A Summary of Our 2025 Award Recipients

The 2025 Bertha Anolic Israel Travel Award:   

  Arel Lissette, a first-year Visual Arts MFA student at Columbia University, is the recipient of the 2025 Bertha Anolic Visual Arts Israel Travel Award. As a Jewish artist navigating the complex and evolving political landscapes between the United States, Israel, and the Jewish diaspora, Lisette’s work reflects a deep engagement with the tensions and narratives that shape our world. Support from this award will enable her to travel to Israel for the first time to conduct independent research in the Lawrence D. Hite Family "This Place" Photographic Archive, a collection of over five hundred documentary photographs that offer diverse and nuanced perspectives of contemporary Israel. Through her exploration of this archive, Lisette will develop a series of charcoal and pastel drawings that aim to bridge the gap between reality and imagination, creating new narratives that explore shared humanity in the face of political and social divides. We hope this travel opportunity will be instrumental in broadening her understanding of the intricate connections between Israel, the U.S., and global Jewish identity, allowing her to present a richer, more empathetic interpretation of these complex stories.

The 2025 Naomi Anolic Early Career Jewish Visual Arts Award:   

   We are pleased to announce that Noah Lagle is the recipient of the 2025 Naomi Anolic Early Career Jewish Visual Arts Award. Noah’s work explores the intersections of identity, memory, and the systems that shape our understanding of the world. Drawing from archival research, architectural forms, and linguistic disruption, he examines boundaries—both physical and metaphorical—that mediate our experience of history, loss, and belonging. His recent work, which includes investigations into sites of Jewish history such as Auschwitz and Pompeii, demonstrates a commitment to engaging with personal, cultural, and historical narratives that challenge conventional notions of space and time. The influence of 20th-century German Jewish thinker Aby Warburg guides Lagle in connecting fragmented histories through visual and textual representations, creating a dynamic, ever-evolving archive. This award will enable him to expand his exploration of these themes, developing a new series of prints combining images, text, and material investigations, that will further contribute to scholarly discourse and expanding the boundaries of Jewish visual culture in contemporary art.

The 2025 Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award:   

    We are excited to announce that Becky Behar has been selected as the recipient of the 2025 Isaac Anolic Jewish Book Arts Award for her deeply personal and visually striking project, Tu Ke Bivas. A photographer and book artist, Behar has long viewed the artist book as a space for intimate, rhythmic storytelling, and this work marks a significant milestone as her first fully realized handmade artist book integrating a sustained, four-year photographic project into a cohesive, intimate form. Tu Ke Bivas (meaning "May you live" in Ladino) is a meditation on Sephardic identity, matrilineal memory, and the transmission of Jewish traditions across generations, featuring over 45 photographs that explore themes of diaspora, inheritance, resilience, and renewal. The book's design, including its exposed spine, marbled endpapers, and innovative use of translucent gold sheets, reflects the fluidity of memory and the sacredness of heritage, inviting a layered engagement with its physical form. With support from this award, Behar will complete the final production of Tu Ke Bivas, ensuring that it reaches exhibition venues, libraries, and Jewish cultural institutions, fostering important reflection on diasporic continuity and intergenerational connection.