Jewish Civilization 2024–2025
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 T/Th 12:30 – 1:50 pm Larisa Reznik
01) Winter T/Th 2:00 – 3:20 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 T/Th 12:30 – 1:50 pm Larisa Reznik
03) Winter T/Th 2:00 – 3:20 pm Sheila Jelen
01) Spring T/Th 2:00 – 3:20 pm Larisa Reznik
JWSC 12005 Jewish Civilization III – Narratives of Assimilation
Spring T/Th 2:00 – 3:20 pm
Bozena Shallcross
This course offers a survey into the manifold strategies of representing the Jewish community in East Central Europe beginning from the nineteenth century to the Holocaust. Engaging the concept of liminality-of a society at the threshold of radical transformation-it will analyze Jewry facing uncertainties and challenges of the modern era and its radical changes. Students will be acquainted with problems of cultural and linguistic isolation, hybrid identity, assimilation, and cultural transmission through a wide array of genres-novel, short story, epic poem, memoir, painting, illustration, film. The course draws on both Jewish and Polish-Jewish sources; all texts are read in English translation.
JWSC 12007 (= YDDH 21723) Jewish Civilization III – Chicago Jewish History and Culture
Spring T/Th 9:30–10:50 am
Jessica Kirzane
In this course, students will explore key moments in Chicago Jewish History and culture. We will read and examine primary source documents from the founding of the city's first Jewish communities, hospitals, and philanthropic institutions to the public performance of Jewish identity at Chicago's World's Fairs to the 2020 Metropolitan Chicago Jewish Population Survey. Drawing upon literary, journalistic, and archival accounts, we will uncover the vibrancy of Chicago's historic Jewish immigrant neighborhoods, Jewish urban politics, and Jewish suburbanization, mapping out a multivocal understanding of Jewish life in the city. The course will have a research project component.
JWSC 12011 (= HIST 23523) Jewish Civilization III – History of the Jewish Present in the US, France, and Israel and Palestine
Spring T/Th 12:30 – 1:50 pm
Kenneth Moss
The contemporary Jewish situation in Israel and Palestine, the US, and France as seen through historical, sociological, anthropological, political science, and cultural religious studies lenses. Central concerns include politics, society, conflict, and Jewish-Palestinian entanglements and mutual formation in Israel and Palestine; space, place, power, poverty, and wealth in contemporary Jewish life; questions of community-society relations in American and French societies riven by questions of race and racism and intercommunal tensions as well as enduring questions of democracy and inequality; divergent Jewish identities and the ideas, histories, and affects that shape them with special attention to mizrahiut; Jewish religious revival with particular attention to various forms of Orthodox, pietistic, mystical, and illiberal religiosity on the one hand and the impacts of feminism and other liberation movements on the other; Jewish culture and literature in Israel and the diaspora in a post-secular age; rising disagreements over Zionism, identity, politics, and the Jewish future roiling Jewish communities.