Previous Courses
Spring 2025 JEWISH 117 001 - LEC 001 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Special Topics in Antisemitism: The Origins of Racism in the West
Yonatan Binyam
This course provides students an opportunity to investigate the similarities and differences between premodern and modern group identity narratives. Premodern narratives of peoplehood will be analyzed alongside modern racial narratives utilizing a comparative approach to reading primary sources, coupled with a critical engagement with secondary sources on the issues of race, racism, and religion. The course will focus on narratives related to Western Civilization, white people, black people, Antisemitism, and Orientalism. It will also cover some of the parallels and differences between Western ideologies of racism and Antisemitism and those found in certain parts of the premodern Islamic world and the Middle East.
Spring 2025 HISTORY 178 001 - LEC 001 offered through History
History of the Holocaust
John M Efron
This course will survey the historical events and intellectual developments leading up to and surrounding the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. By reading a mixture of primary and secondary sources we will examine the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) against the backdrop of modern Jewish and modern German history. The course is divided into three main parts: (1) the historical background up to 1933; (2) the persecution of the Jews and the beginnings of mass murder, 1933-1941; and (3) the industrialized murder of the Jews, 1942-1945.
2024 Fall JEWISH 179 001 - LEC 001 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Special Topics in Holocaust Perspectives: Catastrophe, Memory & Narrative
Fascism and Propaganda: Politics and Culture in 20th Century Germany
Sara Rose Friedman
This course will focus on the theory and practice of propaganda during the 12 years of the Third Reich. It takes a close look at the ideology the Nazis tried to transmit, the techniques, organization, and effectiveness of their propaganda. Challenging the idea of the total power of propaganda, it looks for the limits of persuasion and possible other reasons for which Germans might have decided to follow Hitler. Sources will include the press, radio, film, photography, political posters, and a few literary works of the time. Finally, it will also be discussed to what extent techniques of propaganda continued to be used globally after 1945. In particular, the fascism studies of the Frankfurt School, which dealt with antisemitic demagogy in 1940s U.S. society, will be examined more closely.
2024 Fall LEGALST 129 001 - SEM 001 offered through Letters & Science Legal Studies
Antisemitism and the Law
Steven M Solomon
We will explore the intersection of antisemitism and the law, by covering the history of law as a vehicle for institutionalizing antisemitism, law as a vehicle for combating antisemitism, and law as a political tool to combat antisemitism. Historical topics will include the Dreyfus case, the Holocaust denial trial of Irving v. Lipstadt, the Damascus blood libel trial of 1840, the blood libel trial of Mendel Beilis, and the impact of the lynching of Leo Frank. We will also review discriminatory laws in the United States and other areas and countries against Jews, including in Nazi Germany.
2024 Fall HISTORY 280B 001 - SEM 001 offered through History
Advanced Studies: Sources/General Literature of the Several Fields: Europe
German Jewry
John M Efron
This seminar is designed to introduce students to an intensive examination of the major themes and issues concerning the history of the Jews in Germany from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. German Jews made defining innovations in Jewish life while at the same time, they also contributed to general western culture to a degree disproportionate to their numbers. No other Jewish community has had such a profound effect on both Jewish and European civilizations concurrently. Among the topics to be explored are the debates over Jewish emancipation, the scholarly and religious life of German Jews, integration into and separation from the mainstream, German antisemitism and Jewish responses, economic transformations, communal organization and family life, Jewish culture in the Weimar Republic, life under Nazi rule, Jewish life in postwar Germany.
2024 Fall HISTORY 175E 001 - LEC 001 offered through History
History of Modern Israel: From the Emergence of Zionism to Our Time
Ethan Benjamin Katz
The class explores the history of the Zionist movement and the State of Israel in all its complexity and contradictions. What is Zionism? What are its roots? Is it a liberation movement? A religious cause? A colonial ideology? A set of state policies? And what is the relationship between Zionism and the modern State of Israel? How do Zionism and Israel look different when considered from the standpoint of Jewish, Palestinian, European, or Middle Eastern history? Exploring Zionism and Israel from its roots in the nineteenth century to the present, this class offers in-depth knowledge and discussion on all of these topics and more.
2024 Fall JEWISH 121A 002 - LEC 002 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Topics in Arts and Culture
Jews in the Modern World
John M Efron
This course will examine the impact of modern intellectual, political, cultural, and social forces on the Jewish people since the eighteenth century. It is our aim to come to an understanding of how the Jews interpreted these forces and how and in what ways they adapted and utilized them to suit the Jewish experience. In other words, we will trace the way Jews became modern. Some of the topics to be covered include Emancipation, the Jewish Enlightenment, new Jewish religious movements, Jewish politics and culture, immigration, antisemitism, the Holocaust, and the state of Israel.
Spring 2024 JEWISH 179 001 - LEC 001 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Holocaust Perspectives: Catastrophe, Memory & Narrative
Alan Martin Tansman
This course examines Japanese and Jewish responses to twentieth-century atrocities, paying close attention to how catastrophic events are treated in a variety of artistic forms, including memoir, fiction, feature film and filmed testimony, documentary, photography, painting, and music. Throughout, we will be asking about the possibilities, and the difficulties, of comparing responses by different cultures to different types of atrocities. The course will require close and careful reading, viewing, and writing.
