Global Arc

This seminar explores the relationship between marginality and creativity by focusing on the way America's Jews of the 20th century drew on the performing arts as well as on film, radio, television, and publishing to express their identity as full fledged Americans. One three-hour seminar.

The current state of Jewish-Islamic relations is fraught with mutual suspicion and competing historical narratives that are manifest as much in the religious as in the political arena. In the midst of this debate, it is sometimes forgotten that Jews have for centuries been a vital presence in the Islamic world and have contributed to Islamic civilization right up to modern times. This course explores the complex historical relationship of the Jews of the Islamic world from the rise of Islam in the seventh century to the mass exodus of Middle Eastern and North African Jewry from their ancestral communities in modern times.

Wise and foolish, strident and tender, pious and skeptical--these are the many voices of Yiddish, in literature, film and music. The course moves from classics of Yiddish writing--S.Y. Abramovitsh, Sholem Aleichem, and I.L. Peretz--to Yiddish modernism in urban settings, from Vilnius and Warsaw to New York. All texts will be read in translation. We'll explore Yiddish responses to the holocaust by Chaim Grade and I. B. Singer and transformations of Yiddish traditions in the hands of women writers, dramatists, and filmmakers. We'll close by considering the current international Klezmer revival and its implications for Yiddish continuity.

In this seminar, we will explore the complex role that music has played in the formation and expression of Jewish Cultural and religious identity. We will consider not only music performed within liturgical settings both historically and in modern times, but also the ways in which a sense of Jewishness has shaped and continues to shape the composition, performance, and the reception of a variety of musical styles, including popular music, music for the concert hall, music for theater and film, jazz, and folk music.

For 3,000 years the city that is holy to all three monotheistic religions has known little peace and tranquility and has been the site of wars, conquests, and division. By drawing on historical, literary, religious, and cinematic sources, this course will explore the history of Jerusalem from antiquity to the modern period. It will examine its place in the religious imagination of Jews, Muslims, and Christians and trace the political history of a city that continues to be one of the most inflammable places on Earth. It will look at the conditions in today's "united" Jerusalem and explore the different contingencies to bring peace to it.

What accounts for the recurrence of Jewish characters in prominent dramas and operas throughout the centuries? Do such portrayals of the Jew link Jews and drama--that is, are Jews inherently "dramatic?" These questions will be considered in relation to such works as The Merchant of Venice, Lessing's Nathan the Wise and Ansky's Yiddish classic The Dybbuk. Students will watch renditions of these dramas; lectures and a number of critical readings will contextualize these works historically, culturally and theoretically. Two 90-minute classes.

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This seminar will be a close study of the variety of textual sources dealing with the subject of creation and cosmology in Hellenistic and especially rabbinic Judaism, and also selected early Christian materials (with ancient Jewish sediments). Traditions will be examined exegetically, with an emphasis on comparative intra-cultural and interdisciplinary analysis.

This course examines the formation and development of modern Israel, following the transition in Israel from a conformist society dominated by Zionist ideology to a society seriously questioning its values, ideals, and norms. It will focus on these changes in a wide range of sources: political and diplomatic, cultural, literary, cinematic, and more. The course will focus on the role of: the ideological origins of Zionist ideology; the Holocaust; the Arab-Jewish conflict; the Ashkenazi-Mizrahi; and the secular-religious divide on the development of contemporary Israeli society. Two 90-minute classes.

Intensive study of the account of Israel's enslavement and Exodus from Egypt as contained in the Biblical Book of Exodus. A detailed examination of the text, language, literary form, content, theology and stages of composition, with the aim of identifying the questions posed by the Biblical text and evaluating the methods employed and the solutions proposed by commentators and critics in their attempts to answer them.