Winter 2012

ENGLISH (Back to Top)

368 The Rise of Israeli Women’s Prose
Tamar Merin, TTh 2-3:20

The course will examine the historical, the poetical and the ideological circumstances that accompanied the late rise of Hebrew women's prose after the establishment of the State of Israel. Throughout the course, we will discuss the exclusion of women from the study of Hebrew during the Enlightenment period, and their problematic joining to the Zionist project; a substantially male project that later shaped an Oedipal system of influence relationships between literary "fathers" and "sons". One outcome of these circumstances was the evolution of a female dialogic literary tradition which was based on a cross-gender correspondence with some of Hebrew literature's most canonic authors, such as S.Y Agnon. We will discuss this dialogic tradition and its varied expressions in the works of Israeli female authors between the 1960s-1990s, as a literary phenomenon that undermines the masculine and oedipal historiography prevalent in the study of Hebrew literature.

GERMAN (Back to Top)

111-2-20 First Year Yiddish ***
Khane-Faygl Turtletaub, TTh 3:30-5:00

This is the second quarter of the three-quarter Elementary Yiddish sequence: an introduction to Yiddish language and culture. Comprehension, speaking, reading and writing will be stressed to insure that students acquire a basic command of Yiddish. The course will be introduced by placing the Yiddish language in its cultural and historical context. Learning will be facilitated by the addition of songs and proverbs to the curriculum.

202-2 Third Year Yiddish ***
Khane-Faygl Turtletaub, MW 12:00 - 1:30

Conducted in Yiddish, this course aims to further develop essential communication skills in Yiddish (such as reading, writing, speaking, and listening) as well as to further the awareness of the socio-cultural context of modern literary Yiddish and its communicative, expressive, and stylistic varieties. Particular emphasis will be placed on grammatical drills and students' writings with the aim to integrate advanced grammatical features into short, thoughtful pieces of writing, the best of which would be submitted to a current Yiddish newspaper, magazine or journal for possible publication.

242- Imagining Modern Jewish Culture in Yiddish and German
Peter Fenves, Marcus Mosley, MW 12:30 - 1:50

The aim of this course is to introduce students to the dynamic tension between two distinct yet closely related Jewish cultures, one rooted in the German language, the other in Yiddish. The relation between modern German-Jewish culture and its Yiddish counterpart is at once highly fraught and astonishingly productive: both sides of this divide at the heart of European modernity saw themselves in relation to each other, sometimes disparaging, sometimes emulating the other.

Two of the most important themes that we pursue during the quarter are the breaching of the cultural boundaries that separate so-called Western (German) and Eastern (Yiddish) Jewry and the often bitter confrontation between traditional religiosity and modern-secular culture. Particular attention is paid to the work of Franz Kafka and the paintings of Marc Chagall. In addition, the class will examine the place of Klezmer music in Yiddish culture and that of “high” classical music (such as the works of Felix Mendelssohn and Gustav Mahler) in the German-Jewish experience. We begin with a series of short stories and then turn to two short travel-novels, Mendele Mocher Sforim’s Travels and (excerpts from) Kafka’s Amerika. Later in the quarter we focus on drama and film, including Scholem Aleichem’s Tevye, the Dairyman (made into the popular film, Fiddler on the Roof), and two plays about dreaming: Richard Beer-Hofmann, Jacob’s Dream and S. Anky’s A Dybbuk, or Between Two Worlds, as it was recently re-edited by the contemporary playwright, Tony Kushner. No knowledge of either Yiddish or German is required.

HEBREW (Back to Top)

111-2-20 Hebrew 1 **
Edna Grad, MTWTHF 11:00-11:50

This is a course in elementary modern Hebrew. The course is designed to develop all four language skills (listening, speaking, reading and writing) and an explicit knowledge of Hebrew grammar. Class work centers on learning new vocabulary and grammatical structures. These are introduced and exercised orally in anticipation of dealing with written dialogues and essays. Drills in the texts and on audio files expand and reinforce the new material. Independent lab work is part of the coursework.

121-2-20 Hebrew 2 **
Edna Grad, MTWF 2:00-2:50

This is an intermediate level course in Hebrew. The purpose of the course is to enlarge the student's vocabulary and to reinforce and expand his/her knowledge of Hebrew grammar in order to improve conversational and writing skills as well as the ability to handle literary texts (from Biblical to modern). Northwestern students should have completed and received credit for 101-1, 2,3; with a C+ minimum grade. New students must have permission of the instructor.

216-2 Hebrew 3
Edna Grad, TTh 12:30-1:50

This is an advanced level course in Hebrew. Literary works from Old Testament to contemporary Hebrew prose and poetry will be read, discussed and analyzed orally and in writing.

**First and second year Hebrew and Yiddish (Hebrew 111,121 and German 111,121) do not count directly for the minor. However, students who complete two years of Hebrew or Yiddish need to take only five courses for the Jewish Studies minor rather than the normal seven courses: see the "Requirements for the Minor" section of the web page. One quarter of Hebrew 3 counts toward the Hebrew Studies Minor requirement for one of the two courses conducted in Hebrew.

