The End of Modern Jewish History

This course addresses the changes to the Jewish disapora throughout the second half of the twentieth century. It begins by considering the constellation of processes that defined modern Jewish history from the 1750s until the 1940s, including demographic growth; geographic spread; the struggle for political and legal emancipation; cultural, social, and economic integration; and the birth of modern anti-Semitism. The course then asks in what ways the Holocaust and the birth of Israel transformed Jewish life in the diaspora, positing that in the 1940s a new era of Jewish history began.