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Intended for beginners. Provides a thorough grounding in reading, writing, grammar, oral comprehension, and speaking. Students who complete the course are able to function in basic situations in a Hebrew-speaking environment.

Intended for beginners. Provides a thorough grounding in reading, writing, grammar, oral comprehension, and speaking. Students who complete the course are able to function in basic situations in a Hebrew-speaking environment.

Sequel to HEBRW 1101-HEBRW 1102. Continued development of reading, writing, grammar, oral comprehension, and speaking skills.

This course is designed to introduce students to the language, grammar, and vocabulary of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament. By the end of the semester students will be able to read and understand a number of biblical narrative passages, drawn from texts such as the stories of: creation in the Garden of Eden, Noah's Ark, Joseph and his brothers, the Israelites' exodus from Egypt, David and Goliath, and others stories students are interested in reading in the original language. Emphasis will be placed on learning vocabulary in context so that students begin to understand the language of the Bible as a window on ancient Israelite religion, culture, and experience.

Who were the Jews that first settled in the Americas and around the Atlantic? How did their experiences intersect with processes of colonization, empire-building, racialization, and the formation of an interconnected Atlantic World? Why do half the world's Jews live currently in countries on the Atlantic littoral? How do they maintain trans-national bonds with other Jews around the world? This course will reconstruct the rise of the Sephardi Diaspora following the 1492 expulsion of Jews from Spain, their settlement patterns across Europe, Africa, and the Americas, their global economic activities, and the uneasy ways they mapped onto religious, political, and racial schema of the period. We will also explore the mass-migrations of European, Middle Eastern, and North African Jews in the 19-20th centuries that rejuvenated the Jewish Atlantic and will investigate how the formation of the State of Israel has impacted the bonds of solidarity within this multi-ethnic Jewish Diaspora.

Elementary Yiddish I is the first in a three-class sequence that will enable students to meet their Arts & Sciences language requirement in Yiddish. It provides an introduction to reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. Yiddish contains a wealth of embedded knowledge about Ahkenazi Jewish life, both historical and contemporary. In addition to language competence the course will build understanding of this legacy through songs, humor, holiday traditions, literature, and other cultural products.

Elementary Yiddish II is the second in a three-class sequence that will enable students to meet their Arts & Sciences language requirement in Yiddish. It provides a further introduction to, and deepening of, reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills. In addition to language competence the course will build understanding of Ashkenazi Jewish culture through songs, humor, holiday traditions, literature, and other cultural products.

Why were Jews virtually invisible in films produced during the Hollywood's golden age? Is this a surprise, given the leading role played by American Jews in founding the studio system? Writing about the films studied in this course will help students situate and interpret the presence (and absence) of characters identifiable as Jews in Hollywood films released from the silent era through the present. We will view approximately six films in their entirety and study excerpts from others. Films to be studied in whole or part may include: The Immigrant, The Jazz Singer, The Great Dictator, Casablanca, The Apartment, Funny Girl, Annie Hall, Barton Fink, and A Serious Man. Students will write film analyses, review essays, reflective responses, and explorations of contextual material. Readings from film studies and popular journalism will situate these films within the historical, cultural, and industrial contexts in which they were produced.

Explore the ways of 19th to 21st century Russian Jewry through survey of literature and film. Learn about life in Russia from the perspective of Jewish and Russian-Jewish writers as well as through portrayal of Russian Jews in works of prominent Russian authors in the context of period. Selected works of Pushkin and Chekhov, Gogol and Sholom Aleichem, Pasternak and Yevtushenko will help create a multidimensional picture of the political and socio-cultural environment in which processes of integration and assimilation, both imposed and impeded by the state, shaped the identity of the modern-day Russian Jews in their deep, inherent connection to the Russian culture and often complicated relationship with their roots, which characteristically distinguishes them from their American contemporaries.

The course is aimed at training students in exact and idiomatic Hebrew, expanding vocabulary and usage of grammatical knowledge, and acquiring facility of expression in both conversation and writing. Uses written and oral exercises built around the texts. Reading and discussion of selections from Hebrew literature and Israeli culture through the use of texts and audiovisual materials.

Religion is a term with a rich history but without a precise definition. Everyone can describe a religious idea or a religious experience even though there is no agreement about what it is that makes an idea or an experience religious. How did this state of things come about? What is it that makes religion both one thing and many things? Why do we apply this concept to Christianity, Islam and Judaism and to the deep feelings we associate with secular forms of devotion and enthusiasm - for food, for love, for family, for art, for sport? In this seminar, we will discover that religion is a distinctly modern concept, developed to address the psychological and social needs of Europeans increasingly adrift from the traditional communal practices and moral commitments of their parents and grandparents. Tracing the history of religion - rather than the history of religions - from the age of Immanuel Kant to the age of Emmanuel Levinas, we will examine paradoxical connection between the rise of religion and the decline of faith.

Why is it that the age of emancipation which saw most of the world's Jews gain citizenship status and achieve unprecedented levels of socio-economic modernization, also witnessed a catastrophic assault on Jewish life? How do we explain the conjunction between the spread of liberal values and the exponential rise of anti-semitism? Most historians refer to the virulence of racism in accounting for the scale and brutality of anti-Jewish rhetoric which prepared the way for the destruction of European Jewry in the twentieth century. But this explanation fails to account for the fact that progressive democratic discourse which explicitly endorses ethnic diversity and emphatically repudiates racial prejudice remains susceptible to anti-Jewish animus even now. In this class, we will examine the complex relationship between emancipation and anti-semitism from the perspective of those who benefited from the former but had to contend with the reality of the latter - Europe's rising class of Jewish intellectuals. We will discover that their insights into the problem of modern Jew-hatred were both acute and prescient and have much to teach us about the current Jewish predicament.

In European history, the Greeks tend to get credit for inventing almost everything - philosophy, art, literature, science, democracy. Naturally, they also get credit for inventing history. The names Thucydides and Herodotus are invariably invoked when historians talk about the origins of their discipline. Actually, Thucydides and Herodotus came late to the party; the first historians were Jewish scribes, living in Persian exile in the seventh century BCE, some two hundred years before their Greek successors. Collectively known as the Deuteronomists, these scribes, on the basis of extensive data from royal archives, wrote a history of the domestic disintegration and eventual destruction of their city-state (Jerusalem) by an imperial army of northern barbarians (the Babylonians) who burned their most important cultural institution (the Temple) to the ground. Preceded by a methodological prologue that set out their principles of inquiry (also known as the biblical book of Deuteronomy) the bulk of their multi-volume account (Joshua-Kings II) consists of a richly documented and well-crafted narrative detailing the causes, long-term and short-term, of this political catastrophe. If you take this seminar, you will find out what the Deuteronomists wrote and why their work is important even for non-historians.

