Undergraduate Jewish Studies Courses 2024–2025
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 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 12009 Jewish Civilization III – Philosophical Responses to the Holocaust Spring T/Th 11:00 am – 12:20 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.
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.
Additional Courses
ANTH 21740 (= CEGU 21740) Ecology and Governance in Israel Autumn T/Th 11:00 am—12:20 pm; Michael Fisch
Ecological governance has emerged as an aspirational concept in recent years in political science, philosophy, and anthropology in response to concerns over the increasing likelihood of an unprecedented global ecological crisis as a result of human driven climate change. This course will trace the conceptual genealogy of ecological governance in Western and Eastern political theory and environmental history as it explores the political ecologies of Israel and the Middle East. In so doing, the course embarks from the assertion that environmental justice and the struggle for justice overall are inseparable challenges. Of central concern will be to understand how Israel's politics, culture, and history technological development together with its particular environmental conditions provide conceptual and methodological interventions into current and historical articulations of ecological governance. Note: Enrollment in this class is by consent only. Please request via the enrollment site.
JWSC 20120 (= BIBL 31000, NEHC 20504/30504, RLST 11004, HIJD 31004, FNDL 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.
JWSC 20490 (= BIBL 40490, RLST 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.
JWSC 20510 (= BIBL 53510, HIJD 53510, 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).
JWSC 20600 (= BIBL 40600, RLST 20600) Deuteronomy Spring; Jeffrey Stackert
This course is an exegetical study of selected texts from the Deuteronomic source of the Torahn (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.
JWSC 20701 (= BIBL 40600, RLST 20600) Jewish Graphic Narrative: Between Memory and Caricature Spring M/W 1:30 – 2:50 pm; Na'ama Rokem
This course explores the history of comics through the lens of its Jewish creators and Jewish themes, and the history of Jewish culture and society through the lens of graphic storytelling. We learn to interpret this complex art form that combines words and hand-drawn images, translating temporal progression into a spatial form. Reading American, European, and Israeli narratives, our discussions will focus on autobiographical and journalistic accounts of uprooting, immigration, conflict, and loss. We will ask: how do Jewish graphic novelists use the conventions and the grammar of this medium? How do they grapple with the proximity between caricature and comics, and with the legacy of racist caricatures? And what is the relationship between graphic narrative and memory culture? A central concept or figure we will keep returning to is the face, which is a central element in the aesthetics of comics and graphic narrative, and a key to its meaning-making.
JWSC 22604 (= HIST 22604) Muslims and Jews in France and Its Empire: 1830 to the Present Spring MWF 10:30 – 11:20 am; Kyra Schulman
In recent years, Muslim-Jewish relations in France have come to be portrayed as unbridgeable. This course asks how we got here. The course is designed to provide students with an introduction to the history of France and its empire through the lens of its Muslim and Jewish minorities. It begins with the French conquest of North Africa, interrogates the development of uneven French colonial policies towards Muslims and Jews, traces state violence against both groups from the Holocaust to the 1961 Paris massacre, and concludes with debates today over the right to wear the veil or kippah in public. The course provides students with practical skills in GIS mapping as a means to analyze the role space and place played in the production of Muslim-Jewish relations. Readings include key historiographical texts to introduce students to the major questions and debates as well as primary sources and current events materials to formulate their own analyses. The course emphasizes the importance of fostering respectful, critical dialogue around often contentious topics. It does so with the aim of challenging students' pre-assumptions shaping their visions of a Muslim-Jewish past and present in order to reimagine a productive future. No previous skills in GIS mapping or French language knowledge required.
JWSC 23203 (= HIST 13003, SOSC 28003) History of European Civilization III: Medieval and Early Modern Spain Spring T/Th 12:30–1:50pm (Section 1) and T/Th 3:30–4:50pm (Section 2); Shai Zamir
In this course we will learn about Spanish society and culture from Islamic Al-Andalus to early modern Spain (10th–17th centuries). We will explore violent conflict (the “Reconquista”); cultural exchange among Muslims, Jews, and Christians; and the experience of women and men as they were navigating gendered ideals of knighthood, honor, and Catholic piety. We will also study about the Spanish Inquisition and the forced conversions and later expulsions of Jews and Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula. The course will focus on primary sources and documents from different genres, including letters, inquisitorial testimonies, royal legislation, epic poetry, and more. Students who are interested in the study of medieval culture, religion, and premodern history are warmly invited.
