Jewish Studies (JEWISH)

Terms offered: Fall 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2021
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.
Freshman and Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2016
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.
Freshman and Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.
Freshman and Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2017
Freshman and sophomore seminars offer lower division students the opportunity to explore an intellectual topic with a faculty member and a group of peers in a small-seminar setting. These seminars are offered in all campus departments; topics vary from department to department and from semester to semester.
Freshman and Sophomore Seminar: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2020, Spring 2020, Fall 2019
Organized group study on topics selected by upper division students under the sponsorship and direction of the Jewish Studies faculty.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024, Fall 2023
The course is intended to give Jewish studies minors a general introduction to the field through a survey of religious and cultural expressions of Jews across time and geographies. No previous knowledge of Judaism or Jewish Studies is necessary.
Introduction to Jewish Religion, Culture, and People: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
Judeo-Spanish, or Ladino, is the linguistic legacy of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal in the late fifteenth century. In this translation-driven course, students will learn to read and analyze Judeo-Spanish literary and cultural texts. Combining language instruction with literary /cultural studies, this fast-paced course exposes students to Sephardic culture in the longue durée, including Hispano-Jewish poetry, Moroccan balladry, liturgical texts from Amsterdam, Ottoman-era memoir, Holocaust testimony from the Balkans, and Jewish-American reportage and satire. Depending on course composition, students will have the opportunity to practice basic conversational skills. No knowledge of Hebrew or a Romance language required.
Elementary Judeo-Spanish: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Not yet offered
Conducted in Judeo-Spanish, this course attempts to answer these and other questions by
interrogating primary sources that span the twelfth to twentieth centuries. In addition to JudeoSpanish materials, the course will also incorporate readings from the Old Spanish, JudeoPortuguese, and early modern Castilian and Portuguese literary traditions, with English
translations provided when necessary or as an interpretive aid.
Advanced Judeo-Spanish Seminar: Ibero-Jewish Voices from the Margins: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Spring 2024
This course is designed primarily to allow faculty to develop focused interdisciplinary courses which address specific issues, themes, or problems in American Jewish politics, culture, and society. Topics may vary from semester to semester. Students should consult the department's webpage for current offerings before the start of the semester.
Special Topics in American Jewish Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025
This course examines an important topic in historical or contemporary antisemitism. It traces the evolution of antisemitism as a cultural code, form of social exclusion, political program, and/or ideology. Course materials situate given cases of antisemitism in the larger cultural, social, and political contexts of a given time and place. Students gain deep knowledge and comparative perspective on the structure, development, causes, and impact of anti-Jewish hatred, exclusion, and discrimination.
Special Topics in Antisemitism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
Course will focus on specific areas or topics related to creative arts and literature in Jewish studies through a combination of lectures, term papers, and examinations. Instructors and topics to vary from semester to semester. Consult Jewish Studies website for updated course descriptions.
Special Topics in Jewish Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2023
Study of selected Jewish languages including Hebrew and Yiddish, and Jewish literature including prose, poetry, and drama, from various periods and geographic areas, in the context of time and place. Selections may vary from semester to semester depending on the interests and expertise of the instructor.
Special Topics in Jewish Languages and Literature: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course will address topics related to Jewish arts and culture with a format that includes lecture and lab hours.
Topics in Jewish Arts and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2023, Fall 2021
Course designed to permit regular and visiting faculty the flexibility to address topics that reflect their research interests and supplement regular curricular offerings. Consult department website each semester for specific descriptions.
Topics in Arts and Culture: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020
This course will provide an overview of Israeli art and culture and its place within the international cultural world. We will examine museums, theatre, visual art, popular music, and cinema, as they reflect the multi-cultural and pluralistic Israeli society. 

Arts and Culture in Israel: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Spring 2024
A course on trends in Jewish religious, cultural, and social life. The course will study innovative and conservative aspects of thought, ritual, and belief in relation to contemporary life and traditional Jewish values in at least one country other than the United States.

Topics in Judaism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025, Fall 2024, Fall 2022
A course on trends in Jewish religious, cultural, and social life. Our understanding of the Hebrew Bible has been transformed in recent years due to insights from literary criticism, anthropology, archaeology, and historiography. This course explores the impact of these innovations and provides a multilayered introduction to the writings of the Hebrew Bible, focused on the mingling of memory, religion, and the literary imagination.
Special Topics in Judaism: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Not yet offered
This course will examine the “births” of “Christianity,” “Judaism,” and “Islam,” and challenge narratives that treat these as three self-evidently separate, internally coherent entities with discrete origin points. We will explore modes of interactions between Jews, Christians and Muslims in the medieval Islamic world, and test the utility of terms like “influence,” “cross-pollination,” “symbiosis,” and family tree metaphors, as well as new conceptual frameworks like Heyden and Nirenberg’s “co-production.”

