Jewish Civilization II: Early Modern Period to 21st Century

Undergraduate / Graduate

Introduction to Jewish thought, experience, creativity, conflict, and relations with others from the 17th century to the present in Europe, the Middle East, and the Americas. Ranging across Sephardi and Ashkenazi life, religious and secular culture, philosophy and the arts, politics and the everyday, we focus on three key questions. First, how have Jews faced the theological, intellectual, and normative challenges that modernity has posed to Judaism, and what forms of Jewishness have they created in response? Second, how have Jews confronted the challenges, opportunities, and grave dangers presented to them by the modern political ideologies of liberalism, nationalism, socialism and antisemitism, and how have Jewish political efforts changed or failed to change Jews' condition? Third, what defines the Jewish present after a century marked by extremes of assimilation and extrusion, possibility and violence? We study the unprecedented integration Jews have enjoyed in the US and the radically new forms of Jewish life taking shape in Israel, where a state devoted to cultivating Jewish nationhood and the formation of a majority-Jewish Hebrew-speaking national society have profoundly impacted the lives of both Jews and Palestinians. Our study of the Jewish present engages both conflict and creativity: the violent Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Jewish confrontations with spiraling global tensions, the divides that wrack Jewish life within, and new forms of Jewish art and thought.