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...