GRADUATE STUDENT SPOTLIGHTS Noam Sienna’s A Rainbow Thread Wins Two Awards Noam Sienna (PhD, History) published his groundbreaking work, A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969 (Print-O-Craft Press, 2019), just over a year ago. In that first year, the initial printing sold out. And now his book has won two major awards: The 2020 Judaica Reference Award from the Association of Jewish Libraries, and the 2020 LGBT Anthology Award from the Lambda Literary Foundation. Commenting on the sold-out print run, Sienna notes, “I think it demonstrates what a need there was for this book.” “Before the pandemic,” he reports, “I was able to spend the year traveling to share it with a wide variety of audiences, and I was always amazed by how excited people were about it.” Indeed, the two awards recognize Noam Sienna both the quality and breadth of Sienna’s scholarship as well as speak to the need the anthology fulfills for both an academic and general audience. As Sienna says, “I’m honored to have received these two awards, which represent how warmly the book has been received both in the world of Jewish Studies and in the world of LGBTQ community.” Sienna chose to publish his anthology with a trade press rather than with an academic press because he wanted to have a wider audience than just academics. He is happy with that choice, not only because of the sold-out initial printing, but because he feels Print-O-Craft Press is “doing great work producing creative and beautiful Jewish books, and they gave me a lot of freedom with this book, which I’m grateful for.” He also notes that the press has been able to continue fulfilling orders through print-on-demand services, and a second print run is scheduled for summer 2020. Sienna defended his dissertation (supervised by CJS Director Daniel Schroeter) via Zoom on May 15, 2020. He is currently focused on his academic work on medieval and early modern Sephardi history, including preparing a proposal to publish his dissertation research as a book. He is also devoting attention to a few studies of some of the cases mentioned in his dissertation that he did not have room to fully explore. And finally, focusing on the positives in a pandemic, he says, “I’m also using this time to find new opportunities to teach online, which has meant developing a different pedagogy and learning some new skills, and it’s been very rewarding.”
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