Drawing on a combination of primary and secondary sources, this course explores the multiple forms and evolution of biographical writing from the Renaissance onward. We will interrogate the relationship between biographical reasoning and several modern phenomena, including the construction of national identities, the rise of psychoanalysis, and even the historical profession itself. And we will consider whose voices, experiences, and subjectivities are historically valorized through the increasing prominence of biography, and who has been marginalized, silenced, or erased from history in the process.

Yiddish language and linguistics, including aspects of its morphology, syntax, and phonology. Also the history of the Yiddish language and sociolinguistic topics.

Intended for intermediate students, this is the third in a three-course sequence, designed to enable students to meet the College of Arts & Sciences language requirement. Students will increase their understanding of the language in cultural context and will further develop their capacity to produce both spoken and written Yiddish.

Where have humans found truth? Will the truths we uphold today remain true tomorrow? Leaning on discussion and close reading of texts, this seminar asks students to think about how truth becomes history and how historically-situated concepts, values and norms become true. Examining the ways in which thinkers and writers from a variety of different perspectives have conceived what truth is (and isn't), the class will focus on notions of truth and falsehood in religion, science, philosophy, and literature. Specific themes for consideration and discussion will include: the role of divinity in underwriting truth claims; the place of truth-standards in the study of nature and the development of new technology; the moralization of truth and lies; the disillusionment with absolutes and the increasing relativization of truth in the modern age.

In this course we will read some of the most influential micro-history writers and explore examples of different subgenres of microhistory, such as individual biographies, family histories, social histories of towns, city, and village histories, histories of singular events and the impact they have on a family or a community, a history of an object, and fictional narratives of individual experiences of global events. The course aims to explore how seemingly a limited-scale of analysis can illuminate the experience of much larger events. The course will draw on examples that focus on a wide range of experiences from around the world, with special attention paid to the the Middle East and Africa. The final research project will build on the student's own family's history, or the history of one individual, or an object (such as an inherited jewelry, a document, a painting, or a photograph etc) and research to situate that person/object/family's history in the context of an event of global important (such as a war, colonialism, mass violence, environmental history, empire, etc).

This course explores the history of the Holocaust during which the Nazis murdered six million Jews. Topics covered in this class include the history of antisemitism in Europe and twentieth-century Germany, the origins and rule of the Nazis, the politics of World War II, the Final Solution and extermination camps, Jewish literary responses to the Holocaust, among other topics.

This course is an introductory survey to various aspects of Israeli culture, society, and history. Through a close examination of various media (film, music, literature) as well as key events and social and political facts, students explore a range of phenomena related to Israeli social practices and its political system, alongside a chronological overview of changes in Israeli culture and society over time. Topics covered may include geography, immigration, demographics, inequality, Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Hebrew language, gender, literature, film, among others.

This course examines the production and exchange of wine, beer, coffee and tea, and the social and ideological dynamics involved in their consumption. We start in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, and end with tea and coffee in the Arab and Ottoman worlds. Archaeological and textual evidence will be used throughout to show the centrality of drinking in daily, ritual and political life.

This course examines the history of Zionism as an idea and as a political movement in all its various forms, currents, and transformations from its origins in mid-nineteenth century Europe to the present. Despite its success in establishing the State of Israel in 1948, Zionism, which also sought to normalize Jewish collective life and provide a safe haven from persecution for the Jews, has encountered multiple challenges from within and without. Some continue to think of it as the national liberation movement of the Jewish people while others regard it is a Western inspired colonial project. Originating largely as a radical rejection of both traditional Jewish religious life and the Jews' diaspora in favor of modern nationalism, since 1967 Zionism has witnessed religious-nationalist fervor and a Jewish diaspora increasingly interested in or disinterested with the state of Israel. The course also considers the phenomenon of post-Zionism in Israeli historiography as well as Zionism's difficulty in coming to terms with the idea and reality that two peoples rather than one live in the land west of the Jordan. We'll also consider the Palestinian response framed as Zionism from the standpoint of its victims.

How is the memory of the Holocaust kept alive by means of the literary and visual imagination? Within the historical context of the Holocaust and how and why it occurred, we shall examine major and widely read Holocaust narratives that have shaped the way we understand and respond to the Holocaust. We also study ethical and psychological issues about how and why people behave in dire circumstances. We shall begin with first-person reminiscences-Wiesel's Night , Levi's Survival at Auschwitz, and The Diary of Anne Frank-before turning to realistic fictions such as Kineally's Schindler's List (and Spielberg's film), Kertesz's Fateless, Kosinski's The Painted Bird, and Ozick's The Shawl. We shall also read the Kafkaesque parable of Appelfeld's Badenheim 1939 and the fantastic cartoons of Spiegelman's Maus books as well as W.G, Sebald's Austerlitz. We shall conclude with several episodes of the acclaimed 2009-2017 French TV series A French Village.

This course explores the history of medicine and other sciences in the ancient Near East, broadly defined. In addition to medicine, the other scientific disciplines covered in this course include mathematics, astrology, astronomy, alchemy, zoology, among others. Geographically, the course traces the transmission of scientific knowledge in ancient Babylonia, Iran, Egypt, Israel, Turkey, and beyond. As such, the course offers students a tour of different ancient civilizations and corpora. Students read selections from cuneiform Akkadian tablets, Egyptian Christian Coptic spellbooks, rabbinic sources such as the Talmud, among many other works. At the same time, students will be required to critically engage recent scholarship in the history of science and medicine as a way to help frame their analyses of the ancient materials. The course interrogates how ancient civilizations transmitted and received scientific knowledge, as well as the relationship between what we today tend to call science, medicine, magic, and religion. This course is intended not only for students in the Humanities and Social Sciences, but also for those majoring in science or medicine.

This course provides a literary and historical introduction to the earliest Christian writings, especially those that eventually came to be included in the New Testament. Through the lens of the Gospel narratives and earliest Christian letters, especially those of Paul, we will explore the rich diversity of the early Christian movement from its Jewish roots in first-century Palestine through its development and spread to Asia Minor and beyond. We will give careful consideration to the political, economic, social, cultural, and religious circumstances that gave rise to the Jesus movement, as well as those that facilitated the emergence of various manifestations of Christian belief and practice. The course will address themes like identity and ethnicity, conversion and debate, race and slavery, gender and sexuality, and the connections between politics and religion.

