Jewish StudiesProgram

This course explores the life of the Jewish people from Biblical times on, emphasizing cultural, religious, and institutional developments. Jewish tradition goes back thousands of years, and Jews have resided in many different lands. They have become an integral part of many different cultures, yet have often retained (or been forced to retain) a certain degree of separateness or difference. In this course we will trace continuity and change in Jewish traditions from ancient to modern times, and across different regions. Taking into account inter-cultural contact and historical events—ranging in place from the Middle East to Muslim Spain to Asia, Africa, Europe, and the Americas, and in time from the ancient world to the medieval era, the Holocaust, and contemporary Israel and the U.S.—we will explore developments in Jewish history, literature, and culture.

Utilizing the textual and archaeological evidence, this course introduces students to the lands, cultures, and peoples associated with the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and Qur’an. Geographically, the lands of the Bible encompass what is often referred to as the Cradle of Civilization or Fertile Crescent – an arc-shaped region defined by the Nile, Jordan, Tigris and Euphrates river valleys. Today this crescent includes the modern countries and regions of Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian territories, Jordan, Syria, southeastern Turkey, and Iraq. Spanning ten millennia of history (ca. 9000 BCE-750 CE), this course explores a series of landmarks in the history of human development, which are considered together with Jewish, Christian, and Islamic traditions.

Israel is often portrayed in media and popular society in incomplete or distorted terms. This course teaches students to cut through the mythology, and develop a more accurate understanding of what Israel is in the 21st century. Since Israel is a culturally, ethnically, and religiously diverse society, it is only possible to understand the true nature of modern Israel through exploring the many sub-groups that comprise the Israeli citizenry. The course looks at Ashkenazi and Mizrahi Jews (both religious and secular), Muslim and Christian Palestinian Arab citizens of Israel, Ethiopian-Israelis, Russian-Israelis, Bedouins, and Druze. For each group, it looks at demographics, background histories, migration patterns, institutions, cultural norms, values, and practices. We will look at what is important to each group, how they see and organize themselves, and how they understand and experience the world around them.

Ancient Israel names the land and people of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament), and it provides important background for the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. Yet, ancient Israel remains difficult to approach historically, perceptible in biblical texts received only through centuries of later transmission and archaeological data often lacking names, voices, and stories. This course will explore the history, society, and culture of ancient Israel in its West Asian context from ca. 1200-330 BCE through a variety of evidence types, with the goal of probing what everyday life was like for people.

This course examines the literature of the Bible. Throughout this course, students will study the language, thought, images, and structures of the book that has arguably proved the central text of Western literature. Students will also actively explore the ways in which the Bible has shaped the literature of English-speaking cultures around the world. Students will read substantial portions of the Old and New Testaments, learning to read critically and to interpret the Bible as they would any other literary text. They will also learn about the historical construction of the Bible, some history of its translation, and contemplate the competing versions of existing Biblical texts. Accordingly, reading the Bible as literature by necessity requires critical engagement with different international cultures from different historical periods.

This course examines the literature of the Bible. Throughout this course, students will study the language, thought, images, and structures of the book that has arguably proved the central text of Western literature. Students will also actively explore the ways in which the Bible has shaped the literature of English-speaking cultures around the world. Students will read substantial portions of the Old and New Testaments, learning to read critically and to interpret the Bible as they would any other literary text. They will also learn about the historical construction of the Bible, some history of its translation, and contemplate the competing versions of existing Biblical texts. Accordingly, reading the Bible as literature by necessity requires critical engagement with different international cultures from different historical periods.

We will trace the social, religious, cultural, and political developments in the Jewish community from the Colonial Period to the present. Topics to be covered include immigration, acculturation, ethnicity, gender, politics, and communal and religious innovation. While “knowing the facts” is obviously important to historical understanding, this course helps students develop critical thinking skills. These skills include: close and thoughtful reading and analysis of primary and secondary sources; looking for a broader coherence or “order” to the material; independent analysis and effective articulation (both in writing and in class discussion) of well-reasoned, well-crafted conclusions and interpretations and arguments (conclusions/interpretations/arguments which are supported by specific factual evidence derived from a variety of sources).

