News Highlights Commencement 2026:
Sidney Hillson/Rose Bronstein Memorial Award

Abigail Gillman, Professor of Hebrew, German, and Comparative Literature in the Department of World Languages and Literatures at Boston University, received the Sidney Hillson/Rose Bronstein Memorial Award at Hebrew College’s Commencement Ceremony on May 31, 2026. Below are her remarks.

Thank you so much to the Board of Trustees for selecting me for this award, and to Rabbi Sharon Cohen Anisfeld, the faculty, and the extended community of Hebrew College, who are so close to my heart. It is an honor to be part of today’s festivities.

I am inspired, and humbled, to receive an award which honors a remarkable woman, Rose Bronstein. Rose Bronstein’s passion for Hebrew, for ivirt b’ivrit, reminds me of my own first role model in my study of Hebrew: my mother, Sarah Fisher Gillman, who learned her Hebrew at the Shulamith School for girls in Boro Park in the 1940s. Though my mon’s vocabulary is a bit dated, her proficiency and love of the language, has been a lifelong inspiration.

Hebrew College has been a second academic home since the start of my career. Barry Mesch, the provost, invited me to his office in the early ‘90s to discuss possible collaborations with Boston University. At that time, BU did not have a center of Jewish studies. Over the years, I relished the opportunity to teach adults learners. Adult education is tremendously rewarding. In this respect, I followed in the footsteps of my father, Rabbi Neil Gillman.

I want to share with you a few of the delights and challenges of my work as a scholar and teacher of Hebrew and Jewish literature.

At Boston University, I teach students from all backgrounds and many international students. It never ceases to amaze me, how the texts I call “Jewish” literature, whether written in English, German, Yiddish or Hebrew, resonate with these students. Indeed, Jewish literature is filled with ideas and wisdom of universal relevance.

A course on Middle Eastern Literature, which includes Hebrew alongside Arabic, Persian, and Turkish works, presented a new challenge, especially after October 7. What can I read with these students in just three weeks, that will help them understand Israel’s complicated identity within this tough neighborhood called the Middle East? There is only time for one novel!

In my scholarship, I have focused on German Jewish culture, and especially on the topic of translation. The field of Hebrew-German (and Yiddish-German) studies has grown in the last decades, and it is a part of a larger enterprise I call Jewish translation history. Translation has been ubiquitous in Jewish society. The ancient synagogue did not have humashim with translation on its shelves, but it did have a living breathing translator in the sanctuary who translated aloud each Hebrew verse read from the Torah into Aramaic. The historian of Jewish translation practices asks what did translation mean for different generations and genders? and what purposes and agendas did it serve in different periods?

I am now writing about the mashal, the Jewish parable. Like a character in a story by Agnon, I have been traveling through the Jewish library, collecting parables, from Franz Kafka to Etgar Keret, from the Bible to Hassidic tales, from Buber to contemporary writer Haviva Pedaya.

Finally: since 2021, I became much more connected with Israeli academics and writers than I had been earlier in my career. The literary scene in Israel is extraordinarily rich and vibrant. In a time when Israel is too often reduced to a monolithic entity, it is one of my missions to help a wider range of voices and literary works be heard and read heard in the diaspora.

To the students graduating today: as you take your next steps, you all are blessed to have the Hebrew language, and all of Jewish literature, in your toolkits. How fortunate you are to have studied here, and to have learned here! Mazal tov to all!