This course is an introduction to Jewish identities, values, and practices from the ancient to modern era. Organized thematically, it examines Judaism as a religious phenomenon, with a particular emphasis on its cultural and textual diversity across three millennia. Themes covered include creation, Sabbath, prayer, Jerusalem, pious customs, magic, reincarnation, revelation, among others. Throughout the semester students perform close readings of a wide selection of Jewish texts from the Bible, Talmud, kabbalah (mysticism), philosophy, liturgy, and modern Jewish thought. In what ways are these various traditions of Judaism interrelated and/or in tension with one another? In the face of the Jewish history's tremendous diversity, what is it that has unified Judaism and the Jewish people over the centuries? By exploring these types of questions, this course examines the appropriateness of defining Judaism as a religion, an ethnicity, a civilization, and/or a culture. Readings include introductory-level textbooks and essays, as well as a range of primary source materials in translation.

For thousands of years, people have believed that the world is ending imminently. In this course, we will examine the roots of apocalyptic thinking in the ancient world, especially among Jews and Christians. We will look at biblical apocalyptic texts as well as a wide array of other apocalyptic literatures, such as the books of Enoch, the Sibylline Oracles, 4 Ezra, the Apocalypse of Adam, the Apocalypse of Paul, and many others. These texts contain visions of end times, journeys to heaven and hell, and dramatic images of angels and demons, war and peace, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Our goal is to understand the circumstances that gave rise to apocalypticism and how disaster-thinking may have, paradoxically, provided comfort during crises. Throughout the course, we will pay close attention to the meaning of apocalypse as revelation, an unveiling, a discovery.

This course examines the history of the conflict between two peoples with claims to the same land (Palestine/Israel), from the rise of their national movements at the turn of the 20th century and their eventual clash down to the present crisis. We will investigate the various stable and shifting elements in the evolution of the conflict including conflicting Israeli and Palestinian narratives and mythologies about the nature of the conflict. Among many issues to be addressed are: the relationship of this conflict to the history of European colonialism in the Middle East, the emergence of Pan-Arabism and Islamism, the various currents in Zionism and its relationship to Judaism, the implication of great power rivalry in the Middle East, the different causes and political repercussions of the four Arab-Israeli wars, efforts at peacemaking including Oslo and Camp David, and the significance of the two Palestinian uprisings.

The Jewish community of Rome is the oldest one in all of Europe, dating back to 200 BCE, but it is only a part of a complex and fascinating mosaic that is Italian Jewry. In this course we will examine the long Jewish presence in the Italian peninsula through the work of some of Italy's most eminent modern Jewish writers, filmmakers, social scientists and historians of Jewish Italy. We will focus on the historical events that have shaped the past hundred and fifty years: the role of Italian Jews in the unification of Italy and state-building, two world wars and different social movements of the pre- and post-WWII eras, and the plurality of Jewish Italian voices today, especially in their relationship to Israel and the diaspora. The course material will include several lectures by Italian scholars and writers, as well as virtual visits to Italian cultural and political institutions relevant to our topic.

The Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) is a repository of ancient Israelite religious, political, social, historical, and literary traditions. For the modern reader these ancient traditions are often obscured by a focus on the text as revelation. The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the biblical world by reading the Hebrew Bible in translation, on its own terms, as a body of literature that evolved in an ancient Near Eastern context. The Bible itself will be the primary text for the course, but students will also be exposed to the rich and diverse textual traditions of the ancient Near East, including Mesopotamia, Egypt, Moab, and Ugarit. In addition, this course will explore the impact of early biblical interpretation on shaping the monotheistic traditions inherited in the West. As participants in a secular course on the Bible, students will be challenged to question certain cultural assumptions about the composition and authorship of the Bible, and will be expected to differentiate between a text's content and its presumed meaning.

This course examines Near East's rich and diverse literary heritage. We will read a selection of influential and wondrous texts from ancient to modern times, spanning geographically from the Iberian peninsula to Iran. We will explore a range of ancient myths of creation and destruction. We will also trace encounters with otherness in travel narratives. Together we will read and discuss such ancient works as the The Story of Sinuhe and The Epic of Gilgamesh, as well as selections from the Hebrew Bible, New Testament and Qur'an. We will explore medieval works such as the Travels of Ibn Battuta, the Shahnameh of Ferdowsi, and The Arabian Nights. We will also read Orhan Pamuk's My Name is Red, and Sonia Nimr's Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands, as well as excerpts from Yochi Brandes's The Orchard. Students will also have the opportunity to research and analyze primary source materials in the collections of Cornell Rare Books and Manuscript Collection, and the Johnson Art Museum. All material is in English translation.

What does it mean to call a film is Jewish? Does it have to represent Jewish life? Does it have to feature characters identifiable as Jews? If artists who identify as Jews-actors, directors, screenwriters, composers-play significant roles in a film's production does that make it Jewish? Our primary point of entry into these questions will be Hollywood, from the industry's early silent films, through the period generally considered classical, down to the present day. We will also study films produced overseas, in countries that may include Israel, Egypt, France, Italy, and Germany. Our discussions will be enriched by contextual material drawn from film studies, cultural studies, Jewish studies, American studies, and other related fields. Students will be expected to view a significant number of films outside of class-an average of one per week-and engage with them through writing and in-class discussion. The directors, screenwriters, composers, and actors whose work we will study may include: Charlie Chaplin, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, Billy Wilder, Barbra Streisand, Woody Allen, Mel Brooks, Aviva Kempner, Joan Micklin Silver, the Marx Brothers, and the Coen Brothers.

Most people think of Christianity as the daughter religion of Judaism. In this course, we will see that what we now know as Judaism and Christianity both claimed ownership of the same textual tradition and emerged together from the same set of historical circumstances, shaped by political crisis, a radical transformation of the social order and the challenge of Graeco-Roman culture. Through close reading of the principal sources of Christian literature, such as Paul's letters to the first communities of gentile believers and the accounts of the life and death of the messiah, known collectively as the gospels, we will explore how and why the followers of Jesus first came to think of themselves as the New Israel and how a polemical engagement with their controversial interpretation of Hebrew prophecy shaped the development of the rabbinic movement in Roman Palestine.

Before Jewish politics, Jewish identity and Jewish philosophy, there was Jewish law. No other institution is more important to the history of Judaism and to the Jewish way of life. In this lecture course, we will explore the ways in which legal thought and legal discourse shaped Jewish experience and expression between the biblical age and the computer age. We will discover how the cultural meaning of law changed over time, how legal concepts shaped Jewish belief and Jewish behavior, and how the study of Jewish legal sources contributed to the emergence of modern constitutional thought in the Atlantic world.

