Stern College Syllabi -- Spring and Fall 2021-2022 courses --- JHIS (Jewish History)

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JHIS 1486 - D1 The Holocaust & Rescue
(2021-01) Paldiel, Mordecai
Course Objective: The nature of Nazi anti-Semitism; the evolution of the Holocaust to the mass murder of Europe’s Jews; Jewish responses, and the various rescue attempts, including of non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.
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JHIS 4932H - NPT Liturgical Customs Medieval Europe / JUDS 1204H - NPT Jewish Liturgy
(2021-01) Kanarfogel, Ephraim
The Development of Liturgical Customs and Practices (מנהגי תפילה וברכות ) in Medieval Europe Selected topics in Jewish history. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
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JHIS 1575 - DM American Jewish History, 1880-1940
(2021-01) Gurock, Jeffrey
The Jewish community in the United States: its development from earliest times; immigration and settlement; social, economic, and communal development; contribution to American civilization; the modern and contemporary scene. American Jews and the Holocaust, State of Israel, civil rights movement, Russian Jewry, inner-city tensions. 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
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JHIS 1001 - J Survey Jewish History
(2021-01) Orenbuch, Cali
Course Objectives: Gain broad based knowledge of Jewish History from the Persian period, the Hellenistic Era, the 2nd Commonwealth (בית שני ), the period of the Mishna and Gemara ___ Political, social, economic, and cultural currents in the history of the Jews from the Second Commonwealth through modern times. First semester: Second Commonwealth, late Roman period, and Jewry in the orbit of Islam; second semester: the Jews in medieval Christendom; the development of modern Jewish history. 1.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
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HIST 2304 - B Modern Israel / JHIS 1511 - B Modern Israel
(2021-01) Kosak, Hadassa
COURSE DESCRIPTION: While the course will address the topic of Israel and the Middle East and the Arab-Israeli conflict, our discussions will include topics of social, cultural, and political history of Israel since 1948 to the present. Starting with the nation building enterprise such as challenges of absorption and modernization of the state and society, we will also survey the rise of Palestinian national movement; the role of ethnicity in Israeli politics; global political developments as a factor in the changing Israeli economy and politics; the social and cultural divisions in Israel; and, finally, challenges facing Israel in the twenty-first century.
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JHIS 1235 - K Dead Sea Scrolls
(2021-01) Hidary, Richard J.
Welcome to the exciting world of the Dead Sea Scrolls. This archaeological treasure has given us a window into the critical junction between the Bible and the Mishnah. Some of these texts may seem strange and surprising but hopefully you will also find them fascinating and relevant to your own understanding of Judaism and Second Temple politics and polemics.
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JHIS 4940H - C Topics: Psalms & Sonnets
(2021-01) Koenigsberg, Chaya Sima; Trapedo, Shaina
Course Description: This course will survey the interplay between poetry and prayer in Jewish tradition from Tanakh to the modern era. Using classical meforshim, we will examine the style and significance of biblical prayers and poetry to understand the important power Jewish tradition places on poetry and song as forms of personal and national religious expression. The centerpiece of our course will be Sefer Tehillim whose many lyrical and timeless psalms were recited as part of the Temple service and became the foundation and inspiration for the formalized liturgy of the Siddur. Group and self-study assignments will examine psalms traditionally utilized by Jews to express their joy or distress throughout the long exile. Building on our study of the relationship between Psalms and the liturgy, we will look at the literary genre of piyyut (liturgical poetry) beginning in the Land of Israel in Talmudic times. The impetus, impact, and inclusion of piyyut throughout the Jewish world as well as opposition to piyyutim by some Geonim and Rishonim will be examined. In our discussion of piyyut, important kinnot (poetic laments), composed to commemorate the destruction of the Temple and other national tragedies, especially in medieval Ashkenaz, will be considered, as well as the way Jews in the Middle Ages experimented with structure, meter, rhyme, and rhetoric to compose original works that expressed gratitude, love, longing, displacement, and grief in the Golden Age of Spain. Our survey will continue in the early modern period with the liturgical additions of the Kabbalists of Safed, such as Lekhah Dodi, and the heartfelt Yiddish prayers composed for and by Jewish women known as tehinnes. While these tehinnes continued to be recited by Jewish women daily, or at poignant moments in their lives into the 20th century, they have been all but forgotten with the widespread loss of Yiddish fluency. Indeed, poetry continues to be an important form of religious self-expression as will become apparent in our study of poetry and lamentations composed after the Holocaust and the more recent faith-filled poems and prayers composed by Jews living in the modern State of Israel facing an uncertain future. ___ In accordance with the Straus center mission, in addition to tracing the impact of the poetry of Tanakh on the religious expression of Jews in varied lands and times in Jewish history, we will note their impact on secular Renaissance writers. It may surprise students that toward the end of his life, Italian humanist and poet laureate Francisco Petrarch (credited with the birth of the sonnet), selected King David over Virgil as the “poet” of his soul. Indeed, the Psalms were translated, paraphrased, and alluded to by virtually every author of the period, including but not limited to Sidney, bacon, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne, and Milton. These acts of literary adaptation and appropriation infused Renaissance and Reformation England with the lyricism and wisdom of ancient Israel that has profoundly shaped Western literature and culture to this day. Lectures on the impact of Psalms on Western literature will be presented by Dr. Shaina Trapedo. ___ Course Objectives: • Students will gain an understanding of the unique features of biblical poetry, as well as fluency in reading and analyzing particular Psalms and prayers. • Students will gain the tools to analyze a chapter of Psalms on their own and convey their analysis in writing. • Students will gain an appreciation of the import of Psalms and its role in formalized and spontaneous religious self-expression throughout different periods of Jewish history. • Students will gain awareness of the need for a uniform liturgical formulations and additional forms of self-expression, as well as the reception and controversies surrounding liturgical additions in different times periods in Jewish history. • Students will gain an appreciation of larger influence of Psalms on Western literature.