Pre-Modern Judaism: Religion and Society: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2022, Fall 2017
This course will map Israel’s social structure, identify its implications for social and economic inequality, and shed light on its role in structuring political loyalty, conflict and action. It will introduce students to relevant concepts and theories from sociology and political science, and findings from comparative research, that aid understanding of the Israeli case and place it in a broader perspective.
Israeli Society: Social Structure, Inequality, and Political Cleavages: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Not yet offered
The course takes us far beyond contemporary tensions between Muslims and Jews, and deep into a more complicated history that spans the Mediterranean and beyond. We move through topics that include the earliest encounters between Muslims and Jews during the years of the rise of Islam; the historical impact and legacy of the dhimmi (the system of rights and restrictions that defined Jews’ status for centuries under Islamic rule); the culturally fruitful shared experience of Jews and Muslims in Medieval Spain and the Ottoman Empire; the effects of French, British, and Italian colonialism in the modern Middle East; and the important conflicts over Zionism and Arab nationalism during the past century.
Muslim-Jewish Encounters: From the Beginnings of Islam to Today: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2025
Jewish thought is a field of Jewish studies that analyzes the themes of Jewish tradition, culture, community, and education throughout the ages from a conceptual point of view. The field often deals with connections, parallels, influences, and tensions between Jewish ideas and those of the wider world through studies of Jewish philosophy, theology, and mysticism. Key topics that are considered in this field include the existence and nature of God, the rationale for religious observance, the purpose of the Jewish people, the demands of Jewish ethics, the bonds between Israel and the Diaspora, the authority of revelation, the relation between faith and reason, and the transmission of Jewish culture across the generations.
Introduction to Modern Jewish Thought: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course will examine the impact of modern intellectual, political, cultural, and social forces on the Jewish people since the eighteenth century. It is our aim to come to an understanding of how the Jews interpreted these forces and how and in what ways they adapted and utilized them to suit the Jewish experience. In other words, we will trace the way Jews became modern. Some of the topics to be covered include Emancipation, the Jewish Enlightenment, new Jewish religious movements, Jewish politics and culture, immigration, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel.
Jews in the Modern World: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024
The class explores the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel in all its complexity and contradictions. What is Zionism? What are its roots? Is it a liberation movement? A religious cause? A colonial ideology? A set of state policies? And what is the relationship between Zionism and the modern State of Israel? How do Zionism and Israel look different when considered from the standpoint of Jewish,
Palestinian, European, or Middle Eastern history? Exploring Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century to the present, this class offers in-depth knowledge and discussion on all of these topics
and more.
History of Modern Israel: From the Emergence of Zionism to Our Time: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Prior to 2007
This course will survey the historical events and intellectual developments leading up to and surrounding the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. By reading a mixture of primary and secondary sources we will examine the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) against the backdrop of modern Jewish and modern German history. The course is divided into three main parts: (1) the historical background up to 1933; (2) the persecution of the Jews and the beginnings of mass murder, 1933-1941; and (3) the industrialized murder of the Jews, 1942-1945.
History of the Holocaust: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2024, Spring 2024
This course will examine comparative responses to and
representations of violent conflict. We will pay attention to how
catastrophic events are productive of new forms of expression--oral,
written, and visual--as well as destructive of familiar ones. We will
examine the ways in which experience and its representation interact
during and in the aftermath of extreme violence. Our empirical cases
will be drawn from our research on responses to WWII atrocities, and
on the post-Cold War civil wars in Africa.
Special Topics in Holocaust Perspectives: Catastrophe, Memory & Narrative: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2020, Spring 2019, Spring 2018
Organized group study on topics selected by upper division students under the sponsorship and direction of the Jewish Studies faculty.
Directed Group Study: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2021, Fall 2020, Fall 2019
Subject matter will vary with topics related to Jewish Studies
Supervised Independent Study and Research: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2024, Spring 2020, Spring 2019
Graduate seminar will focus on specific areas or topics in Jewish studies through a combination of close reading of texts, student presentation, and informal lectures. Instructors and topics to vary semester to semester. Consult department website for updated course descriptions.
Advanced Topics in Jewish Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2023, Fall 2021, Spring 2021
This seminar, specifically designed as the ‘integrative course’ for students pursuing the Designated Emphasis in Jewish Studies, will offer an in-depth introduction to some of the central trends and personalities in modern Jewish historiography. We will read (and read about) the founders of modern Jewish historiography, and then explore some contemporary trends in Jewish scholarship, according to the disciplinary affiliations of the students in the class. Students will need to write a 5000-word article to complete the course, using a bibliography that includes Jewish Studies materials. A subject-relevant seminar paper from another course may be used to fulfill this requirement, subject to approval by Jewish Studies faculty.
Modern Jewish Scholarship: History and Practice: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2011, Fall 2010, Spring 2010
The course is offered to graduate students in the Designated Emphasis (DE) in Jewish studies to provide course credit for conducting dissertation research and dissertation writing, only after the student has successfully advanced to candidacy.
Jewish Studies DE Dissertation Research and Writing Credit: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Spring 2021, Spring 2014, Fall 2012
Topics and instructors will vary depending upon area of study. Special individual study for qualified graduate students only. Individual study and research, including fieldwork, in consultation with instructor on subject matter not covered in scheduled course offerings.
Individual Study and Research - Jewish Studies: Read More [+]

Terms offered: Fall 2012, Fall 2011, Spring 2011
The course is offered to graduate students in the Designated Emphasis (DE) in Jewish studies to provide opportunities for directed qualifying exam preparation prior to advancement to candidacy.
Jewish Studies DE Exam Preparation: Read More [+]