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 senior mentors from the United States, Israel, and Europe since 2004. It is proud to facilitate professional development of the future generations of Jewish Studies researchers in the fields of Eastern European Jewish history, religion, literature, culture, anthropology, and sociology. Next June in Warsaw, the Director of the PJCS, Prof. Eugene Avrutin, will join a cohort of distinguished senior scholars, including Natalia Aleksiun, Israel Bartal, Jonathan Dekel-Chen, David Engel, Eli Lederhendler, Rebecca Kobrin, Anna Shternshis, Yfaat Weiss, and Marcin Wodziński. Rachelle Grossman, Assistant Professor at the Department of Comparative & World Literature, and Anastasiia Strakhova, Associate Director of the PJCS, are alumni of the Forum in 2022 and 2017, respectively. This is a new, exciting chapter in the history of the PJCS. We hope that the Forum will become the first of many collaborative projects with the Hebrew University.
December 9, 2025