Blacks and Jews in America

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course offers a constructive, interdisciplinary approach to examining the competing and overlapping ways Blacks and Jews in America imagine, cultivate and perform their religious and cultural identities. Although the groups emerge in the American context with unique histories and traditions, there is an overwhelming popular belief that Blacks and Jews share, at least historically, a special relationship. The course will explore the nature of this relationship and investigate the religious and social inter-sectionality of Black and Jewish imaginations within the context of antiblack racism and anti-Semitism. Using primary, secondary, visual and material resources, students will investigate how Blacks and Jews retrieve religion, tradition and ethics to interrogate, explore and, in some cases, expand definitions of democracy, political liberalism, freedom, citizenship and community.