First Year Seminar: A Nation Apart? Jewish Identity in an Age of Nationalism

3 units

This course invites you to explore the varieties and limits of Jewish identity in a world in which nations appear to be the driving forces of history. In the age of nationalism, begining in the second half of the 18th and continuing to the end of the 20th century, traditional forms of Jewish identity as well as the place of Jews within the social fabric became problematic. Who were the Jews as individuals and as a collective? A nation? A religious group? Neither exactly? And what was their relationship to the emerging, modern nations of Europe to be? Did the process of emancipation resolve the problem? To what extent was antisemitism a response to the dilemma of defining and situating Jews in the new European order? How has the existence of a Jewish nation state in the Middle East affected Jewish identity in other parts of the world? Finally, how has globalization altered the relationship of Jews to the state as well as toward other Jews?