2026-06-01 - We mark the end of the 2025-2026 academic year by celebrating the successes of Jewish Studies and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies students. Here are our award winners. Matthew Fam (PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative & World Literature...
2026-05-04 - The Program in Jewish Culture & Society welcomed Miriam Udel to campus on February 23rd as a part of the Krouse Family Visiting Scholar in Judaism and Western Culture Fund's annual lecture series, with additional support from the Center for Children's Books. Udel is the Judith London Evans...
2026-05-04 - On the evening of January 26th, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society and Illini Hillel welcomed Dan Shapiro to campus as part of the Israel Studies Program, with additional support from the Jewish United Fund. Shapiro, a graduate of Uni High School in Urbana and son of Michael Shapiro, one...
2026-03-05 - The Program in Jewish Culture & Society announces a call for applications for the Dick Abrams Scholarship, which provides two $1,300 stipends. The scholarship will be awarded to full-time, degree-seeking undergraduate students in good academic standing enrolled at the...
2026-02-03 - Applicants must be degree-seeking graduate students in good academic standing enrolled at the University of Illinois. The Gendell/Shiner Family Fellowship provides a stipend of $14,000 and a waiver of tuition and some fees. Preference will be given to students at the ABD level in either Jewish...
2026-01-15 - The Jewish Studies Podcast Project is out! We interview our faculty, visiting scholars, and guest lecturers about their new projects and recent books. Follow us on Spotify for a new episode every third Thursday of the month.The first episode is dedicated to Dara Goldman, May Her Memory Be a...- 2025-12-09 - The Program in Jewish Culture and Society has started a promising collaboration with the Leonid Nevzlin Research Center for Russian and East European Jewry at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. We became co-organizers of the International Forum of Young Scholars on East European Jewry that will...
2025-12-09 - From November 14-16, Champaign-Urbana was host to the Midwest Yiddishfest, a three-day Yiddish culture and arts festival co-sponsored by the Program in Jewish Culture & Society and the C-U Jewish Federation. The program featured nine public programs that covered a broad array of subjects,...
2025-12-09 - On October 28th, Israeli-Canadian author Ayelet Tsabari visited campus as part of her book tour for her debut novel, Songs for the Brokenhearted (2024). The event was supported by the Einhorn Fund, the Israel Studies Project, and the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity. The novel...
2025-12-09 - On September 8th, the Program in Jewish Culture & Society and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies welcomed Ronnie Grinberg, associate professor of history at the University of Oklahoma and author of Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals (...
2025-08-25 - This summer, I attended the 23rd International Summer Seminar in Yiddish Language and Culture at the Centrum Kultury Jidysz in Warsaw, Poland. I was part of the level two cohort and each day we spent four hours studying Yiddish. Our daily Yiddish lessons included a review of concepts like questions...
2025-01-15 - The Program in Jewish Culture & Society announces a call for applications for the Gendell/Shiner Family Fellowship, the Karasik Scholarship, and the Dick Abrams Scholarship. Applicants must be degree-seeking students in good academic standing enrolled at the University of Illinois.The Gendell/...
2025-01-08 - Rachelle Grossman is an assistant professor in the Department of Comparative and World Literature. She is a specialist in Yiddish literature and print culture who received her PhD from Harvard University. Her current book manuscript discusses the transformation of...
2025-01-08 - Eli Rosenblatt joined the Department of Religion as an assistant professor in Fall 2024. His research and teaching illuminate Jewish texts, ideas, and practices in the 19th and 20th centuries, with a particular interest in the Caribbean and United States. His...
2024-10-15 - On October 14, 2024, we had a great turnout for Harriet Murav's lecture on her recently published book, "As the Dust of the Earth: The Literature of Abandonment in Revolutionary Russia and Ukraine." From 1918 to 1922, as many as 40,000 Jews were killed in the pogroms of the Russian Civil War....