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JHIS 1321 - F Jews In Christendom
(2021-01) Levin, Chaviva
In this course we will explore the experiences of Jews in the Middle Ages in the orbits of Christianity. We will examine Jewish cultural and intellectual developments in the contexts in which they occur as well as study Jewish modes of self government; the legal, social and economic roles played by Jews in medieval Christian cultures; and the attitudes Jews adopted toward those cultures. We will focus on considering the ways in which members of majority and minority cultures in a society interact and how they affect one another. This course aims to explore positive as well as negative encounters between Jews and Christians in the Middle Ages and to consider the changing position of Jews in Christian society along with Jewish responses to those changes. Class discussions are an important component of this course.
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ARTS1975H/JPHI4933H/JHIS4934: Jewish Illuminated Manuscripts: Torah as Art in Medieval Ashkenaz
(2021-01) Koenigsberg, Sima
Jewish illuminated manuscripts are among the treasured artifacts that have survived the trials of Jewish history and whose imagery provides a window into the Torah worldview of the Jews that commissioned them hundreds of years ago. The Leipzig Mahzor, produced in Worms, Germany in the 14th century, is a collection of piyyutim for holidays whose vibrant imagery reflect the teachings of the community’s famed rabbi, R. Eleazar of Worms, the preeminent student of R. Judah the Pious, who led the Hasidei Ashkenaz movement. This course will trace the origins and structure of the Jewish communities of the German Rhineland and will provide an overview of their unique teachings and customs related to prayer, repentance, biblical exegesis, and piety. Primary text readings will be complemented with visual studies of the imagery found in the Leipzig Mahzor which was used by the community of Worms on holidays in the synagogue. Images from other contemporaneous Jewish illuminated manuscripts will also be considered. The course will also address the process of writing and illuminating Jewish manuscripts, art and Jewish-Christian relations, and issues related to art and Halakhah.
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JHIS 4930 – K Topics: Jewish Presence in Latin America
(2021-01) Perelis, Ronnie
This course explores Jewish immigration, settlement, cultural production and religious life from the earliest instances of European conquest and colonization of the Americas until the present day. The Americas are not just a geographic space, but they also function as a dreamscape –paradise, savage frontier, land of refuge, or an El Dorado. We will explore the interplay between Jews, Judaism and the realities and mythologies of Latin America. The majority of the material will come from the Spanish and Portuguese zones of Central and South America with attention given to the Jewish communities of the Dutch and English colonies of the Caribbean such as Curaçao and Jamaica with some forays into North America. The investigation into the colonial period will focus more heavily on aspects of Sephardic history such as crypto-Judaism, Inquisitorial persecution and the expansion of the western Sephardim to the New World. As the course moves into the modern period, more emphasis will be placed on the experience of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and their descendants. Secondary sources will provide the wider historical context for the wide range of primary texts that will be at the center of the class discussion. ___ Goals of the course: *Develop textual and analytical skills through careful engagement with primary sources *Empower the student to think critically, creatively and personally about the texts and their historical context *Examine the complexities and ambiguities of culture, society and identity
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JHIS 1452 - M History of Polish Jewry
(2021-01) Karlip, Joshua
Course Overview: In this course, we will examine the history of East European Jewry from its communal origins in the thirteenth century through 1945. Special emphasis will be placed upon religious, intellectual, cultural, political, and social movements that impacted the Jewish modern experience, even beyond Eastern Europe itself. This course will thus examine large themes of East European Jewry and their discussions by historians. Another aim of the course is to familiarize the students with primary sources from the East European Jewish experience. ___ Topics covered in the class will include: the Golden Age of Polish Jewry, the Chmielnicki Massacres, the rise of Hasidism and Lithuanian Mitnagdism; the Russian Haskalah and its relationship to Tsarist policies toward the Jews; the Mussar Movement and the rise of the Lithuanian yeshivot; the rise of Yiddish and Hebrew literature; the lives of Jewish women and families; the crisis of 1881-1882 and the birth of modern Jewish politics in the forms of Zionism, Bundism, and Diaspora Nationalism; Russian-Jewish and Polish-Jewish relations, the fate of East European Jewry during World War One, and a comparison of interwar Polish and Soviet Jewries. The course will end with a discussion of the destruction of East European Jewry in the Holocaust. ___ Course Learning Outcomes: By the completion of the course, students will be able to: 1. Have knowledge of the basic chronology of events in the East European Jewish experience and, more generally, of modern Jewish history. 2. Understand the similarities and differences between the various religious movements that arose in Eastern Europe and discuss their historical contexts. 3. Understand how the policies of the empires under which East European Jews lived impacted upon the growth of various modern Jewish ideologies. 4. Discuss how the complex interplay between Jewish tradition, governmental policies, and Jewish ideologies impacted the daily lives of Jews.
