Undergraduate Jewish Studies Courses 2023–2024
Jewish Civilization
The Jewish Civilization sequence may be used to fulfill the College’s general education requirement in civilization studies. It is a three-quarter sequence that explores the development of Jewish culture and tradition from its ancient beginnings, through its rabbinic and medieval transformations, to its modern manifestations. In the first two quarters, through investigation of primary texts—biblical, Talmudic, philosophical, mystical, historical, documentary, and literary—students will acquire a broad overview of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness, while reflecting in greater depth on major themes, ideas, and events in Jewish history. With the first two quarters as preparation, the third quarter of Jewish Civilization will offer courses on different topics that will vary year to year.
It is recommended, though not required, that students take these courses in sequence. Students who register for JWSC 12000 will automatically be eligible to take JWSC 12001. In order for a third-quarter course to qualify as a civilization course for the general education requirement, the student must also take Jewish Civilization I and II. Jewish Civilization III courses, however, may also be taken as an independent electives.
JWSC 12000 (= RLST 22010; NEHC 22010; MDVL 12000; HIST 11701) Jewish Civilization I – Ancient Beginnings to Medieval Period
01) Autumn T/Th 11:00 am – 12:20 pm Larisa Reznik
02) Autumn M/W 1:30 – 2:50 pm Larisa Reznik
01) Winter M/W 4:30 – 5:50 pm Larisa Reznik
JWSC 12001 (= RLST 22011; NEHC 22011; HIST 11702) Jewish Civilization II – Early Modern to 21st Century
01) Winter T/Th 11:00 am – 12:20 pm Kenneth Moss
02) Winter M/W 1:30 – 2:50 pm Larisa Reznik
01) Spring M/W 4:30 – 5:50 pm Larisa Reznik
JWSC 12004 (= RLST 22013, GNSE 16004) Jewish Civilization III – Mothers and Motherhood in Modern Jewish Culture
Spring M/W 1:30 – 2:50 pm
Jessica Kirzane
From sentimentalized keepers of Jewish tradition to objects of ridicule burdened by stereotypes of overbearing, guilt-inducing behavior, Jewish mothers hold a prominent role in Jewish self-representations. Writing alongside or against these stereotypes, Jewish mothers themselves have struggled with the obligations and expectations of Jewish motherhood. Engaging with a variety of literary, theological, historical, and pop culture texts, this class explores Jewish feminisms in relation to motherhood, Jewish fictions of motherhood, and the role of motherhood in Jewish religious life and thought. This course includes material from a variety of different contexts for modern Jewish life, but places particular emphasis on American Jewish history and culture.
JWSC 12009 Jewish Civilization III – Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust
Spring M/W 3:00 – 4:20 pm
Larisa Reznik
This course examines a range of philosophical responses to the problem of living and acting in the wake of the Holocaust, which called into question every philosophical, theological, and cultural piety of Western civilization: the existence and goodness of God; the actuality of historical progress; the ability of the modern nation-state and its laws to secure freedom and equality for individuals among religious and cultural differences; the capacity of art, culture, and education to make people good and ethical; the power of human reason to decipher good from evil and to guide human action accordingly. We will explore these questions together with a set of methodological concerns around how to study, represent, and memorialize the Holocaust and other historical atrocities, asking: is the Holocaust best approached as a unique historical event or should it be studied together with the histories of enslavement, imperialism, and colonialism? Is there something about the very nature of modernity that generates fascism? What stories can be told, how should they be told, and who has the right to tell them? What forms of knowledge, institution-building, and culture-making might be called upon to honor the victims of past atrocities and generate resources for resisting present and future ones? Course materials may include film, photography, and texts by Adorno, Levinas, Arendt, Levi, Césaire, Fanon, Kofman and others.
Additional Courses
Autumn 2023
JWSC 20120 (= BIBL 31000; NEHC 20504/30504; RLST 11004; HIJD 31004) Introduction to the Hebrew Bible.
Autumn T/Th 12:30 – 1:50 pm
Simeon Chavel
The course surveys the contents of the Hebrew Bible, through the concepts of book culture, literature, history, and religion. It introduces critical questions regarding the HB's figures and ideas, its literary qualities and anomalies, the history of its composition and transmission, its relation to other artifacts from the period, its place in the history and society of ancient Israel and Judea, and its relation to the larger culture of the ancient Near East in the Iron Age and Persian period (12th-4th cents. BCE).