JWSC 23810 (= REES 27310) The Underground Book Spring T/Th 11:00 am – 12:20 pm; Benjamin Arenstein
Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, there was an explosion in the practice of “underground” publishing—- that is, textual objects produced through unofficial, and often illegal, presses. In this undergraduate seminar, we will investigate this phenomenon across a range of transnational contexts. We will begin by considering the theoretical and practical concerns of underground publication. We will then examine how underground publishing manifested in locations as diverse as the late Soviet Union, 1980s Chicago, and Brazil under military dictatorship. We will conclude the course by considering how the rise of digital media has shaped the nature of underground publishing. Throughout, we will pay particular attention to the book as a material object, questioning the ways in which materiality shapes and determines underground reading practices. As part of this seminar, students will gain hands-on experience with various aspects of bookmaking and printmaking. By reproducing underground publication techniques, we will develop first-hand knowledge of the material challenges and opportunities associated with the self-publishing medium. In the final weeks of the course, students will have the chance to produce their own book object. As a culminating project, students will work alongside the instructor and the Department of Special Collections to assemble an exhibition on underground publishing, which will be displayed in the University of Chicago Library.
JWSC 23405 (= NEHC 20228, HIST 25810, RLST 20228) History of Jews in the Middle East Autumn M/W/F 10:30–11:20am; Orit Bashkin
This class examines the history of Jews in the Middle East from the early modern period, when many Jewish refugees fleeing Spain and Portugal settled in the Ottoman Empire, to the modern Period, when Jews debated and challenged colonialist, reformist, nationalist, leftist, and secular ideologies. Reading novels, memoirs, and new works in the fields of Jewish and Middle Eastern Studies, we will examine how early modernity and modernity gave birth to new identity formations and new frames of belonging. We will visit the unknown histories of early modern Jews who produced translations and explications of the Hebrew Bible in Arabic, of Jews and Muslims who fought together Christian missionary activities, of Arab Jewish feminists, and of Jewish communists who established anti-Zionist societies in the Middle East.
JWSC 24009 (= HIST 44003, 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.
JWSC 24920 (= ITAL 24920/34920) 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.
JWSC 25907 (= HIST 25907/35907, 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.
JWSC 26020 (= HCHR 36001, RLST 26001, RLVC 36001) 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.
JWSC 26620 (= RLST 26620) Tradition and Modernity in Jewish Thought and Literature Winter; M 11:30 am–2:20 pm James A. Redfield
The concept of tradition often takes a back seat to modernity but what does it mean to be part of a tradition in the modern world? How does tradition challenge received views and stimulate creativity, against the modern view of tradition as the “dead hand of the past”? How have the concept; ideology; and cultural role of tradition changed in Jewish culture since the Enlightenment? This course explores those questions in three bodies of work: (1) late 18th- to mid-20th-century German-Jewish historians, critics, & theologians; (2) modern Hebrew & Yiddish writers; and (3) their shared biblical, rabbinic, and mystical inspirations. Through close readings of these writers' reflections on their own literary traditions, tradition emerges as both a resource and a problem for Jewish cultural creativity; one that calls for its own theoretical vocabulary and can be set in dialogue with the modern evolution of other traditional cultures.
JWSC 26677 (= AMER 26677/46677, HIJD 46677, 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.
JWSC 26702 (= RLST 26702, MDVL 26702, NEHC 26702/36702, HIJD 36702, HREL 36702, ISLM 36702, 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?
JWSC 27723 (= AASR 37653, HIJD 37653, 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.
JWSC 27724 (= HIJD 47724, DVPR 47724, 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.
JWSC 28447 (= CMLT 28447, GLST 28447, HIST 25219, RLST 28447) It’s the End of the World As We Know It: Apocalypticism and Religious Thinking about the End Times Autumn M 1:30–4:20 pm; Marshall Cunningham
Why and how will the world end? How much time is left? What happens to humans in those final days—and after? This course will examine art, rituals, and sacred texts—along with the movements that produced them—in order to understand how religious communities have answered such questions throughout history. Along the way, we will learn about the circumstances that have inspired Apocalyptic movements, the religious traditions that they have emerged from, and the theological and political principles that have animated them. We will cover a wide range of contexts, including Roman-occupied Judea during the first century CE, the Xhosaland of southern Africa in the mid 19th century, and the rise of QAnon and climate activism in the 21st century United States. No prerequisite knowledge of the historical periods or religious traditions examined required.
JWSC 29500 (= ANTH 23910/35035, ARCH 27019, HIST 23413/33413, REES 27019/37019) 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.
JWSC 29700 Reading and Research - TBA
JWSC 29900 BA Preparation Course - TBA