This course provides an introduction to the collection of early Christian writings that make up the New Testament. It begins with an examination of the first-century context in which these writings took shape-one overshadowed by the Roman empire, influenced by Hellenistic culture, and based, above all, on varieties of Judaism. From there, the course takes up a few guiding questions. How, in this ancient context, did the first Christians understand and portray the figure at the center of their communities, Jesus of Nazareth? What do the New Testament writings reveal about the beliefs and aspirations of these communities as they advanced a movement that would, in time, become among the most consequential in world history? By the end of the course, students will have gained knowledge of the historical context of New Testament writings and an understanding of why the New Testament has been such an important and influential collection of writings.

This class studies how art, literature, film, and other media can help us to gain a perspective on one of the most horrific events in human history, the Holocaust: the genocidal murder of more than six million men, women, and children (mostly Jewish) under the Nazi regime during World War II. We will also examine the theoretical questions involved in any attempt to capture what appears to be beyond our comprehension, in terms of moral outrage and the sheer scale, inhumanity, and bureaucratic efficiency. To this end we will study literary works, such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, as well as photographs, poems, artworks, installations, museum architecture, the design of monuments and other artifacts. We will also examine questions of memorialization (Holocaust museums and memorials), national guilt, survivor’s guilt, stigmatization, and the ethics of historical representation.

This class studies how art, literature, film, and other media can help us to gain a perspective on one of the most horrific events in human history, the Holocaust: the genocidal murder of more than six million men, women, and children (mostly Jewish) under the Nazi regime during World War II. We will also examine the theoretical questions involved in any attempt to capture what appears to be beyond our comprehension, in terms of moral outrage and the sheer scale, inhumanity, and bureaucratic efficiency. To this end we will study literary works, such as Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz, films such as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Roman Polanski’s The Pianist, and Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, as well as photographs, poems, artworks, installations, museum architecture, the design of monuments and other artifacts. We will also examine questions of memorialization (Holocaust museums and memorials), national guilt, survivor’s guilt, stigmatization, and the ethics of historical representation.

This course covers the origins of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and how the issues at stake changed over time, up to the present day. The course situates the conflict in the history of the Middle East and the larger context of international relations, including the Cold War and the end of the Cold War. Topics include regional warfare and its significance, efforts at peacemaking, and social, economic, and cultural developments among Israelis and Palestinians.

This course studies the developments of right-wing totalitarianism in the twentieth century with special emphasis on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which provided the roots for fascist developments in the modern world. The course concerns itself with understanding the social, political, and economic contexts of fascism, its governing assumptions, ideals, and values, how it worked in practice, and its consequences and historical implications. Another focus will be on the question of why these illiberal, anti-democratic, and ultimately murderous regimes appear to have appealed to many groups during the 1930s and 1940s, not only within Italy and Germany, but also within broader European society.

This course studies the developments of right-wing totalitarianism in the twentieth century with special emphasis on Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany, which provided the roots for fascist developments in the modern world. The course concerns itself with understanding the social, political, and economic contexts of fascism, its governing assumptions, ideals, and values, how it worked in practice, and its consequences and historical implications. Another focus will be on the question of why these illiberal, anti-democratic, and ultimately murderous regimes appear to have appealed to many groups during the 1930s and 1940s, not only within Italy and Germany, but also within broader European society.

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls was one the most important archeological discoveries of the 20th century. This collection of over 900 scrolls found in caves by the Dead Sea includes the oldest manuscripts of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) and hundreds of other Jewish writings dating from the 2nd century BCE to the 1st century CE, many of which were previously unknown. In this course we will examine select examples of the Dead Sea Scrolls in order to understand how these writings have revolutionized our understanding of the formation of the Bible, Jewish groups in the Greco-Roman period, and the origins of Christianity and rabbinic Judaism.