Note: This course counts as a Gateway course for RLST majors/minors.
JWSC 21107 (= RLST 21107) Reading in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed
Autumn F 1:30 – 4:20 pm
James Robinson
A careful study of select passages in Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed, focusing on the method of the work and its major philosophical-theological themes, including: divine attributes, creation vs. eternity, prophecy, the problem of evil and divine providence, law and ethics, and the final aim of human existence.
JWSC 23600 (= RLST 23600, RETH 33600) Evil: Myth, Symbol, and Reality
Autumn T/Th 2:00 – 3:20 pm
William Schweiker
From the horrors of the Shoah to violence suffered by individuals, the question of the origin, meaning, and reality of evil done by humans has vexed thinkers throughout the ages. This seminar is an inquiry into the problem of evil on three registers of reflection: myth, symbol, and reality. We will be exploring important philosophical, Jewish, and Christian texts. These include Martin Buber, Good and Evil, Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, Immanuel Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone, Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil, Edward Farley, Good and Evil, Hans Jonas, Mortality and Morality and Claudia Card, The Atrocity Paradigm. There will also be a viewing of the movie Seven (1995) directed by David Fincher and written by Andrew Kevin Walker. Accordingly, the seminar probes the reality of evil and the symbolic and mythic resources of religious traditions to articulate the meaning and origin of human evil. The question of “theodicy” is then not the primary focus given the seminar’s inquiry into the fact and reality of human evil. Each student will submit a 5-7 page critical review of either Jonathan Glover’s Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century or Susan Neiman’s, Evil in Modern Thought. Each student also will write a 15-page (double spaced;12pt font) paper on one or more of the texts read in the course with respect to her or his own research interests.
PQ: Students must have done previous work in theology and/or ethics.
JWSC 26313 (= RLST 26313) Judaism, Medicine, and the Body
Autumn T/Th 9:30 – 10:50 am
Ranana Dine
For centuries the “Jewish doctor” has existed as an archetype, but is there such a thing as Jewish medicine? Does Judaism teach a distinct approach to the body, illness, and healing? And more significantly, why should religion have anything to do with one’s health today? In this course we will grapple with our assumptions regarding modern Western medicine by discussing topics in Jewish medical thought and ethics. We will study how Judaism – its texts, history, laws, and traditions – intersect with issues of science, medicine, and the body. In particular we will think about how a Jewish approach to medicine, and more broadly a religious approach, might complicate contemporary assumptions about the body and healing. We will also consider how Jewish bodies have been imagined and stereotyped, and think about how that might affect Jewish approaches to disease and medical ethics. This course will thus offer students a way to think about alternatives to assumptions about medicine, the body, and ethics in the secular West, which will be explored both in class materials and in personal projects. No prior work in Jewish studies, medical ethics, or religious studies necessary.
JWSC 28449 (= RLST 28449) The End is Near: The Bible and Apocalypse
Autumn M/W 3:00 – 4:20 pm
Jonathan Wegner
The rise of nuclear weapons, the global warming crisis, and the Covid-19 pandemic have reignited debates about the fate and meaning of human history. If it is the end of the world as we know it, how should we act, and what—if anything—comes next? For centuries, the Bible has been a source for people thinking about end of time. In this course, we examine how the Bible and other ancient texts portray human catastrophe and the possibility of new beginnings. From national upheavals and the dawn of a final political order, down to the fate of the individual and the destiny of the cosmos at large, this course exposes students to the multiplicity of ways that the End is envisioned throughout the Bible and later interpretation. How do biblical authors interpret the meaning of existence in light of the End? What stands out about ancient literature when we understand it as anticipating the End, and how can these texts help us understand contemporary fears about the End? No background knowledge about the Bible or the ancient world is required for the course.
JWSC 29406 (=LING 29406/39406) Formal Diachronic Semantics in Hebrew and Other Languages
Autumn M/W 3:00 – 4:20 pm
Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal
The course seeks to bring together two sub-disciplines within linguistics: historical linguistics and formal semantics. Both of these sub-disciplines have evolved from distant intellectual fields: the first comes from the philological world, while the second has its origins in the world of mathematical logic. Recently, there has been a rapprochement between these fields dealing mostly with the study of changes of meaning, grammaticalization and reanalysis. This course aims to examine the research paradigms that attempt to integrate them and explore new methodologies for building bridges between them. The course will focus on examples from Hebrew, but there is no requirement of Hebrew, and studies and examples from many other languages will be provided as well.