Spring 2024 JEWISH 100 001 - LEC 001 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Introduction to Jewish Religion, Culture, and People
Jews and Judaism: From Paris to Jerusalem and Beyond
Ethan Benjamin Katz
This class treats France and the Francophone world as a laboratory for the study of Jewish civilization over the past millennium. France has the world’s second largest Jewish population outside of Israel. It has a rich and complex history that traces all the key developments of the Jewish experience since ancient times: expulsions and migrations; codification of Jewish law; religious reform; the rise of anti-Semitism and the tragedy of the Holocaust; struggles between Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews; complex relations between Muslims and Jews; the emergence modern Jewish politics; and the impact of the Israeli-Arab conflict. As we explore these themes and other themes, students become introduced to most fields of Jewish studies.
Spring 2024 AMERSTD 110 003 - LEC 003 offered through Undergraduate Interdisciplinary Studies
Special Topics in American Studies
Jews and Judaism in the American Political Mind
Despite small size, Jews and Judaism have held a large place in the American political mind. This course examines the role of Jewish thought in American ideas since before the Founding, analyzes past and current views on Jews and Judaism across the American political spectrum, and explores continuing anti-Semitism and philo-Semitism in the US.
This course deals with the occupation of the Netherlands by Nazi Germany in World War II and the Holocaust, with a special focus on the Anne Frank's diary. We will discuss literature, film and historiography with a focus on anti-Semitism, collaboration and resistance as well as the postwar discussion on guilt and responsibility. All materials will be in English, no knowledge of Dutch is required.
2023 Fall JEWISH 39 001 - SEM 001 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Freshman and Sophomore Seminar
The Holocaust in Thought and Memory
Daniel Solomon, Ethan Benjamin Katz
European Jewry’s destruction in the Holocaust has greatly impacted the subsequent development of the Western tradition and Jewish civilization. Students in this course will examine responses to the Holocaust across a range of intellectual and artistic domains, including poetry, philosophy, history, memoir, and more.
2023 Fall JEWISH 120A 001 - LEC 001 offered through Jewish Studies Program
Special Topics in Jewish Languages and Literature
Anne Frank and After: World War II and the Holocaust in the Netherlands
Jeroen Dewulf
This course offers a critical reflection on Anne Frank’s famous diary in the context of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Using film and literature, it studies the German invasion, the resistance and collaboration, the horrors of the Nazi regime, the Holocaust, and the post-war debate on World War II in Dutch society.
2023 Summer Session A 6 weeks, May 22 - June 30 HISTORY 158D 001 - LEC 001 offered through History
History of Fascism
Dictators, Genocide, and Violence
Alexis Herr
Fascism was a form of rule created in Europe in the 1920s, when world communism was rising and liberalism steeply declining, when racist thinking pervaded all politics, and fears of decadence and secularization and loss of status melded within a new quality, promoting salvation through recovery of lost wholeness. Fascist governments enacted policies through violent and confident self-assertion of a “leader” and uniformed followers. This course seeks to untangle the paradoxical developments that drove exclusionary and inclusionary politics that in turn galvanized mass murder, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Students will examine key periods and themes, including: the origins of anti-Judaism, antisemitism, “scientific” racism, and othering; violence, colonialism, and World War One; the rise of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and Francisco Franco; the economics of mass murder; and the radicalization of nationalism in Europe and beyond.
Spring 2023 HISTORY 178 001 - LEC 001 offered through History
History of the Holocaust
John M Efron
This course will survey the historical events and intellectual developments leading up to and surrounding the destruction of European Jewry during World War II. By reading a mixture of primary and secondary sources we will examine the Shoah (the Hebrew word for the Holocaust) against the backdrop of modern Jewish and modern German history. The course is divided into three main parts: (1) the historical background up to 1933; (2) the persecution of the Jews and the beginnings of mass murder, 1933-1941; and (3) the industrialized murder of the Jews, 1942-1945.
Spring 2023 HISTORY 103B 001 - SEM 001 offered through History
Proseminar: Problems in Interpretation in the Several Fields of History: Europe
Antisemitism and Jewish Responses
John M Efron
Hatred of Jews and Judaism is an enduring prejudice. Its chronological limitlessness is matched by its apparent lack of geographical boundaries. We will chart that history and Jewish responses to it from the age of Tacitus to the age of Trump. Among the themes we will examine are the old forms of religious anti-Judaism, the many medieval charges brought against Jews, the iconography of antisemitism, as well as modern, racist antisemitism and the myriad conspiracy theories about Jews that still grip the fevered imagination of antisemites. Throughout the course we will pay attention to the multiple ways Jews and Judaism have been used throughout history by religious and social critics to describe their own disaffection with the age in which they lived.
Spring 2023 COMLIT 202B 001 - LEC 001 offered through Comparative Literature
Approaches to Genre: Lyric Poetry
Paul Celan & The Americas: Poetry After Fascism, Before Post-Democracy?
Robert G Kaufman
Paul Celan’s poetry has often been characterized as the most groundbreaking in European poetic art since 1945; likewise as the poetry—perhaps as the body of work across all the arts—most crucial to the “after Auschwitz” debates that shadow countless artists, critics, and philosophers (though none more consequentially, none more controversially, than Celan and Theodor W. Adorno). What happens when we return to these much-considered works and debates, but supplement “after Auschwitz” with the related yet distinct phrase “after fascism”—while introducing still another term, “before post-democracy?”