HISTORY (Back to Top)

203-2 Jewish History, 1789-1948
Yohanan Petrovsky- Shtern, TTh 11:00-12:30

Modernity has dramatically changed the profile of western civilization and had a major impact on European Jewry. The course will take students from French Revolution that started integrating the Jews into the fabric of European society through the establishment of the State of Israel. It will highlight the plurality of models of Jewish integration and acculturation, the formation of new Jewish identities, the split of the traditional community under the impact of Haskalah (Jewish Enlightenment), the rise of Liberal and Orthodox trends within Judaism, and the spread of Jewish political movements such as socialism and nationalism. Based on a plethora of English-language documents, the course will introduce students to those problems of interaction between the general society and the Jewish minority that pointed toward the twentieth century transformation of modernity. In sum, the course will explore the fascinating response of Jews to modernity on political, societal, theological, and cultural levels.

300-31 Jewish Messianic Movements: The History of the End of History
David Shyovitz, MW 9:30-11:00

From antiquity to the present, messianic beliefs, movements, and figures have profoundly shaped the course of Jewish social, cultural, and political life. This course will analyze a variety of messianic phenomena, paying particular attention to the broader (Christian and Islamic) surroundings within which they developed. It will use these messianic episodes and beliefs as windows onto some of the broader, fundamental issues in the history and historiography of Jewish societies and cultures. Emphasis will be on primary readings (all in English translations), and on exploring the sociological, literary, anthropological, and theological approaches that scholars have taken to the subject matter. Specific topics to be discussed include: the origins of Christianity; medieval Mahdism; apocalypticism and Armilus (the Jewish Antichrist); mathematical calculations of the onset of the Millenium; Shabbetai Zvi and Sabbatianism; the modern secularization of messianism and the State of Israel; and the rise of the Lubavitch movement.

392/395-30 Blood Libel: Magic, Torture, Cannibalism
David Shyovitz, MW 12:30-2:00

In Late Antiquity, Jews and early Christians were accused of murdering and eating young children during their initiation rites. In the Middle Ages, whole Jewish communities were routinely massacred in response to accusations of ritual murder and cannibalism. in the modern period, similar accusations have been leveled, with catastrophic results, throughout Europe, the Middle East, and even the United States. Why did belief in religiously inspired ritualized cannibalism, murder, and torture gain and maintain so much traction over such a wide expanse of time? This course will trace the origins, diffusion, and surprising persistence of the “blood libel,” and will survey historians’ attempts to make sense of this phenomenon. We will analyze a wide array of ancient, medieval, and modern sources (all in English translation), and discuss the continued impact of the blood libel motif on contemporary political and theological discourse.

395-40 Holocaust Survivor Research*
Peter Hayes, MW 2:00-3:30

This course will show students how to use the more than 50,000 testimonies collected in the Visual History Archive of the Shoah Foundation Institute at USC, in conjunction with conventional written source material, to research topics that the student and the instructor will define together. Students will learn to navigate the testimonies from lap- or desktop computers, use the indexing functions to isolate relevant passages, weigh the accuracy and importance of specific recollections, and assemble this and other source material into a final paper.

* Prerequisites are either History 344-0 or 349-0 OR permission of the instructor. Students have been asked to email the History Department for a permission number

JEWISH STUDIES (Back to Top)

101-6 Job’s Tears: Jewish Response to Suffering from the Bible to Maus Fresh. Sem.
Marcus Moseley, MW 3:30 – 4:50

This seminar revolves around a question that can be easily formulated but cannot be easily answered: why do the righteous suffer? This question has been at the center of Jewish thought and practice from its very earliest times to the most recent. Beginning with passages from the Book of Genesis, the seminar discusses the question of unjustifiable suffering by examining a range of biblical texts and figures, culminating in the exemplary figure of Job, whose story we will read in conjunction with classical rabbinic commentary and impressive illustrations of the romantic poet William Blake. The seminar then turns to texts written in response to the Khmielnitsky massacres in the seventeenth century and the surge of pogroms in early twentieth-century Russia, with special emphasis on H. N. Bialik’s poetic response to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903 and Marc Chagall’s Jewish crucifixion series composed in the wake of the destruction of Jewish shtetls in the First World War. The final four weeks of the class are concerned with the Holocaust, as we read excerpts from diaries written in the Warsaw and Lodz ghettoes, analyze Elie Wiesel’s Night, and conclude with Art Spiegelman’s Maus. .

350 Representing the Holocaust in Literature and Film
Phyllis Lassner, MWF 11:00-11:50, T 6:30 -9:00 p.m.

This course explores the Holocaust as it is expressed in various genres: fiction, poetry, and testimony; fictional, autobiographical, and documentary film; and presentation by a Holocaust survivor. Working as a small group, we will examine artistic and ethical questions about representing the reality of the Holocaust and questions about how we make meaning from its horrific events and the roles of memory, language, and history. Because of the painful nature of the material, the course emphasizes small group work. Discussion and writing assignments will encourage students to share their responses so that we begin to understand different portrayals of victimization and survival as well as relationships between ourselves and our readings and films. Course readings and Professor Lassner supply the historical contexts necessary to approach our subject.

