Graduate Courses 2024–2025
Co-undergraduate/Graduate Courses
BIBL 31000 (= FNDL 11004, HIJD 31004, JWSC 20120, NEHC 20504/30504, RLST 11004) Introduction to the Hebrew Bible Autumn M/W 3:00–4:20 pm; Simeon Chavel
The course introduces the Jewish/Hebrew Bible as a literary treasury with a material history. We will survey the genres and the different works, review scholarly theories about the texts and about ideas in them, and situate them in the history of Israel and Judea and in the culture of ancient Southwest Asia. We will also engage theories of history, literature, and narrative. The course includes a weekly Discussion Section for mixed-modes activities and conceptual discussions.
BIBL 40490 (= JWSC 20490RLST 20490) The Plagues in Egypt: Tradition and Composition Spring; Jeffrey Stackert
This course will pursue an in-depth investigation of the plagues in Egypt as presented at length in Exodus 7–12 and Psalms 78 and 105 and in brief in several other biblical texts. It will focus especially on source-critical and tradition-historical issues in these texts. All texts will be read in their original languages. PQ: Strong biblical Hebrew; those with questions about their Hebrew proficiency should consult with the instructor.
BIBL 40600 (= JWSC 20600, RLST 20600) Deuteronomy Spring; Jeffrey Stackert
This course is an exegetical study of selected texts from the Deuteronomic source of the Torah (Deut 1:1–32:47). We will focus on the setting of this text within the larger pentateuchal plot, its legal revision, its historical context, and the purpose of its authors in relation to their source texts. This course will serve as the reading course for students coming out of the first year Hebrew sequence, but all students with facility in biblical Hebrew are welcome. All biblical texts will be read in Hebrew. PQ: At least one year of biblical Hebrew.
BIBL 53510 (= HIJD 53510, JWSC 20510, NEHC 20513/53510, NELC 30063, RLST 20510) Early Jewish Interpretation of the Hebrew Bible Autumn T 11:00am–1:50 pm; Simeon Chavel
In this seminar we will survey together the literary form and hermeneutical manner of ancient Jewish works that engage the biblical text—rewritings, retellings, commentaries, translations, and midrash. We will also read scholarship on Jewish interpretation and interpretive works. PQ: Biblical Hebrew and either Aramaic or Greek (Koiné or Septuagint).
HIJD 36702 (= HREL 36702, ISLM 36702, JWSC 26702, MDVL 26702, NEHC 26702/36702, RLST 26702, RLVC 36702) Arabic into Hebrew: Translation and Cultural Change during the Middle Ages Autumn F 1:30–4:20 pm; James Robinson
Religions, like all cultural phenomena, are akin to organic beings: they change, grow and adapt, absorb and assimilate what they encounter, become transformed constantly in relation to challenges and opportunities—and sometimes react against them. This course will focus on one example of religious-cultural-philosophical adaptation and change through a study of the medieval translation of Arabic and Judeo-Arabic works into Hebrew during the twelfth to fifteenth centuries. We will focus on the translations themselves and translation technique but principally on what was translated and why, when, and where, by whom and for whom. All this with an added emphasis on the result: How did Judaism and Jewish culture change through translation—in all its forms—during the High Middle Ages?
HIJD 37653 (= AASR 37653, JWSC 27723, RLST 27653) Judaism and Ethnography Spring; James A. Redfield
Defining ethnography broadly as curiosity about human difference, this course engages close readings in a vast gallery of ethnographic portraits both of and by Jews, from the Bible to the early modern period. Together, we will construct a history of this tradition by tracing patterns in how Jews are represented and how they represent themselves, as well as their own Others, in dialogue with those cultures. While anthropologists and literary theorists will help us to appreciate the diversity and fluidity of Jewish (auto-)ethnography, these thinkers will also turn our critical gaze on Greek, Roman, and European Christian images of Jews and Judaism. This history is not simply a case-study in an overlooked ethnographic tradition but an archive where influential and often oppressive "Western" ways of thinking about human difference have been spawned, cross-fertilized, resisted, and transformed.
HIJD 46677 (= AMER 26677/46677, JWSC 26677, RLVC 46677, RLST 26677) American Jewish Literature Autumn M 1:30–4:20 pm; Sheila Jelen
Is there an American Jewish literature? At the heart of this question is a reckoning with what constitutes American Jewish experience. Literary expression has played an outsized role in the way that American Jews view themselves, exploring a vocabulary and an idiom of immigration and religion, of ethnic identity and of political consciousness. In this class we will study a selection of the fiction, poetry, essays and films of American Jewish experience with an eye towards the varieties of American-Jewish experience and the role of literature in forging that experience.
HIJD 47724 (= DVPR 47724, JWSC 27724, RLST 27724, RLVC 47724) Diasporism in Modern Judaism Spring; Sarah Hammerschlag
This course will consider the fate of arguments for Diasporic Jewish Identity and thought in the 20th and 21st centuries in philosophical and literary sources and will consider the relationship between debates within Jewish thought and correlates in Black Studies and Post-colonial Studies. Thinkers to be read include Hermann Cohen, Franz Rosenzweig, Emmanuel Levinas, Jacob Gordon, Jacques Derrida, Sarah Kofman, Susan Taubes, Philip Roth, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe and others.