JWSC 29700 Reading and Research
JWSC 29900 BA Preparation Course
Winter 2024
JWSC 17203 (= HIST 17203, NEHC 17203) Twentieth-Century Jewish History
Winter 9:30 – 10:50 am T/Th
Kenneth Moss
Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of profound and violent transformations in Europe, the United States, the Middle East. Topics include the impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the last stages of European empire; nationalism, socialism, and religious politics in Jewish life; birth of Jewish secular culture and secular-religious struggles within Jewish life; the remaking of American Jewry; Zionism, Jewish settlement and nation-building in Palestine, and the emergence of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict; antisemitism, Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinian dispossession, and the trajectories and tensions of Jewish nationhood and Israeli society-building; the postwar reordering of Jewish life amid Cold War, Israeli statehood, conflict in the Middle East, and unprecedented communal integration in the United States; trajectories of Jewish identity and religion in a century of tremendous creativity and bitter Jewish disagreements. Much attention to contemporary history including the dramatic changes and conflicts within Israel and trajectories of conflict and crisis in Israel and Palestine under Israeli domination. Lectures with ample space for discussion. No prior study of Jewish history expected.
JWSC 20924 (= RLST 20124) The Bible Throughout History: From the Dead Sea Scrolls to King James
Winter 12:30 – 1:50 pm T/Th
Doren Snoek
While the collection of ancient texts found in modern Bibles appears fixed and is read by many people as a source of edification or theological insight, it has not always been this way. Though absent from most Bibles, there is an entire body of literature commonly known as “rewritten bible”: early translations, retellings, or entirely new stories with familiar names and faces that update, retcon, or subvert their “biblical” sources. How might we understand these ancient forms of fan fiction? The class will introduce this corpus (including some of the Dead Sea Scrolls) and its sources, production, and historical contexts. We will confront significant problems in understanding religious texts: how is it that some texts become authoritative while other very similar texts do not? Who gets to retell foundational religious narratives, and within what social or political constraints? What does it mean to relate to sacred texts as artistic prompts or imperfect points of departure? Can a biblical text be rewritten for an entirely different religious tradition? We will consider similar questions for contemporary religious practice, asking: how did rewriting the Bible get started, and has it stopped?
JWSC 22906 (= BIBL 32906, NEHC 22906/32906, RLST 22906) The Book of Ezekiel
Winter 1:30 – 4:20 pm M
Simeon Chavel
A seminar for reading the Book of Ezekiel (in English; optional reading group for those who read biblical Hebrew), the Bible's most bizarre and challenging Prophetic work. It features Ezekiel's close encounters with a brutal divine, instantaneous transportation to future spaces and faraway places, dream-scenes that become real, mortifying dramatizations, and surreal sensory overload. Ezekiel says he played the role of a crude mime, a confounding cryptic, and an erotic singer. This charged and disturbing work generated a variety of literary and speculative Jewish and Christian traditions, like the Apocalyptic and the Mystical. Modern Bible critics discount its retrospective frame, consider it a repository of historical materials, and probe Ezekiel for personality disorders. We will engage it the way it presents itself to us, as literature, in a which a character tells his glorious and troubled story, and explore its frame, content, poetics, Judean literary traditions, contemporary Babylonian scene, and historical message.
JWSC 23521 (= HIST 23521/33521) The Future of Israel
Winter 3:30 – 4:50 pm T/Th
Ofer Ashkenazi
This class considers key aspects of contemporary Israeli society, culture and politics, and examines their potential future trajectories. Within this framework, we will discuss the historical background of various developments in contemporary Israeli ideologies, experiences, fears and ambitions. In analyzing the evolution and impacts of the tensions that characterize Israeli society and culture today, we will examine various potential resolutions for these tensions. The sources we will discuss in class include official policy statements, speeches, and public opinion polls, alongside visual arts, films, science fiction literature and popular music. The diversity of sources reflects the diversity of voices—of beliefs, aspirations and self-perceptions—within the Israeli society. The acknowledgement of this diversity would not allow us to predict the future, but it would grant us with solid foundations for the understanding of the current challenges, of possible future trajectories, and their long-term implications.