POLITICAL SCIENCE (Back to Top)

395- 20 Israeli-Palestinian Conflict
Wendy Pearlman, T 9:00 -11:50

This course explores the history and politics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We will study a range of views on issues that have defined the conflict's development over time, namely its social, ideological, and diplomatic origins, the 1948 war, the evolution of Israeli and Palestinian identity and society, the sources of violence, the rise and fall of the Oslo peace process, the first and second Palestinian Intifadas, US foreign policy to the conflict, and outlooks for the future.

RELIGIOUS STUDIES (Back to Top)

330 Ancient Judaism: Sacred and Profane
Mira Balberg, TTh 2:00-3:30

The notion of "the sacred" is one of the most fundamental concepts in the study of religion, and yet it is also one of the most elusive and mysterious facets of religious texts and practices. The sacred is paradoxical in nature: it is in the world but also outside of it; it is auspicious but also dangerous; it is all-powerful but extremely vulnerable. Its counterpart, "the profane" is no less of a riddle: it is both the neutral (non-sacred) and the negative; it is both the default state and the "fallen" state. Our premise in this course will be that the concepts of "sacred" and "profane" have no single or fixed set of meanings, but rather that sacredness is a language that is being used to express different ideas on community, relation to the divine, body, death, and other topics that are crucial to self- and group-definition. The goals of this course are twofold.

First, our goal is to explore the different facets of the language of the sacred and the profane and the complexity and richness of these concepts in ancient Jewish culture. Second, our goal is to become familiar with the textual world of ancient Judaism - the Bible, the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha, Hellenistic Jewish literature, the Dead Sea Scrolls, rabbinic legal and homiletic literature, and ancient liturgy. The combination of these two goals constitutes a third goal: getting to know, through the prism of the sacred, the dynamics of the interpretive process, and the ways in which ancient texts acquire new meanings through time. Our ultimate purpose in this course is to learn how texts make a culture, and how religious ideas and concepts regain vitality and acquire new meanings through textual practices.

332 Topics in Judaism: Modern Jewish Thought
Claire Sufrin, W 1:00-4:00

This course examines significant developments in Jewish philosophy and theology from the Enlightenment through the late 20th century. We will consider several thinkers and their understandings of philosophical ideas such as authority, knowledge, and selfhood in relationship to their reinterpretations of Jewish concepts including God, revelation, and the Jewish people. Readings from Spinoza, Mendelssohn, Cohen, Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas.

333 Jewish Women Writers and the Search for Religion
Rachel Gordan, TTh 3:30-5:00

In this course we'll read contemporary fictional portrayals of the Orthodox by American female novelists. The course will bring to light tensions between liberal and ultra-Orthodox Jews and the nature of unassimilable Jewish "otherness." Polarization in the American Jewish community over who gets to define legitimate Jewish religion will be a major theme, along with the impact of feminism on American religion. Readings focus on American Jews but they address the cultural contestation between liberalism and traditionalism that currently characterizes mainstream American religion.

SOCIOLOGY (Back to Top)

376 Media and Society: Focus on Israel

Oren Golan, TTh 2:00 - 3:20

Advances in new technologies and the popularity of new media have instigated and enabled significant change in economies, education, lifestyles and social relationships worldwide, with a distinct flavor in Israeli society. For over a decade, new information and communication technologies (ICTs), including instant messaging, social network services (i.e. Facebook, Twitter), digital gaming, newsgroups and cellular phones, have been rapidly spreading and embedding into the everyday lives of virtually all parts of Israel's social mosaic. The course's aim is to explore the impact that new media has on Israeli society and cultures. Classes will focus on the impact on traditional social institutions in Israel (e.g. the family, ideology, community, socialization, religion, economy, stratification) as well as demonstrate its expressions within emergent forms of communication, language and culture.

SCHOOL OF EDUCATION AND SOCIAL POLICY (Back to Top)

Teach_Ed 351 the Holocaust and Education: The 21st Century
Danny Cohen, MWF 12:00 – 12:50

In this class, we will learn about the development, current state, and future of Holocaust education in the 21st Century. We will consider and debate the complexities and challenges of Holocaust pedagogy, including responding to learners’ emotions and misconceptions, as well as consider various ways to frame Holocaust history. We will explore the goals of educating about the Holocaust, the merits and complexities of addressing all of the Nazis’ target groups, and Holocaust education’s relationship to genocide education. Final Projects will provide students with the opportunity to choose, compare, and analyze the qualities, problems, and opportunities of two educational artifacts (such as non-fiction, fiction, film, witness testimony, a school curriculum, a museum or online exhibition, a community program, a training resource for educators, and so on).

YIDDISH (Back to Top)

German 111-1-20 First Year Yiddish

(see description under German 111)

Khane Faygl Turtletaub, TTh 3:30 - 5:00

German 202-1-20 Advanced Yiddish

Khane Faygl Turtletaub, MW 12:00 - 1:30