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 Argentina, Poland, and the United States to preserve and propagate Yiddish after immense loss. She argues that book publishing was not only a kind of memorial project, but also an effort organized throughout a diaspora to establish new centers of authority for a living culture. 

In her first year at the U of I, Professor Grossman is teaching two courses that fall under the Jewish studies umbrella. During the fall semester, she taught Jewish Storytelling. The course challenges students to think about how storytelling allowed writers to wrestle with modernity as it affected traditional Jewish life, as this literature developed in conversation with major historical developments of the modern era. In the spring semester, Grossman will teach Responses to the Holocaust. This course focuses on both famous and lesser-known examples of Holocaust literature and the debates that they engendered. By examining both literature and responses to it, students not only develop their own reading practices, but they also learn to evaluate how narratives about the Holocaust are put into service of other national, social, and political agendas.