Urbana Campus Research Calendar (OVCRI)

Please join us at 5pm on March 9th in Alice Campbell Hall on the University of Illinois campus or from anywhere in the world via zoom, for the launch of Black, Jewish, and Beautiful: Contemporary Blewish Voices (Syracuse University Press, 2026). With much gratitude to Deborah Lynch, this event is the 2026 Greenfield Lynch lecture. The anthology, co-edited by Anthony Mordechai Tzvi Russell, Sara Feldman, and Brett Ashley Kaplan, brings together impactful perspectives from diverse Blewish/Black Jewish landscapes in the U.S. and globally. By examining the lives, art, and experiences of people who live both identities, this book will blaze a path for future exploration, future histories, and will help to disrupt the focus on “Blacks and Jews” when one is assumed non-Jewish and the other assumed white. This collection of voices reflects increased acknowledgement of multiracial identities in contemporary society, focusing on self-descriptions from people who share Jewish and Black identities and thus performs a microcosm of larger developing realities. The editors and several contributors will be present at the book launch and we invite you to be there! Here is the zoom link. Please note: this zoom link will go live at 4:50pm US Central Time on March 9th, 2026 so please click it then (and not before, it’s not a registration, thanks!).