In the past two centuries, Jewish men and women have adapted remarkably well to the modern condition, embracing the opportunities associated with higher education, city life, industrial capitalism and democratic politics. Jewish artists, writers, scientists and philosophers can be found on every list of luminaries associated with the modern age; it is enough to mention Marx, Freud and Einstein to conjure up the celebrated image of Jewish participation in the modern project. No less remarkable than these names is the resurgence of Jewish tradition, despite the inroads of secularization and the dissolution of communal self-government. This course explores the tensions implicit in the Jewish experience of modernity, marked by intense longing for personal and collective emancipation from religious obligation and social discipline, on the one hand, and by a powerful countervailing impulse to strengthen ethnic loyalties, to invigorate Jewish practice and to keep Jewish values intact. Drawing on various forms of Jewish expression, from the eighteenth century to the twentieth, we will address the contradictions implicit in the strange hybrid of Jewish modernity.

This course is an introductory survey of the history, culture, and society of Ottoman and Mandate Palestine and Palestine/Israel. Students will learn about the history the region from the 19th Century to the present, through a close examination of various sources and texts. Sources may include ethnographies, literature, films, historical documents, and interdisciplinary scholarship.

In the course we will study the history of the lands, peoples, and states of Eastern Europe during the 19th and 20th centuries as an integral part of modern Europlean and global history. We will ask what the East European experience can teach us about larger questions of cause and effect, agency in history, continuties and ruptures, the interplay between institutions, states and individuals, and the relationship between culture and politics. The course will define the region broadly, to include the lands stretching from today's Ukraine to Poland and the Balkans. But given the constant flux in borders, demographics, and sovereignities of this region, we will have to continually reconsider what and where Eastern Europe was. We will survey key periods in the region's history, looking closely at cases from across Eastern Europe. We will learn about institutions, large-scale processes, personalities, events, cultural artifacts, and ideas using a combination of narrative history and literary essays, primary documents, works of fiction, and films.

This constitutes the first course in our third year of the Modern Hebrew language sequence. Development of speech proficiency will be emphasized. Over the course of the semester, students will develop reading comprehension through reading a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts, listening comprehension through screening of filmic works and episodes drawn from popular television series, writing through communication about what is read and screened, as well as more personal topics, and speech through in class discussion and oral presentations. Readings will include authentic and partially adapted contemporary short stories, poems and newspaper articles.

This is the second course in our third-year Modern Hebrew language sequence. Like its predecessor, it focuses on developing speech proficiency, reading and listening comprehension, and writing. It does this through reading of a variety of fiction and nonfiction texts; viewing of filmic works and television series selected for their social, political, and cultural relevance; class discussions; presentations and writing about everyday issues in Israel and abroad.

This course is intended to continue the development of all aspects of Hebrew language skills. Emphasis, however, will be placed on speaking skills and understanding through the use of various outlets in Israeli media: television, film, online sources, newspapers, songs and literature. The use of text and media material relevant to Israeli contemporary society and culture will help the students to gain better understanding of Israeli society and culture.

This course develops oral and written communication, as well as reading and listening comprehension, through engagement with Israeli media (newspapers, radio reports, and television and internet news) and literature. Through study of course materials, students will also gain a broader understanding of the State of Israel necessary for advanced Hebrew proficiency.

This course uses the history of the Spanish Inquisition, and the richness of its archival records, to explore the variety of ways in which the pursuit of heresy was intertwined with transforming how knowledge was constructed, scrutinized, repressed, and deployed in the early modern world. Topics covered will include the struggle over religious authenticity in the age of Reformation, the formation of the bureaucratic state, the rise of empiricism and the scientific revolution, the birth of modern psychiatry, and the intellectual revolutions typically associated with the Enlightenment.

This course aims to familiarize students with the history of Scandinavia, ca. 800-1100 ad. Although well known as a dramatic chapter in medieval history, this period remains enigmatic and often misunderstood. Our goal will be to set Norse history within its European context, observing similarities with processes elsewhere in the medieval world, the better to perceive what makes the Norse unique. We will examine the social, economic and political activities of the Norsemen in continental Scandinavia, in Western and Eastern Europe, and in the North Atlantic.

This course is an in-depth examination of early modern theories of emotion, action, and moral judgment. This class will focus on the writings of Hobbes, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume.

Through the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed an elaborate set of rules for governing marriage and family life, grounded in the Hebrew Bible and adapted to the realities of life in diaspora. This complex and sophisticated system helps to explain the continuity of Jewish collective identity in the sustained absence of a shared territorial homeland. We will study together part of the Talmudic tractate Yevamot (concerning the Levirate marriage) and relevant passages from the code known as Shulchan Aruch, along with scholarship in English. Some reading knowledge of Rabbinic Hebrew-Aramaic required.

This course examines the cultural and historical interaction of Muslims and Jews from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the classical age of Islam down to the turn of the thirteenth century. The intersection of the two cultures (scriptural, spiritual, intellectual, literary, communal, and interpersonal) and members of their respective religious communities will be studied through readings of primary texts (in translation). The course will conclude with some brief reflections on historical memory and the modern and contemporary significance of the two religious communities' interactions during the classical age of Islam.

This course is an introduction to Jewish philosophy - from Biblical texts to 20th century work. Our inquiries will span metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. We will reflect on questions such as the relation between philosophy or reason on the one hand, and religion and ethics on the other, on the possibility of knowledge of God, the ethics of human relations, the nature of suffering, and finally the nature of a tolerant and just society. We will read works by Maimonides, Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Marx, Buber, Rosenzweig, Cohen, Arendt, Levinas, and Butler, among others.

The Purpose of this course is to trace the development of Monotheism from its origins in Israelite/Canaanite polytheism. We will examine worship of the God, Yahweh and other deities in ancient Israel, and will trace the long and complicated process by which Yahweh became the sole deity to be formally accepted within Judaism. Using biblical evidence as well as inscriptional and archaeological evidence from Israel and elsewhere in the ancient Near East, we will address the question of why the Israelites eventually rejected deities such as Baal, Asherah, El and others, and how imagery associated with these deities informs biblical descriptions of Yahweh. We will explore the ways in which a small group of Jerusalem elites helped shape the monotheistic tradition that has been inherited in the West, and will consider the political, social and theological implications of this transformation.

The purpose of the course is to place the Bible within the context of a larger ancient world that can be explored by systematic excavation of physical remains. Students will become familiar with archaeological excavations and finds from ancient Syria-Palestine from 10,000 bce to 586 bce. We will explore this archaeological evidence on its own terms, taking into consideration factors such as archaeological method and the interpretive frameworks in which the excavators themselves work, as well as the implications of this body of evidence for understanding the complexity and diversity of biblical Israel.

