Courses

Jewish Identities

Jewish Identities The course will discuss the questions: who and what is a Jew, how one can be an ethnic or self-identifying Jew and a Jew without religion or religiosity, how secular Jewishness is conceived and practiced in both Israel and the Diaspora, and how secular Jews pass their Jewish heritage to the next generation. Special attention will be given to several sets of historical forces that have shaped Jewish identity: secularism and modernism-postmodernism, antisemitism and Holocaust, and Zionism and the State of Israel. The relative centrality of ethnic descent, religion, religiosity, language, culture, nation (peoplehood) and citizenship in Jewish identity will be linked to the differences in the characteristics of the Jewish community. Currents in Jewish public thought (Mordecai Kaplan, Ben Halpren, Eliezer Schweid, David Hartman), historical transformation of Jewishness (Jacob Katz, David Weinberg, Emanuel Goldsmith) and contemporary attitudes and behavior of the Jewish population (Egon Mayer, Barry Kosmin, Steven Cohen, Sidney Goldstein, Calvin Goldscheider, Zvi Gitelman, Jonathan Webber, Dominique Schnapper, Charles Liebman, Sergio DelaPergola) will be surveyed. The focus will be on secular expressions of Jewishness in Europe, the United States and Israel in the modern and post-modern era. The approach will be sociological, historical and comparative.