2018-04-10 - We were delighted that Julia Phillips Cohen was the 2018 Einhorn lecturer and joined us for two events on the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign campus on Monday, April 9. A packed to capacity noon workshop entitled “The Past as Foreign Country: Sephardi Jews and the Spanish Past” and then a standing room only 5pm lecture entitled “Jews for Jihad? Jewish Citizens in an...

2018-04-10 - Professor Amnon Reichman visited the University of Illinois College of Law on March 8-9, 2018. The visit was sponsored by the Israel Studies Project. Amnon Reichman is Associate Professor of Law at the University of Haifa and Principal Investigator at the Minerva Center for the Rule of Law Under Extreme Conditions.  His areas of expertise include separation of powers, theories of judicial...

2018-04-04 - When it comes to choosing a university, average class sizes are a point of anxiety for many prospective students. Getting a great education boils down to making connections with peers and faculty, and many students wish to do so in an environment that promotes these interactions. With an 18:1 student to faculty ratio, a majority of classes within the College of LAS aren’t lecture style, but...

2018-04-03 - I created Dialogue: A Polish-Jewish Film Series about a year ago with the intention of starting a forum for cross-cultural dialogue around Polish-Jewish issues that extend well beyond the scope of this particular cultural space. The goal of the Series is to breakdown perceived binaries between “Polish” and “Jewish” cultures through dialogue and discussion about a film. I was inspired by...

2018-03-05 - On Monday, March 5th, Michael Shapiro, co-founder and first director of the Program in Jewish Culture & Society, returned to campus to speak about Wrestling With Shylock: Jewish Responses to The Merchant of Venice, in celebration of the essay collection with that name edited by Shapiro and Edna Nahshon and published by Cambridge University Press in 2017.  Speaking to an...

2017-11-06 - On Monday, November 6, 2017, with generous support from the Greenfield Lynch lecture series, we hosted a panel about James Friedman’s striking series, “12 Nazi Concentration Camps.” The panel included James Friedman, Gary Weissman (University of Cincinnati), and me. For the month of November Friedman’s series was on display at the Illini Union Gallery via projections. I would like to thank...

2017-02-17 - Steven Weitzman, a professor in the University of Pennsylvania’s department of religious studies, will present a lecture titled “The Double Helix of Jewish History: Genetics and the Search for the Origin of the Jews” on Monday, Feb. 20, at 5 p.m. in the Knight Auditorium at Spurlock Museum of World Cultures, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana. Weitzman will explore the scholarly quest to understand...

2016-04-18 - The Program in Jewish Culture and Society and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies organized a special visit from Peter Balakian, a 2016 Pulitzer Prize-winning  Armenian American poet, memoirist, and foremost scholar on the Armenian Genocide. This visit included Balakian delivering the Center for Advanced Study (CAS)/MillerComm lecture (video...

2016-02-11 - The Krouse Family Visiting Scholars in Judaism and Western Culture Fund made another exciting visit possible this year. Dagmar Herzog a Distinguished Professor at the CUNY Graduate Center, and her meticulous research on sexuality and fascism has been highly influential.  Her most recent books include Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (2011); ...

2015-09-23 - A wonderful collaboration took place on September 21, 2015, at the Krannert Art Museum in Champaign-Urbana.  The UIUC Program in Jewish Culture and Society teamed up with the Krannert Art Museum (and benefactor Lorelei Rosenthal) to screen the dramatic, at times funny but always poignant, Jewish-themed 2015 BBC...

2015-08-20 - We are delighted to announce that Sayed Kashua, an Israeli writer of Palestinian descent and a singular presence in the world of literature and culture has agreed to stay at the University of Illinois for three more years as a visiting clinical professor. Sayed has been in residence this academic year thanks to the generous support of the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago and we are very...

2012-09-06 - Historians have long been interested in patterns of human movement. Throughout history, people have had to move to survive, either through regular circuits that bring them to communities and resources or through occasional, long-distance migrations, in search of new ways of life. "Russia in Motion: Cultures of Human Mobility Since 1850", edited by two Illinois professors, explores human mobility...