HIST 35907 (= HIST 25907, JWSC 25907, RLST 26677) Urban Life, Housing Policy, Neoliberalism, and Israeli Society Autumn W 1:30–4:20 pm; Ravit Hananel
This course explores Israeli society through the lens of urban studies. It examines the profound transformations that have occurred in Israel’s urban and spatial policy over 70 years and asks how the Israeli case illuminates global trends comparatively. Foci include: the dramatic shift in Israel’s urban policy from state-driven to neoliberal logics; uniqueness and comparability of Israel's urban policy; impacts of major global crises (the 2007/8 economic crisis; Covid-19; climate change); urban policy’s impacts on different population groups within Israel: Jewish and Palestinian Israelis, secular and Orthodox, Mizrahi and Ashkenazi Jews, Ethiopian Jews. We will also discuss possible impacts of the Hamas terrorist attack on October 7 and the ensuing war.
HIST 44003 (= JWSC 24009, REES 44003) Lost Histories of the Left Autumn M 12:30–3:20 pm; Faith Hillis
When most Americans think about "the left," Marxism, Soviet state socialism, or European social democracy spring to mind. This class will explore alternative—but now largely forgotten—blueprints for revolutionizing the political and social order that emerged in the nineteenth century. We will pay special attention to utopian socialism and other efforts to merge revolutionary doctrine and praxis, the Jewish Labor Bund, and anarchism. Examining the intellectual underpinnings of these movements, their influence on the modern world, and the factors that led to their demise, we will also consider what lessons they can teach to those committed to realizing a better future today.
ITAL 34920 (= ITAL 24920, JWSC 24920) Primo Levi Winter F 3:00–5:50 pm; Maria Anna Mariani
Witness, novelist, essayist, translator, linguist, chemist, and even entomologist, Primo Levi is a polyhedral author, and this course revisits his work in all its facets. We will privilege the most hybrid of his texts: The Search for Roots, an anthology that collects the author’s favorite readings--a book assembled through the books of others, but which represents Levi’s most authentic portrait. By using this work as an entry point into Levi’s universe, we will later explore his other texts, addressing issues such as the unsettling relationship between survival and testimony, the “sinful” choice of fiction, the oblique path towards autobiography, and the paradoxes of witnessing by proxy. NOTES: Taught in Italian.
REES 37019 (= ANTH 23910/35035, ARCH 27019, HIST 23413/33413, JWSC 29500, REES 27019) Holocaust Object Autumn M/W/F 3:30–4:20 pm; Bozena Shallcross
In this course, we explore various ontological and representational modes of the Holocaust material object world as it was represented during World War II. Then, we interrogate the post-Holocaust artifacts and material remnants, as they are displayed, curated, controlled, and narrated in the memorial sites and museums of former ghettos and extermination and concentration camps. These sites which—once the locations of genocide—are now places of remembrance, the (post)human, and material remnants also serve educational purposes. Therefore, we study the ways in which this material world, ranging from infrastructure to detritus, has been subjected to two, often conflicting, tasks of representation and preservation, which we view through a prism of authenticity. In order to study representation, we critically engage a textual and visual reading of museum narrations and fiction writings; to tackle the demands of preservation, we apply a neo-materialist approach. Of special interest are survivors’ testimonies as appended to the artifacts they donated. The course will also equip you with salient critical tools for future creative research in Holocaust studies.
RLVC 36001 (= HCHR 36001, JWSC 26020, RLST 26001) Religion and Visual Culture in the Late Antique Mediterranean Spring; Karin Krause
In this seminar, we examine sacred sites and artifacts of early Christians and their neighbors in the regions around the Mediterranean from the third century to about 750 CE. Case studies will illustrate the wealth of religious art and architecture associated with different religions that existed side by side—Christianity, Judaism, polytheism, and emerging Islam. This course has five main objectives: (1) to examine how the designs of religious spaces, buildings, and objects respond to specific spiritual or ritualistic needs; (2) to gain familiarity with typical features characterizing the arts of each religion or sect; (3) to identify elements of a common visual language that result from shared traditions or artistic cross-pollination; (4) to examine different ways in which material artifacts were employed as means of ideological propaganda; and (5) to study art and architecture as evidence of doctrinal competition and conflict. While this course foregrounds the study of material culture, written sources (in translation) complement the analysis of the visual evidence.
Graduate Courses
Note: Some graduate courses may be open to undergraduates with the consent of the instructor.