This course examines the historic diversity of the modern Middle East, exploring histories of inter-communal contact and conflict. We begin by investigating the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and the impact of its dissolution. We will focus our attention on commercial centers that fostered inter-communal relations, as well as investigating sites of strife and cases of minority repression. We will read histories, memoirs, and fiction, and view films that help us better understand inter-communal relations, tensions, and conflict. We will also interrogate the terms for exploring a range distinctions among majority and minority populations including: religious difference (Muslims, Christians, and Jews); divisions of religious rite (Sunni and Shi'a); entho-linguistic minorities (Armenians and Kurds); national identities (Israelis and Palestinians); cultures of origin (Mizrahi, Sephardi, and Ashkenazi Jews). We will explore how these divisions inform urgent current conflicts: the civil war in Syria and the refugee crisis; the civil war in Iraq and the campaign by ISIS against minorities; as well as tensions between Saudi Arabia and Iran.

This seminar examines the history of the United States' involvement with Middle East beginning with evangelical efforts in the 19th century and President Wilson's engagement with the colonial powers in the early 20th century during and after WWI. The discovery of vast Middle Eastern oil reserves and the retreat of the colonial powers from the region following WWII drew successive US administrations ever deeper into Middle Eastern politics. In due course the US became entrenched in the post-colonial political imagination as heir to the British and the French especially as it challenged the Soviet Union for influence in the region during the Cold War. And that only takes the story to the mid-1950s and the Eisenhower administration. Our discussions will be based on secondary readings and primary sources as we interrogate the tension between realist and idealist policies toward the Middle East and trace how these tensions play out in subsequent developments including the origins and trajectory of the US strategic alliances with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and Turkey and conflict with Iran after the 1979 Islamic Revolution and the two Gulf Wars.

Jews have been on TV since the beginning of the medium - over 70 years - and have made decisions about how they are represented. What kind of Jews do we put on screen, and do they actually represent Jews in America? What about the representation of other ethnic and cultural groups? What can we learn from the history of Jewish television that might apply to Black, Latinx, Muslim, LGBTQ, Asian and other communities as they present themselves to the American public? Sitcom Jews uses media analysis, theoretical discussion, and student writing to examine a huge range of TV, starting with classic sitcoms (The Goldbergs (1948), All in the Family, and Bridget Loves Bernie), continuing through current Jewish TV shows (Broad City, Transparent, Curb Your Enthusiasm), and adding a range of ethnic television (The Jeffersons, Black-ish, Insecure, Ramy, Will & Grace, Never Have I Ever).

This class examines modern articulations of identity by and about two distinct Jewish diasporas: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Sephardic Jews trace their origins to the Iberian Peninsula prior to the end of the 15th century. Mizrahim are Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa until the mid-20th century, and their descendants. We will explore Sephardic and Mizrahi identities in works of fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry and films produced from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will trace routes of migration across generations, paying particular attention to how texts construct identity in relation to language and place. Works will be drawn from wide geographic distribution including the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and produced in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Ladino, and Spanish.

This course focuses on how Biblical texts represent women in ancient Israel, and how the Bible's representations constitute both a fabrication and a manifestation of social life on the ground. We will use biblical, archaeological, and ancient Near Eastern textual evidence to consider the complicated relationship between ancient society and the textual and material records from which we reconstruct it. In addition, this course will examine how women's roles in the Hebrew Bible have been understood and integrated in later Jewish and Christian thought, and how these discourses shape contemporary American attitudes towards women, sexuality, and gender.

Students will practice critical, close reading and examination of historical primary sources that are essential for the study of modern Jewish nationalism and statehood. In our discussions, we will identify influential historical ideas within different genres of texts (personal, journalistic, commercials, political, literary, etc.) and critically combine social history and theory, literary understanding and theory, and intellectual history. Throughout the course, special attention will be given to ideas of class and status and their implications on the formation and change of Jewish and Israeli nationalism over the years. Students will consider key concepts of class theory and engage in comparatively examining their usefulness as tools for their historical understanding of the texts analyzed.

We are all the living dead - alive but bound to die, and know it. In this course we will learn how existential fears and anxieties shape our politics, partly through moral meaning-making. While the politics of fear is on the rise worldwide, Israel has seen it long ago. Throughout its existence, Israel has grown strong, but its existential fears have not subsided. Israel, moreover, can teach us about the role of freedom and morality in politics. Israel's existential fears, alongside the realization of choice, has prompted Zionists to seek existential legitimation. In recent years, however, a growing frustration at attainting such legitimacy has fostered bad faith politics, substituting freedom with a sense of no choice.

This course will explore Holocaust survivor testimonies, from the multilayered history of their recording across the globe and their increasing institutionalization after the 1980s to their current uses and future promises, including digital methods. How can we approach, use, and make sense of what amounts to 20 years of uninterrupted listening? This seminar will offer a hands-on, interdisciplinary approach to these largely untapped archives around the world, probing them through the lens of history, film and media studies, trauma studies, cultural studies, and memory studies. Throughout the semester, students will each pick one video testimony to work on individually. Collectively, the course will develop tools to make these video testimonies not only a lasting memorial, but a proper object of study at the global level. Taken together, we will offer a tentative answer to an urgent question: what is the future of Holocaust and atrocity testimony, now that the last generation of survivors is passing away?

What explains authoritarian resilience in the Middle East? What are the causes and consequences of Islamist political attitudes and behavior? What is the historical legacy of colonialism and empire in the Middle East? This course will offer students the opportunity to discuss these and other questions related to the political, social, and economic development of the Middle East and North Africa.

This course explores the interactions between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups in late antiquity, especially in Sasanian Persia circa the first through seventh century C.E. Students pay particular attention to the portrayals of Christians in Jewish rabbinic literature, including Midrash and Talmud, but also draw from early Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and other sources. There will be an emphasis on the reading of primary texts in translation in their appropriate historical contexts, and in comparison with one another. Students engage such questions as: How did Jews define themselves in relation to Christians, and vice versa? In what ways did Jews and Christians part ways with one another, as scholars often maintain, and what were the factors at play in their separation? And, lastly, what role did other religious and political groups, such as Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Romans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and early Muslims play in these developments?

Antisemitism, a deep-seated prejudice against Jews, is seeing a global revival. The most brutal U.S. instance was the 2018 Tree of Life Synagogue massacre, where Robert G. Bowers, an active anti-Semitic online poster, took 11 lives. Tried in 2023, he was condemned to death for his crimes. As emphasized by Assistant U.S. Attorney Soo C. Song, Bowers was driven by his belief that Jews are a cancer upon the planet. Bowers' trial was only the most recent in a series of trials and judicial proceedings, both in the U.S. and internationally, that had antisemitism at their core in a myriad of ways. This course examines various manifestations of antisemitism in law and jurisprudence, from 19th century Europe to early 20th century America to Nazi Germany and the Stalinist U.S.S.R. to the present. Among the topics covered are blood libel trials, the Dreyfus affair in France, the Leo Frank trial in Georgia, the defamation case against Henry Ford, the Nazi Nuremberg laws, the annihilation of European Jews as the core of the crimes against humanity charge at the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and contemporary proceedings charging a hostile anti-Semitic environment at certain U.S. colleges and universities under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

Seminar covering a topic in Biblical Hebrew prose.

