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 take place in Warsaw on June 22-25, 2026. The Forum has been bringing together young scholars and...
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, emphasizing the dynamism of Yiddish, its history, culture, language, music, and literature. The program...
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 is an intergenerational story of a Yemeni Jewish family in Israel and addresses questions of...
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 (Princeton, 2025). The event was co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Global Gender Equity. In...
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 terms [װאָס, װער װען, װוּ…], nominative, accusative and dative forms, past and future tense, and time...
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...