CDIN 45602 (= HIST 45602, CMLT 45602, NEHC 45602) Zionism and Culture, 1881 to the Present Autumn T 11:00 am–1:50 pm; Kenneth Moss, Na’ama Rokem
This course investigates the shifting relations between Hebrew/Israeli literature and culture and Zionism as a political project, ideology, myth, and power structure. We will investigate multiple forms of cultural articulation, from built environment, to popular culture, to culture as a set of practices that govern everyday life, while devoting special attention to poetry—an institution valorized by classical secularist Zionism, yet one often seen as standing in tension with Zionism’s contemporary religious-nationalist forms. What role has Hebrew culture played within the Zionist project as bearer, expression, reflection, or refraction of nationalist ideology or myth? What are the relationships between culture’s putative forms of autonomy and forms of dissent, resistance, or alternative political vision in Israel and Palestine? How might this connect to Mizrachi and other “minority” identities and the roles of Palestinians as cultural producers within Israeli frames? What is to be learned about secular nationalism, Jewish secularism, post-secularism, religiosity, and political theology, particularly in an era of what seems to be the rising hegemony of expressly religious Zionism. Note: No prerequisites. Undergraduates must receive faculty consent.
HIJD 42800 (= HCHR 42800) Christianity and Judaism in Early Modern Europe Spring; Kirsten Macfarlane
Early modernity has long been recognized as a crucial stage in the history of Western Europe. Beginning with the Reformation and ending with the Enlightenment, it is to this period that historians have attributed the rise of modern political thought; the growth of religious toleration; as well as the formation of radically historical biblical criticism. Recently, however, historians have realized that many of these developments did not originate solely within Christian intellectual traditions, but from the exchanges, conflicts, and interactions between Christianity and Judaism, with a particularly important role granted to the phenomenon commonly known as ‘Christian Hebraism’. This course will examine some of the most significant of these interactions with a focus on four areas: 1) interpersonal relations between Jews and Christians; 2) biblical criticism; 3) political thought; and 4) mysticism and Christian Kabbalah. It will explore questions such as how sixteenth-century Jewish writings fueled a seventeenth-century Christian crisis in the Bible’s authority; why the ancient Jewish commonwealth became an unlikely source of inspiration for early modern political theorists; how to understand the relationship between Jewish mysticism and ‘Christian Kabbalah’; and how interfaith millenarianism fed into debates over the readmission of Jews into England. PQ: No prerequisites, but there will be opportunities for students with Latin and/or Hebrew to make use of those languages.
HIJD 44608 (=HIJD44608) The Book of Hosea Winter W 10:30 am–1:20 pm; Simeon Chavel
The Book of Hosea has some of the earliest prophetic material in the Bible in the 8th cent. BCE, from the northern kingdom of Israel. It contains classic ideas about kingship, politics, religion, and social order. It features unique and enticing poetry, poses distinct literary challenges, and also includes late scripturalizing elements. In this text-course, we will read the book together in the original Hebrew. PQ: Two quarters of Biblical Hebrew and one text course.
HIJD 52555 (= RETH 52555, THEO 52555) Narrating the Law: Levinas and the Talmud Winter T 9:30 am–12:20 pm; Laurie Zoloth
This is a seminar that will closely read the Jewish theological/ethical writing of Emmanuel Levinas, in particular, the Talmudic exegesis that he undertook for the French Jewish community circa 1970, collected and published from 1968 to 1994 as well as other essays about Jewish ethics and Jewish thought. Levinas explicates his ethical theories via the recovery of a series of texts from the Babylonian Talmud, the classic text of Jewish law, literature, and theo-philosophic interpretation. Note: Course is in English translation.
HIJD 53400 (= RLVC 53400, AASR 53400) Salvage Poetics: Literature as Ethnography Autumn; Sheila Jelen
This interdisciplinary course will synthesize ethnographic and literary discourses to consider the ways in which the culture of the Jewish “shtetl,” the small towns and villages in eastern Europe where Jewish culture thrived for nearly a millennium, has been represented in the United States after the Holocaust, from the 1940s to the present day. We will read a wide variety of materials within the field of anthropology as well as Jewish literatures and cultures to tease out the concept of “salvage poetics” or a literary poetics that has been forged in popular attempts to bridge dramatically different historical moments, different geographic locations, and different cultures across the abyss of the Holocaust.
RETH 33300 (= ISLM 33300, THEO 33300) Reading your Neighbor’s Scripture: Scriptural Reasoning Winter W 10:30 am–1:20 pm; Laurie Zoloth
Scriptural Reasoning is a method of approaching the scholarly study of texts of the Hebrew Bible, New Testament, and the Qur’an, by reading them as if they are to be understood as in conversation with one another, and as in reception communities that have historically understood them as such. This seminar will explore the practices and methods of a distinctive academic methodology of study, as well as the theoretical and philosophical scaffolding that has emerged from these practices. We will consider both the scholarly work that extends and recommends the practice, and the critiques of the practice. Reading from the perspectives of theology and philosophy, we will consider how the academic reading of Scriptures frames the narrative and the ethical perspectives within the text and how that framing might be disrupted/repaired/interrogated by new exegetical interpretations. Scriptural Reasoning is both a method and a feature of the academy (in journals, in a section at the AAR, and in scholarly books and articles); and it is also a way of making Scriptural reception and interpretation publicly legible. The seminar will allow graduate students an entrance into understanding the Scriptures of their own tradition or research interest, and those of others, with which they may not be conversant, and thus create the possibility for new avenues of comparative scholarship. Note: Undergraduates may petition to enroll.