Jewish Civilization III: The Jewish Question and the Color Line

Undergraduate / Graduate

This class opens with a simple question: why are Jewishness and Blackness represented as both comparable and conflicting in the twentieth century? The answer sometimes appears just as simple: because they are divided by what W.E.B. DuBois called the problem of the twentieth century: the color-line. But such an answer not only glosses over the varied racial and religious identities of Jewish and Black people throughout history; it also begs another question: what is the relationship between race and religion, and how is it overdetermined by Christianity and political construct known as "the West"? Examining the relationship between Jews, religion, and race on an international scale, this course begins with the Dreyfus Affair in France, and crosses the Atlantic to discuss how that relationship changed through two world wars, the Civil Rights Movement, the politics of Black Power, and the global rise of discourses on colonialism and feminism. Drawing on historical and philosophical work by Jean-Paul Sartre, Frantz Fanon, Albert Memmi, and James Baldwin, as well as literary classics by Nella Larson and Sarah Kofman, this course traces out how Jewishness and Blackness have been reconstructed over and over in relation to each other, and in reference to the concepts of gender, race, religion, and colonization that continue to circulate in political discourse today.