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...

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...

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...

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....

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...

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...

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.