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JHIS 1150 - M History of Jerusalem
(2021-01) Katz, Jill C.
Course Description This course surveys the religious, political, and cultural history of Jerusalem over three millennia. The course content will focus on the transformation of sacred space as reflected by literary and archaeological evidence by examining the testimony of artifacts, architecture, and iconography in relation to the written word.
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JHIS 1415 - E History of Zionism
(2021-01) Paldiel, Mordecai
Rise and development of modern Jewish nationalism against the backdrop of contemporary Western civilization and the scope of Jewish history; writings of major Zionist ideologues; role of Zionism within the major Diaspora communities; impact of the rise of the Jewish state movement on the world political and diplomatic scene. 1.000 TO 5.000 Credit hours Course Objective: The history of modern Zionist thought; political efforts to obtain recognition of Eretz Israel (Palestine) as the Jewish National Home; the British Mandate and culminating in Israel’s War of Independence.
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JHIS 1401 - N Modern Jewish History
(2021-01) Olson, Jess J.
Modern Jewish history – what is it? When does it begin? Why is it important? While for other eras of Jewish history, these questions seem self-explanatory, in the case of the modern period they have sparked no small amount of debate. In this course, we will begin to unpack these questions. As we do, we will learn to appreciate the unique facets of the Jewish experience in recent centuries leading up to our own. We will strive to understand together the various ways in which Jews have understood themselves and been understood by the populations among whom they dwelt. We will explore how Jews in different parts of the modern world reflected their own identity and their relationship with others through culture, politics and religious expression. Perhaps most importantly, together we will gain insight into the large arc and many of the unique details of the modern Jewish experience. __ The basic format of this course is interactive lecturing. While I will use our class time together to introduce and explore the topics under our investigation, I will also expect you to be involved and engaged fellow explorers in the ideas we study. Your participation in the form of questions and observations in class are not just welcomed, but encouraged (even expected!). This course is YOUR course – your chance to not only engage in those areas of modern Jewish history that I, as your instructor, provide as a framework for our progress, but also bring in your own and add to the texture of our work together.
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JHIS 4936 - D1 Immigrant Nations US & Israel ; HIST 2913 - D1 Immigrant Nations: US & Israel
(2021-09) Kosak, Hadassa
The course surveys the political, cultural, and social implications of largescale immigration to the US and to Israel. Historically, not all immigrants were welcome, and both nations have a record of resorting to selectivity, or, outright exclusion of the less desirable newcomers. In the case of the US, for example, the Act of 1790 which denied citizenship status to black males, was a model and a tool to "racialize" groups such as the Chinese and the Irish in mid-19th century, and later, the Eastern and Southern European newcomers. A similar model was constructed in the early days of the pre-state Palestine when, in second decade of 20th century, Yemenite Jews were assigned by Zionist leadership a secondary role in the construction of the Zionist project. Focusing on the 20th and 21st centuries, the course will examine the immigration waves to the US and to Israel, including pre-state Palestine. The following topics will be examined: the main waves of immigrants, the changing construction of racial hierarchies and social stratification, the patterns of absorption, and the privileged status granted to western Europeans in the US and to Ashkenazi immigrants in the pre-sate years and in Israel. Throughout the discussions, attention will be paid to the ethno-national character of Israeli nation, and its comparison to the "universal," or, pluralist character of the US. Under the impact of the Civil Rights revolution, the two last decades of the 20th century witnessed in both US and Israel the incorporation of the diverse populations under the umbrella of multiculturalism - a principle that recognizes and celebrates the cultural uniqueness of ethnicities and races. Significantly, however, contemporary views in the US of immigrants from Latin America and from Muslim nations, and of refugees and foreign workers in Israel reveal a persistent policy of inclusion and exclusion. These are compelling examples of current political debates making use of the language of nativism regarding the construction of national identities 0.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
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JHIS 1201 - L Classical Jewish History
(2021-09) Hidary, Richard J.
