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Jewish Culture & Society News

Dana Rabin
Announcing a new Director of our program
This fall, Rabin succeeds Tobor Family Endowed Professor of Modern European Jewish History Eugene M. Avrutin as Director of the Program in Jewish Culture & Society. She specializes in the history of law, gender, and race in eighteenth...
Student Award 2026 Collage
2026 Award Winners
We mark the end of the 2025-2026 academic year by celebrating the successes of Jewish Studies and the Initiative in Holocaust, Genocide, and Memory Studies students. Here are our award winners.  Matthew Fam (PhD Candidate, Department of Comparative & World Literature...
Miriam Udel
Modern Jewish Worldmaking Through Jewish Children's Literature
The Program in Jewish Culture & Society welcomed Miriam Udel to campus on February 23rd as a part of the Krouse Family Visiting Scholar in Judaism and Western Culture Fund's annual lecture series, with additional support from the Center for Children's Books. Udel is the Judith London Evans...
Elana Jakel
Alumni Spotlight

Elana Jakel

Elana Jakel is Program Manager of the Initiative for the Study of Ukrainian Jewry at the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). She received her doctorate in Russian and Soviet History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, with a dissertation entitled “‘Ukraine without Jews’? Nationality and Belonging in Soviet Ukraine, 1943-1948.” The Program in Jewish Culture and Society was her second home during graduate school. She has received a U.S. Student Fulbright Grant, the ...
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Featured Courses: Fall 2026
RUSS 465

Jewish Culture in the Russian (and Soviet) Empire

This course explores what Jewish culture was in the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union and why it was significant.
HIST 400

Making of the Jewish Nation

"Making of the Jewish Nation" traces the development of different forms of Jewish nationalism (diaspora nationalism, Zionism, territorialism, etc.) and the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.