Jewish History 1860 to the Present

Undergraduate / Graduate

Jewish history, politics, and culture across a century of profound and violent transformations in Europe, the United States, the Middle East. Topics include the impacts on Jewish life of World War I, the Russian Revolution, and the last stages of European empire; nationalism, socialism, and religious politics in Jewish life; birth of Jewish secular culture and secular-religious struggles within Jewish life; the remaking of American Jewry; Zionism, Jewish settlement and nation-building in Palestine, and the emergence of the Jewish-Palestinian conflict; antisemitism, Nazism and the Holocaust in Europe; the creation of the State of Israel, Palestinian dispossession, and the trajectories and tensions of Jewish nationhood and Israeli society-building; the postwar reordering of Jewish life amid Cold War, Israeli statehood, conflict in the Middle East, and unprecedented communal integration in the United States; trajectories of Jewish identity and religion in a century of tremendous creativity and bitter Jewish disagreements. Much attention to contemporary history including the dramatic changes and conflicts within Israel and trajectories of conflict and crisis in Israel and Palestine under Israeli domination. Lectures with ample space for discussion. No prior study of Jewish history expected.