This course will survey the history of the Jews during the Diaspora, Second Temple and Rabbinic periods (600BCE-600CE). This period is witness to the development of many aspects of Judaism as we know it today, such as, the holidays of Purim and Hanukkah, the fast days, the canonization of Tanakh, the publication of the Mishnah and Talmud, and the rise of the Rabbis. But this period is also interesting for the variety of forms of Judaism and groups of Jews that did not gain hegemony: Samaritans, Hellenists, Sadducees, Pharisees, Essenes, and the Dead Sea sect, among others. Each of these groups had to respond to and a find a way to survive two destructions and exiles, many wars and revolts, strong influences from foreign cultures, and internal strife while at the same time remaining committed to monotheism and the Biblical tradition. Not all of these groups were successful; we will try to figure out why. The relevance of this material for understanding our own identities and for evaluating the current state of Judaism and its future prospects will become obvious. In addition to these themes and questions, class discussion will focus on historical analysis and critical evaluation of primary sources. We will learn to think and write like historians. By identifying all relevant literary and archaeological sources, recognizing the interpretive difficulties presented by these sources, and evaluating the methodological issues confronting the modern historian, we will be able to formulate not only what we know, but also how we know it, how sure we are of it, and what gaps are there in the historical record. As with everything in life, you’ll only get as much from this course as you put into it, so let’s dig in!
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JHIS 1335 - K The Jews of Medieval Spain
(2021-09) Perelis, Ronnie
This course will investigate the cultural history of the Jews of Spain (the Sephardim), from the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula in 711 until the expulsion of 1492. Medieval Spain, with its vibrant Muslim and Jewish populations, was one of the most complex and culturally rich European societies of its time. It served as a bridge for intellectual, artistic and scientific imports from the east to the European north. Its experiment with convivencia –“the living together” of three different religions within the same society – was unheard of in pre-modern Europe. With convivencia as our lens, we will examine the possibilities and limitations of multi-cultural tolerance by studying the socio-political and cultural trajectory of the Sephardim and their Christian and Muslim neighbors. The course will explore the rich intellectual and artistic heritage of the Sephardim. We will read a wide range of Sephardic writing: the poets of the Andalusian Golden age, the neo-Aristotelian philosophers and scientists, travel diaries, converso dramatists and the music of the Aljamas as preserved in Ladino ballads.
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JHIS 1327H - NPG The Tosafists
(2021-09) Kanarfogel, Ephraim
The literary and juridical creativity of Ashkenazic scholarship in the 12th and 13th centuries. 2.000 TO 3.000 Credit hours
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JHIS 1401 Modern Jewish HIstory
(2021-09) Karlip, Joshua
Course Description: This course is a survey of the history of the Jews and Judaism in the modern age, from 1650 to the present. The course will examine the very different ways in which Jews reacted to modernity in Western, Central and Eastern Europe, the Ottoman Empire, America, and Israel. ___ Course Goals and Objectives: After the completion of this course, students will have an understanding of the major events and movements of Jewish history in the modern era. These events and movements include: the definition of Jewish modernity and its differing features in different regions; the various religious movements that arose in nineteenth-century Central Europe; the cultural and social ferment in nineteenth-century Russia that led to the rise and spread of Zionism, Diaspora Nationalism, and socialism; the unique political and cultural positions of the Jews of the Habsburg Empire; the contrasting fate of Jews in the Soviet Union and the Polish Republic during the interwar era; the place of the Holocaust within the larger context of modern Jewish history; the interconnected but very different two major post-war Jewish communities of the United States and Israel. Through the written assignments, students will gain the skills to analyze both primary and secondary sources from an historical perspective.
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JHIS 1150 - M History of Jerusalem
(2021-09) Katz, Jill C.
Course Description This course surveys the religious, political, and cultural history of Jerusalem over three millennia. The course content will focus on the transformation of sacred space as reflected by literary and archaeological evidence by examining the testimony of artifacts, architecture, and iconography in relation to the written word.