This course is an interdisciplinary exploration of the Jewish experience from the breakdown of traditional society in the eighteenth century to the present, with a focus on the Jewish communities of Europe. We will pay close attention to the impact of the Enlightenment and emancipation on traditional Jewish life; Jewish responses to modernity in the form of new religious, artistic, and political expressions; the rise of the "new" anti-Semitism throughout Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and Jewish responses thereto; and the impact of the Holocaust and founding of Israel on world Jewry. Turning to a range of sources, from mystical texts and Hasidic tales to political manifestos and Yiddish plays, we will be interested in the processes by which the religious beliefs, intellectual life, political strategies, and cultural forms of the Jewish people changed radically within a few centuries. This course is a requirement for Jewish studies concentrators.

The American Jewish community began with a group of twenty-three refugees who arrived on the shores of New Amsterdam in 1654. Over the past three-and-a-half centuries, this community has evolved into a leader of world Jewry and a center of Jewish culture. This course will trace the development of American Jewry since the seventeenth century. We will explore the manner in which the American Jewish community absorbed successive waves of immigrants, incorporated and produced diverse political and religious views, responded to different manifestations of prejudice and discrimination, devised new structures of communal organization, created a distinctively American Jewish culture, and reconceived Jewish observance and identity. A central question will be how American Jews, in these various ways, attempted to reconcile their participation in two worlds-Jewish and American. Class sessions will revolve around discussion of readings and work with primary source materials (for example, newspapers, memoirs, and folk art). Prerequisite: Foundations of Jewish Studies I or permission by the instructor.

This seminar will focus on the varieties of Zionist thought in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, drawing from both primary source material (i.e., the writings of Zionist thinkers) as well as critical scholarly works. The first part of this course will consider the evolution of Zionist ideology, from biblical longing to the basis of a mass movement. We will explore the emergence of various Zionist thinkers in the nineteenth century-cultural, religious, and political-against the backdrop of the "Jewish question" in Western and Eastern Europe, and the ultimate triumph of Herzlian Zionism, resulting in the founding of a Jewish state. The second part of the course will consider the role of Jewish writers, intellectuals, educators, and artists in creating a new Jewish national culture in Hebrew, informed by Zionist principles. This course will revolve around class discussion of assigned texts. Students will be asked to write a research paper on an area of interest. Prerequisite: Foundations of Jewish Studies I or permission by the instructor.

HEB 101 Intro to Hebrew I (JANUARY)

HEB 102 Intro to Hebrew II

REL 104 Intro to Judaism

REL 257 People of the Body

SOC 340 Making it in America