How has the remembrance of the past shaped the evolution of Jewish religion, identity, and culture from Biblical times to the present? How have the creation, dissemination, and preservation of Jewish memory changed over time? How is Jewish history used in political discourse in contemporary society in the U.S. and around the Globe? How can the historical tools be utilized to generate a sophisticated and discerning public engagement with the complexities of the Jewish past? In this course, students will explore these questions through seminar discussions, attending, evaluating, and critiquing exhibits and cultural events and watching films that put Jewish history on display, and by deploying their own research, writing, and creative skills to produce public facing final projects or a traditional research paper.

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Death is both the opposite of life and an intimate part of life. Though it comes to us all, human understandings of the process of dying and of our relations to the dead have varied widely. For many, the dead remain engaged with the living for better and for worse. For others, the dead are just history. We will draw on anthropological, sociological, historical and literary texts to understand better this vast range of attitudes toward the dead and the process of dying-and we will come to understand better what we gain and lose by consigning the dead to oblivion. After considering a wide range of comparative studies, we will conclude with an intensive focus on death, dying, and the dead in Jewish cultures.

This course explores the intricacies of identity-making and processes of racialization in the Atlantic World from ca. 1500 onward. The range of topics covered include the encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people in the Americas and the invention of the Indians, the spread of blood purity discourses across the Ibero-Atlantic, the intertwining of African Slavery and racializing ideologies in the British Atlantic, the development of medical frameworks for defining social differences, and the myriad ways in which subaltern groups and individuals resisted, adopted, and subverted the identities that were ascribed to them.

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other minority experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

American Jews have frequently been touted as a model minority. This course will take a more critical look at the historical interactions between Jewish immigration, United States industrialization, and processes of social and geographical mobility-all through the prism of New York's Lower East Side, first home for over 750,000 Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. We will compare the Jewish experience to that of other immigrants/migrants by considering social institutions as well as material and other cultural practices. We will examine interactions with the built environment -most especially the tenement-in Lower East Side culture. Special attention will be paid to immigrant labor movement politics including strikes, splits, and gender in the garment trade. From the perspective of the present, the course will examine how commemoration, heritage tourism and the selling of [immigrant] history intersect with gentrifying real estate in an iconic New York City neighborhood. Projects using the ILR's archives on the Triangle Fire and other topics are explicitly encouraged. This course counts as an out of college elective for B. Arch and M. Arch students.

Moses Maimonides who was born in Cordoba (1138), moved to Fez as a youth and died in Cairo (1204) is regarded by Jewish, Islamic, and Christian tradition alike as the most important Jewish religious intellectual of the classical age of Islam/the High Middle Ages. This seminar will examine Maimonides as the product of his time and place including his complex relationship with Arabo-Islamic culture and, because of his stature as a communal figure, rabbinic scholar, court physician and philosopher, his role as a catalyst for cultural developments. For comparative purposes we also consider Maimonides' Andalusi contemporary, Ibn Rushd, the philosopher, Muslim jurist, physician and scholar of Islamic law.

This course will focus on the array of perspectives offered in the Hebrew Bible and New Testament on such contemporary social issues as: immigration; abortion rights, surrogate childbirth, gay marriage, gender identity, etc. We will consider the range of voices the Bible preserves on these and other topics, and how biblical texts and biblically based arguments shape and inform American political discourse. Students will be expected to read biblical texts on their own terms in their ancient Israelite and early Christian contexts, as well as to consider how those texts have been received with Jewish and Christian interpretive traditions and absorbed into American political thought. Students will read political theory, Jewish and Christian ethics, recent newspaper and magazine articles and will also consider other forms of media.

What is Gnosticism and why has it come to be so hotly debated among scholars and in our contemporary media? What is the Gospel of Judas and are its ideas heretical? Who wrote the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Mary and why were these Gospels not included in the New Testament canon? To what extent did Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code draw from ancient Christian gnostic sources? This seminar will explore answers to these questions and many others by focusing on the complex array of literary sources from late antiquity-primarily from a cache of manuscripts found at Nag Hammadi, Egypt, in 1945-that have long been associated with a so-called Christian Gnosticism. Church Fathers condemned the movement on a variety of grounds, but in this course we will not simply read the condemnations written by the opponents of gnostic thought; rather, we will focus our attention on reading (in English translation) substantial portions of the gnostic texts written by the adherents themselves. We will give special attention to the ways in which conflicts about Gnosticism connected with conflicts about gender, heresy, power, and authority. To set these texts within a socio-historical context, we will discuss the possible Jewish and hellenistic roots of early Christian Gnosticism and ties to Stoic and other ancient philosophical movements.

Several major and minor kingdoms situated around the Eastern Mediterranean basin flourished during the 14th-12th centuries BCE before a widespread violent collapse occurred around 1175. Thousands of cuneiform and other documents speak to two major socioeconomic processes of the age: the creation of the first international system in world history, and the collapse of that system after about two hundred years. Our course uses archaeological evidence, paleoclimate studies, and textual analysis (in translation) to address several related issues. We look at how networks of information, wealth accumulation, and political power were created and what role they played in globalization and destabilization. We consider whether the key players were aware of the coming collapse, what if any counter-measures were deployed, and how some polities were more resilient than others and created even greater networks post-collapse. We analyze a variety of related sources, with close attention paid to the Amarna Letters and other Egyptian texts from the Ramesside era. Several Bronze Age and Iron Age shipwrecks are examined for their evidence of maritime connectivity. And throughout the course students will become familiar with the history, economy, cult, laws and daily life of Ugarit (Tell Ras Shamra, Syria), a cosmopolitan coastal kingdom whose unparalleled archaeological and textual record affords a particularly close view of the transformative moments of the Late Bronze Age.

This course examines the fixity of Bible's representations of Israel as it relates to the fluidity of Israel's social, political, and religious experience as revealed in archaeology and texts from outside the Bible. We will use the tools of biblical criticism (philological, archaeological, literary historical) and methods drawn from such disciplines as History, Political Science, Anthropology, and Literary Criticism, to examine four biblical narrative traditions: The Joseph story; the exodus from Egypt; the Israelite conquest of Canaan; and the Song of Deborah, a text widely regarded as the oldest in the Hebrew Bible. Each of these played an essential role in the process of fabricating biblical Israel. As works of biblical historiography, each functioned to create a shared sense of a Jewish past in light of the urgencies of the present. Each is also witness to a creative process that unfolded when the past was still malleable, the terms not yet rigid. We will focus on the modes and materials of textual production and on how modern historians engage biblical narrative in fabricating their own narrative histories of ancient Israel. We will also consider how ancient and modern historical writing on ancient Israel has been put into the service of contemporary political discourse on boundaries and borders in Israel-Palestine.

