2025 Dan David Prize Winner Beth Lew Williams

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When a gravedigger in 1860s Nevada City buried Chinese immigrants without recording their names, he erased their individual identity from the historical record, but inadvertently left a trace of the way that Asian-Americans were perceived and mistreated in the past. Chinese people lived full and complicated lives in the American West, but often the only remaining evidence of their experiences comes from people who did not acknowledge their humanity and contributed to their erasure.

"I think immigration history can give us a sense of how it is that white Americans who were living next door to Chinese immigrants in the nineteenth-century were able to dehumanize them...dehumanization then allowed them to do things like regulate them, segregate them and eventually exclude them from coming to the United States,” says Beth Lew-Williams, a historian of race and migration in the modern United States.

Read more about Beth on the Dan David Prize website here: https://dandavidprize.org/winners/beth-lew-williams/

Produced by: Renana Levi and Moofa Production House (https://www.moofa.info/)
Directed by: Tammy Tish
Animation direction, research and creative: Daniella Koffler (Moofa Production House)
Animation: Yosi Lagzeal
Interviews: Shahar Brimer
Filming: Aviv Shilo
Graphic design: Yoav Einhar
Graphic package: Pepper
Sound: Ohad Stamati