Museum Announces First Butcher Scholar Winner

The Women of the West Museum announces that Judy Branfman will be the first recipient of the Butcher Scholar Award for her video documentary project, The Land of Orange Groves and Jails. Branfman, a Research Scholar at the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, has a master's degree from Harvard University's Graduate School of Education and has spent several years researching and writing a history of the Jewish community of Boyle Heights on the east side of Los Angeles.

The Land of Orange Groves and Jails focuses on the free speech movement of Depression-era Los Angeles through the eyes of a group of young, mainly Jewish women activists, and a precedent-setting court case (Stromberg vs. the People of California). In 1929, for flying a red flag at a small children's summer camp in San Bernadino County-then a crime under California's Syndicalism Act-Yetta Stromberg (the camp director and the film maker's great aunt) was sentenced to one to ten years in San Quentin Prison and became the center of a lawsuit that went to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Branfman will accept the $5,000 award at a luncheon in Denver on March 19. In addition to the Butcher Scholar Award, she has received support for this project from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the California Council for the Humanities, the UCLA Center for the Study of Women, the Yablon Foundation, and other foundations and individuals.

The Butcher Scholar Award was established in 2001 as a permanent endowment at the Women of the West Museum in order to recognize a promising scholar whose work and interests further the mission of the museum. The award honors the vision, leadership, and generosity of Jane and Charlie Butcher, who have been strong supporters of the Women of the West Museum since the early 1990s.

The mission of the Women of the West Museum is to discover, explore, and communicate the continuing role of women in shaping the American West. We create experiences that empower people to discover new potential in their lives. Museum offices are in downtown Denver, at 1536 Wynkoop St., Suite 400B. The museum's Web site is www.womenofthewest.org.

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