JWSC 23522 (= HIST 23522/33522) German-Jewish Visual Culture
Winter 3:00 – 5:50 pm M
Ofer Ashkenazi
Ever since Jewish emancipation in the second half of the nineteenth century, German-Jewish culture evolved through the experience of intercultural encounters, acculturation, dissimilation, migration, and persecution. After 1933 this endeavor has been transplanted and fostered outside of Germany as well. The course focuses on the ways German-Jewish visual culture negotiated the varying experiences of Jews in Germany and in migration, contemplated Jews’ agency in the face of uncertainty and crisis, and assigned meaning to views, beliefs and fears. In considering sources such as films, photographs, and comic books that were produced by Jews in Germany and German-Jews abroad, we will explore some often-overlooked yet fundamental aspects of German Jewish history and its perception by various contemporaries. Contrary to traditional scholarship on German-Jewish culture, this course will go beyond the paradigm of the nation-state to highlight the transnational encounters, interrelations and influences that shaped the German-Jewish experience and its negotiation in visual imagery.
JWSC 29700 Reading and Research
JWSC 29900 BA Preparation Course
Spring 2024
JWSC 20550 (= RLST 23550; NEHC 20552) Slavery and Social Justice in the Hebrew Bible
Spring T/Th
David Harris
What is a "just" society? And how do we know if justice has been achieved? This course is both an overview of the concept of a "just society" and a thematic survey of the narratives of the Hebrew Bible (the Jewish Tanak, the Christian Old Testament) through the lens of social justice. In this course we will examine several perspectives within the Hebrew Bible on what makes a just society, with particular emphasis on the narratives and legal corpora of the Pentateuch, the historical narratives of the former prophets, and the sayings and exhortations of the "writing" prophets. We will aim to understand more clearly what the ancient Israelites would have likely understood by the notion of a "just society," and how those understandings may differ from our own. Through our discussions, students will develop their skills in close-reading of texts and literary analysis of biblical narratives. In this course we will study several social issues and their reflections in biblical texts. Among the possibilities are: slavery, the treatment of the poor, the rights of the community vs. the individual, the treatment of the disabled, homicide, war, revenge, animal rights and environmentalism, inheritance, and immigration.
JWSC 20923 (= RLST 20223) Magic, Miracles, and Medicine: Healthcare in the Bible and the Ancient World
Spring
Richard Zaleski
This course examines the complex issues surrounding the body, disability, and medical care in antiquity. It will be guided by a variety of questions, such as what was the root cause of bodily infirmity and disease in antiquity? How did cultural views of sex, gender, and race influence perceptions of the body and what it meant to be able bodied? Such questions are significant when considering what kind of access to healthcare marginalized groups had. In order to explore these questions, we will examine ancient Mediterranean views of medical care through material remains (e.g., magical amulets and healing shrines) and textual evidence (e.g., Galen and Hippocrates). After considering this wider cultural context, we will examine treatments in the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and early Christianity. We will also explore how Christian concepts of medical care evolved in light of accounts of Jesus as a divine healer. In addition to this ancient evidence, we will engage with modern disability studies and sociological analyses to better orient our readings. At the end of the course, students will be better acquainted with the complex relationship between religion and medicine and how that affects modern healthcare decisions.
JWSC 22702 (= BIBL 32700, RLST 22700, NEHC 22700/32700) Biblical Law
Spring
Simeon Chavel
This course will examine the laws in the Torah/Pentateuch and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible for their legal, social, and moral reasoning; their style; their meaning in literary works, as literature; and their historical setting. It will compare them to laws in other ancient works like the Hammurabi monument(s).
JWSC 26615) (= RLST 26600) Violence and Religion
Spring T/Th
Joseph Haydt
Why do disputes about religion so often break out into violent conflict? How does violence in literature relate to real world violence? Would a more secular world be more peaceful? This course will examine the role of violence in ancient and modern societies. We will focus on the recurring connection between violence and the divine. The first part of the course will explore how human communities depict violence in sacred texts, works of literature, and political rhetoric. Why do myths frequently portray the relationship between gods and humans as a violent one? What role does violence play in religious rituals? What is it that makes violence destructive under certain conditions and unifying under others? The second part of the course will examine classic theories of sacred violence to examine how theorists have explained the centrality of violence within religious narratives and the ways religion both facilitates and opposes violence No previous coursework is required to enroll.
JWSC 29700 Reading and Research
JWSC 29900 BA Preparation Course