In this seminar, we will examine the war's major turning points on the European theater in order to understand not only the nature of this conflict, but also the forces that made it possible. We will look closely at the two superpowers that clashed on the continent, turning Europe into a veritable inferno for the people caught in between. What kinds of societies were Nazi Germany and Stalin's Russia? How did the war affect them and their regimes? We will also survey the spaces in between to discover why these two vast empires competed so ruthlessly over them. We will find out how the populations caught between these two giants made ends meet, both by cooperating and by resisting the great powers. Although some knowledge of what was going on at the front will be helpful, this class is not a course in military history. As a result, it focuses primarily on the social and cultural dimensions of war - which it explores through a variety of sources, including fiction, memoirs, and films. Topics include the occupation and destruction of Poland; the fall of France; Hitler's Europe and the Holocaust; resistance and collaboration with Nazi occupation forces across Europe; the Soviet experience of war; as well as the effect of war on family life, politics, and societies in Europe.

This course takes Vienna's history as a starting point for studying how the modern mind fought to liberate itself from a past deemed overly burdensome, while embracing radical innovation and change. Students will develop a sense of the city's role as a laboratory of twentieth-century ideologies and ideas: liberalism and conservatism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, modernism and traditionalism. Most of the course's key themes will converge on what contemporaries referred to as 'the Jewish question,' a problem which most characters we will examine engaged with to some extent. Assigned readings will include texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This course offers Jewish Studies majors a chance to write a significant research essay that allows for depth of study of a topic of interest to each individual student. Because it is a required course for the major, it is also intended to create a sense of community among majors and provide collective support for the students' research and writing. In this course, student research will be guided through individual meetings with the instructor as well as in-class writing exercises and peer review. Students will develop research and writing skills, including library research, bibliographies, drafts, art of argument, and rewriting. The course will be designed in a way that allows students to conduct research that is of interest to them, regardless of what that field of interest is.

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.

For undergraduates who wish to obtain research experience or do extensive reading on a special topic. Students select a topic in consultation with the faculty member who has agreed to supervise the course.

The first half of a two-semester sequence for Jewish Studies majors who wish to conduct research for an honors thesis. In this class, student research will be guided through individual meetings with the instructor as well as in-class writing exercises and peer review, and students will develop research and writing skills, including library research, bibliographies, drafts, art of argument, and rewriting. The course will be designed in a way that allows students to conduct research that is of interest to them, regardless of what that field of interest is. In the first semester of this sequence, weekly readings of the course are designed to expose students to a variety of scholarly approaches in the field of Jewish Studies. In the second semester, students will create a detailed bibliography that is aimed at more specific expertise in the subject matter at hand. The second semester will conclude with a lengthier research paper.

Critical readings in medieval Hebrew lyrical and liturgical poetry and imaginative rhymed prose from tenth-century Islamic Spain to Renaissance and Baroque Italy.

Topic: Writing Through the Forest in Search of Trees. Hello, Humanities Student! Are you a plotter or a pantser? Not sure? Come and join us to find out, and to gain valuable insight into what kind of a writer you are, and how to manage that writer most effectively and productively. This theme-centered methods seminar, through a communal focus on trees, woods, glens, and copses in the pre-modern world, will hone in on the most indispensable tool in the humanist's belt: writing. From the generation of ideas, to their organization into an outline (or a blueprint, or whatever euphemism we, as a group or as individuals, decide to apply to the initial, tangled pile of yarn) to the first draft. Followed by frank and constructive criticism of the initial draft as a group and in pairs, and then on to the part that all students-really, all humanists?okay, all writers-find to be the greatest struggle: Your paper has some good ideas, but it really needs a rewrite. Now what do you do? As we write, and rewrite, we will also read widely. In addition to primary sources, scholarly articles and essays, we will include criticism, personal essay, theory, excerpts from fiction, and more, in an effort to open students' writing up to a myriad of possibilities for persuasive and compelling written communication.

This course examines the cultural and historical interaction of Muslims and Jews from the emergence of Islam in the seventh century through the classical age of Islam down to the turn of the thirteenth century. The intersection of the two cultures (scriptural, spiritual, intellectual, literary, communal, and interpersonal) and members of their respective religious communities will be studied through readings of primary texts (in translation). The course will conclude with some brief reflections on historical memory and the modern and contemporary significance of the two religious communities' interactions during the classical age of Islam.

Through the centuries, Rabbinic Judaism developed an elaborate set of rules for governing marriage and family life, grounded in the Hebrew Bible and adapted to the realities of life in diaspora. This complex and sophisticated system helps to explain the continuity of Jewish collective identity in the sustained absence of a shared territorial homeland. We will study together part of the Talmudic tractate Yevamot (concerning the Levirate marriage) and relevant passages from the code known as Shulchan Aruch, along with scholarship in English. Some reading knowledge of Rabbinic Hebrew-Aramaic required.

This course explores the intricacies of identity-making and processes of racialization in the Atlantic World from ca. 1500 onward. The range of topics covered include the encounters between Europeans and Indigenous people in the Americas and the invention of the Indians, the spread of blood purity discourses across the Ibero-Atlantic, the intertwining of African Slavery and racializing ideologies in the British Atlantic, the development of medical frameworks for defining social differences, and the myriad ways in which subaltern groups and individuals resisted, adopted, and subverted the identities that were ascribed to them.

Several major and minor kingdoms situated around the Eastern Mediterranean basin flourished during the 14th -12th centuries BCE before a widespread violent collapse occurred around 1175. Thousands of cuneiform and other documents speak to two major socioeconomic processes of the age: the creation of the first international system in world history, and the collapse of that system after about two hundred years. Our seminar uses archaeological evidence, paleoclimate studies, and textual analysis (in translation) to address several related issues. We look at how networks of information, wealth accumulation, and political power were created and what role they played in globalization and destabilization. We consider whether the key players were aware of the coming collapse, what if any counter-measures were deployed, and how some polities were more resilient than others and created even greater networks post-collapse. We analyze a variety of related sources, with close attention paid to the Amarna Letters and other Egyptian texts from the Ramesside era. Several Bronze Age and Iron Age shipwrecks are examined for their evidence of maritime connectivity. And throughout the course students will become familiar with the history, economy, cult, laws and daily life of Ugarit (Tell Ras Shamra, Syria), a cosmopolitan coastal kingdom whose unparalleled archaeological and textual record affords a particularly close view of the transformative moments of the Late Bronze Age.

