogue as well as the George Floyd Global Memorial in Minneapolis. She will present her findings in spring 2025.

A scholar of Holocaust memory, trauma and loss, Levitt is also the author of “The Objects that Remain,” “American Jewish Loss after the Holocaust” and “Jews and Feminism: The Ambivalent Search for Home.”