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/Shiner Family Fellowship provides a stipend of $14,000 and a waiver of tuition and some fees for...
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 Yiddish after the Holocaust and examines the many competing efforts of major Yiddish cultural figures in...
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 forthcoming monograph, “Creole Israel: The Jewish Atlantic World After Slavery,” takes up traditional tools—...
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. The mass violence in Ukraine was part of a global phenomenon of ethnic and racial violence, which...
2024-09-20 - The week of September 16, 2024, was full of adventures with our Israel Studies Project visitors, Judy Maltz, a senior correspondent for the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, and Amit Schejter, a full professor of communication studies at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. A lunch with seniors at the Champaign-Urbana Jewish Federation, a public lecture, a lunchtime talk, a movie screening, numerous...
2024-09-12 - On September 11, 2024, PJCS kicked off the new academic year with a marvelous event. Samuel Freedman, an award-winning author and professor at Columbia University, delivered a terrific lecture on Hubert Humphrey's battles against antisemitism and extremism in mid-century America.
2024-09-04 - Alice Balestrino is a PhD candidate in Italian Studies and The Initiative for the Holocaust, Genocide and Memory Studies. Her dissertation focuses on two Jewish authors who collaborated, to varying degrees, with fascism: Margherita Sarfatti and Gertrude Stein. Caught between resistance to the totalizing power of fascist politics which threatened them as gendered and racialized subjects and the...
2024-05-14 - May 14, 2024 1PM CST Online event. Register here. The State of Israel is a democratic and liberal state that also serves as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The social and...
2024-04-30 - Even as a fourth-generation Jewish Texan, S.L. Wisenberg has always felt the ghost of Europe dogging her steps, making her feel uneasy in her body and in the world. At age six, she’s sure that she hears Nazis at her bedroom window and knows that after they take her away, she’ll die without her asthma meds. Later in life, she makes her first and only trip to the mikvah while healing from a breast...
2024-04-25 - THURSDAY, APRIL 25TH, 2024 Ruth Behar 4:00pm Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum 600 South Gregory, Urbana View on Map EVENT DESCRIPTION In this presentation, Ruth Behar will discuss her recent turn from anthropology to writing coming-of-age novels. These works of historical fiction feature Jewish Cuban and Sephardic young girls seeking to...
2024-04-04 - This event, part of the Greenfield Lynch Lecture Series, will take place April 4, 2024 at 5:30 PM in Levis Faculty Center 210. Ben Lerner is the author of eight books of poetry and prose as well as several collaborations with visual artists. His new book of poetry, The Lights, was just published by FSG, and his most recent novel, The Topeka School, won the Los Angeles Times Book Award...
2024-03-26 - This lecture will take place Tuesday, March 26, 2024, 4:00-5:30 PM in Levis Faculty Center 422. The least known Jewish community in the ancient world is the network of Jews who populated the Arabian Peninsula during the years between the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and the rise of Islam during the 7th century C.E. Nonetheless, a significant amount of material written in...
2023-11-03 - On behalf of the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, I write to express our deepest collective concern to all those who have suffered by the appalling terrorist attacks by Hamas and the escalating war in Israel and Gaza. I would like to stress that there is no place for antisemitism, Islamophobia or hate for any faith at Illinois. A message of concern with respect and tolerance from...
2023-10-23 - On Friday, November 3, 2023, the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, Memory Studies held a conference on Race, Migration, and Memory. Keynote speaker Shimon Attie talked about "Night Watch and Other Projects." Please click here to view the recording.