This course examines the fixity of Bible's representations of Israel as it relates to the fluidity of Israel's social, political, and religious experience as revealed in archaeology and texts from outside the Bible. We will use the tools of biblical criticism (philological, archaeological, literary historical) and methods drawn from such disciplines as History, Political Science, Anthropology, and Literary Criticism, to examine four biblical narrative traditions: The Joseph story; the exodus from Egypt; the Israelite conquest of Canaan; and the Song of Deborah, a text widely regarded as the oldest in the Hebrew Bible. Each of these played an essential role in the process of fabricating biblical Israel. As works of biblical historiography, each functioned to create a shared sense of a Jewish past in light of the urgencies of the present. Each is also witness to a creative process that unfolded when the past was still malleable, the terms not yet rigid. We will focus on the modes and materials of textual production and on how modern historians engage biblical narrative in fabricating their own narrative histories of ancient Israel. We will also consider how ancient and modern historical writing on ancient Israel has been put into the service of contemporary political discourse on boundaries and borders in Israel-Palestine.

This course takes Vienna's history as a starting point for studying how the modern mind fought to liberate itself from a past deemed overly burdensome, while embracing radical innovation and change. Students will develop a sense of the city's role as a laboratory of twentieth-century ideologies and ideas: liberalism and conservatism, Zionism and anti-Semitism, modernism and traditionalism. Most of the course's key themes will converge on what contemporaries referred to as 'the Jewish question,' a problem which most characters we will examine engaged with to some extent. Assigned readings will include texts by Arthur Schnitzler, Sigmund Freud, Theodor Herzl, Joseph Roth, Robert Musil, and Ludwig Wittgenstein.

This course focuses on how Biblical texts represent women in ancient Israel, and how the Bible's representations constitute both a fabrication and a manifestation of social life on the ground. We will use biblical, archaeological, and ancient Near Eastern textual evidence to consider the complicated relationship between ancient society and the textual and material records from which we reconstruct it. In addition, this course will examine how women's roles in the Hebrew Bible have been understood and integrated in later Jewish and Christian thought, and how these discourses shape contemporary American attitudes towards women, sexuality, and gender.

This class examines modern articulations of identity by and about two distinct Jewish diasporas: Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews. Sephardic Jews trace their origins to the Iberian Peninsula prior to the end of the 15th century. Mizrahim are Jews who lived in the Middle East and North Africa until the mid-20th century, and their descendants. We will explore Sephardic and Mizrahi identities in works of fiction, memoirs, essays, poetry and films produced from the mid-twentieth century to the present. We will trace routes of migration across generations, paying particular attention to how texts construct identity in relation to language and place. Works will be drawn from wide geographic distribution including the Middle East, North Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and produced in Arabic, English, French, Hebrew, Ladino, and Spanish.

This course explores the interactions between Jews, Christians, and other religious groups in late antiquity, especially in Sasanian Persia circa the first through seventh century C.E. Students pay particular attention to the portrayals of Christians in Jewish rabbinic literature, including Midrash and Talmud, but also draw from early Christian, Zoroastrian, Manichaean, and other sources. There will be an emphasis on the reading of primary texts in translation in their appropriate historical contexts, and in comparison with one another. Students engage such questions as: How did Jews define themselves in relation to Christians, and vice versa? In what ways did Jews and Christians part ways with one another, as scholars often maintain, and what were the factors at play in their separation? And, lastly, what role did other religious and political groups, such as Gnostics, Zoroastrians, Romans, Mandaeans, Manichaeans, and early Muslims play in these developments?

The modern Jewish religious movement known as Hasidism began in Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century and thrives today. We will approach Hasidism primarily through three avenues: recent critical social history; selections from Hasidic literature; and ethnographic accounts of Hasidic life today. By the end of the semester, students will be able to articulate some ways that Hasidism reflects both broader trends in European religious and moral thought of its time, and some ways that it represents distinctively Jewish developments. You will also gain a deeper appreciation of the various kinds of evidence and disciplinary approaches that need to be brought to bear on the attempt to articulate as broad, deep and varied a phenomenon as modern Hasidic Judaism.

Death is both the opposite of life and an intimate part of life. Though it comes to us all, human understandings of the process of dying and of our relations to the dead have varied widely. For many, the dead remain engaged with the living for better and for worse. For others, the dead are just history. We will draw on anthropological, sociological, historical and literary texts to understand better this vast range of attitudes toward the dead and the process of dying-and we will come to understand better what we gain and lose by consigning the dead to oblivion. After considering a wide range of comparative studies, we will conclude with an intensive focus on death, dying, and the dead in Jewish cultures.

From Jerusalem to Rome, from Shanghai to Marrakesh, Jews and cities have been shaping each other for thousands of years. This course ranges through time and space to examine how Jewish and other minority experiences offer a window onto questions of modernity and post-colonialism in intersections of the built environment with migration, urban space, and memory. Readings and film/video encompass historical, ethnographic, visual, architectural and literary materials to offer a broad look at materials on ghettos, empires, cosmopolitanism, tolerance, immigrant enclaves, race and ethnicity.

American Jews have frequently been touted as a model minority. This course will take a more critical look at the historical interactions between Jewish immigration, United States industrialization, and processes of social and geographical mobility-all through the prism of New York's Lower East Side, first home for over 750,000 Jewish immigrants from Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire and elsewhere between the mid-19th century and the 1920s. We will compare the Jewish experience to that of other immigrants/migrants by considering social institutions as well as material and other cultural practices. We will examine interactions with the built environment -most especially the tenement-in Lower East Side culture. Special attention will be paid to immigrant labor movement politics including strikes, splits, and gender in the garment trade. From the perspective of the present, the course will examine how commemoration, heritage tourism and the selling of [immigrant] history intersect with gentrifying real estate in an iconic New York City neighborhood. Projects using the ILR's archives on the Triangle Fire and other topics are explicitly encouraged. This course counts as an out of college elective for B. Arch and M. Arch students.

This extraordinary figure died in 1941, and his death is emblematic of the intellectual depredations of Nazism. Yet since World War II, his influence, his reputation, and his fascination for scholars in a wide range of cultural and political disciplines has steadily grown. He is seen as a bridging figure between German and Jewish studies, between materialist critique of culture and the submerged yet powerful voice of theology, between literary history and philosophy. We will review Benjamin's life and some of the key disputes over his heritage; read some of the best-known of his essays; and devote significant time to his enigmatic and enormously rich masterwork, the Arcades Project, concluding with consideration of the relevance of Benjamin's insights for cultural and political dilemmas today.