Sacrifice (from Latin sacer “holy + facere “to make”) is one of the most prevalent yet troubling aspects of religion. Its destruction and violence is often at odds with other rituals and core understandings within a religion, so why is it done and what good does it do? For the sacrificer, does it represent a gift to the gods, a renunciation, an exchange, a surrogate, or something else? This course will examine some competing definitions and theories of sacrifice, as well as its manifestations in the cultures and religions of the ancient Mediterranean world, especially those of Greece, Rome, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Hatti, Israel, and Phoenicia. A brief look at religious sacrifice elsewhere, such as ancient Mesoamerica and India, will conclude the course.

The course provides students with basic knowledge on major topics in Palestinian and Israeli societies and cultures with a thematic analysis of these topics. It examines the encounter between Palestinians and Israelis from a perspective that questions our ability to understand them separately and it emphasizes interdependency between the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and internal tensions within Palestinian and Israeli societies.

The course gives students hands-on tools for investigating ideology and propaganda through the analysis of a variety of historical and contemporary texts. With the help of different theoretical perspectives, students learn how to analyze ideologies that can be found in texts, identify whose interests those ideologies serve, and discuss their biases, with the goal of learning how these belief systems can be used to promote and circulate specific political views (i.e., propaganda). The course begins with a historical overview of the role played by language and other meaning-making resources in the production and circulation of ideology and propaganda across a variety of historical contexts. The course will then explore contemporary practices of disinformation, and investigate alternative strategies through which to counter disinformation.

The Holocaust stands out as the most terrible and challenging phenomenon of the 20th Century. Societies and the scholarship struggled for decades to fully grasp how much the Holocaust has questioned widely shared assumptions about modernity and progress. This course pursues the overarching question how the Holocaust could have taken place. Who were the perpetrators, victims and bystanders? How much agency did they have? How was the Holocaust organized? The course will encourage students to critically engage with the Holocaust, and will consider a variety of different kinds of sources and means of representation, including oral testimony, film and fiction, as well as more conventional documentation.

Most of the early study of the Holocaust focused almost exclusively on the experiences of Jewish men. It was men who wrote the first and most widely read Holocaust memoirs and men who produced the first studies of the Holocaust. The first question motivating this class is thus what we can learn from examining women’s experiences. Is it possible that the ghetto, the camp, and the forest look different from women’s perspectives? Are there factors we miss when we read primary documents written by only half of the participants in these historical events? Beyond this, however, our exploration will also lead us to look more broadly at gender as a category of analysis. What do we gain by bringing questions of gender to bear on our study of the Holocaust? Are there any ethical concerns that should inform our approach?

The history and memory of the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki are often taught separately in different disciplines. This course will examine them together through the various ways different societies remembered, understood and commemorated these. Using the extensive literature on the history of memory, this course further suggests ways in which these memories and histories affected and were entangled by each other. Specific content will vary according to individual instructor, but topics may include victim cultures, cold war nuclear history, trauma, human rights, dark tourism, memorials, architecture as well as the general impact of these tragedies on the fraught politics of memory in East Asia and the Middle East, or the way the memories of the tragedies were entangled with the civil rights and other struggles in American and global history.

Development and achievements of the Achaemenid kingdom; relationships between Persians and Greeks.

This course features advanced study of a particular ancient Mediterranean language or dialect, group of languages or dialects, or a specific language topic, such as philology, paleography, epigraphy, or linguistics in the Ancient Mediterranean, including Rome, Greece, Egypt, Syria, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, Iran, Arabia, etc. The choice of primary topic in each iteration of the course is made by the instructor. The aim of the course is to provide students with critical exposure to aspects of ancient Mediterranean language study as well as a solid grounding in scholarly research methods for ancient language study.